Classifications

• • G—PHYSICS
  • G06—COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
  • G06F—ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING
  • G06F40/00—Handling natural language data
  • G06F40/30—Semantic analysis
• • G—PHYSICS
  • G06—COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
  • G06F—ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING
  • G06F16/00—Information retrieval; Database structures therefor; File system structures therefor
  • G06F16/30—Information retrieval; Database structures therefor; File system structures therefor of unstructured textual data
  • G06F16/33—Querying
  • G06F16/332—Query formulation
  • G06F16/3325—Reformulation based on results of preceding query
• • G—PHYSICS
  • G06—COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
  • G06F—ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING
  • G06F16/00—Information retrieval; Database structures therefor; File system structures therefor
  • G06F16/30—Information retrieval; Database structures therefor; File system structures therefor of unstructured textual data
  • G06F16/36—Creation of semantic tools, e.g. ontology or thesauri

Definitions

• the invention relates to a game implemented by computer means, in which a player selects a combination of words giving a numerical score, possibly enabling the player to be allocated winning points.
• search engines such as Google (registered trademark of Google Inc.) or Exalead (registered trademark of Exalead SA) popular when searching for information, because of the capacity of such search engines to index the content of. several billions of pages that are available for consultation on all kinds of Internet site.
• search engines are used by sending them a request containing a word or a “phrase”, i.e. a combination or string of words.
• the engine responds to requests in a fraction of a second, delivering a numerical score representative of the number of page hits containing the word (or the words in the phrase) amongst all of the pages indexed by the engine, together with a list of corresponding pertinent Internet sites.
• the number of hits (sometimes referred to below as the “score” or the “numerical score”) returned by the engine depends to a very large extent on the words selected to make up the request. For some words it can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands or millions, whereas for others it can be no more than a very small number. If the user submits terms that are very general, the score will be very high; conversely, if the user gives a very precise designation, then the score will be smaller.
• the numerical score depends not only on the general or specialized character of the terms used, but also on the greater or lesser semantic proximity of the various words of the combination of words submitted to the engine.
• Games have already been proposed that use these engines, e.g. a game known as “Google Walk”, which consists in finding a combination of fewer than ten words that gives rise to a single reference being returned by the engine, i.e. a combination of words giving a numerical score equal to unity, neither more, nor (above all) less.
• the drawback of that game regardless of its recreational quality, is that the final result, e.g. “hamlet bandoneon tax gun paris” does not have any meaning, so such a game is almost a game of chance, the final result often being no more than a site that contains pure word lists, for example lists of words for providing assistance in playing games such as Scrabble (registered trademark).
• One of the objects of the invention is to propose a game implemented by computer means using one or more engines, that is suitable for increasing player motivation by calling on player shrewdness and by reducing the content of chance in the progress of the game.
• the game of the invention is not specifically a game based on knowledge or erudition, i.e. it is the game that is accessible to a wide audience, insofar as it requires the player only to seek entertainment and hope for a win, without testing a player's general and cultural knowledge.
• Another object of the invention is to propose an original method of advertising making it possible by incorporating branding content in the game of the invention to provide privileged exposure of a given trademark by using the actual wording of the trademark as one of the essential parameters of the game.
• the invention provides a game consisting in allocating winning points to players by means of a computer system comprising: at least one terminal suitable for presenting data to a player and for enabling the player to provide parameters for the system; a gaming site coupled to each of said at least one terminal; and a search engine.
• the terminal and the site submit requests to the search engine, each request containing a starting word or a plurality of words grouped together in a phrase comprising a starting word and an additional word; and they receive in response a numerical score representative of the number of hits for the word or the phrase, in a set of web pages indexed by the search engine.
• the game comprises the following sequence of successive steps: a) determining the starting word and submitting a request containing the starting word; b) receiving an initial score corresponding to said request containing the starting word; c) selecting an additional word and submitting a request containing a phrase including the starting word and the selected additional word, separated by a separator (advantageously a space, as in the usual syntax for search engines); d) receiving the score, lower than the initial score, corresponding to the request made in step c); e) reiterating steps c) and d) (N ⁇ 1) times using a different additional word each time, thus giving N respective scores corresponding to the N additional words selected in succession; and f) allocating winning points to one or more players in application of a rule that is a function of said N scores and of said parameters supplied to the system by the respective players.
• the starting word determined in step a) may in particular be a trademark, or else a word selected by a player from a set of predefined words, or indeed a word selected by the gaming site from a set of predetermined words.
• the parameters supplied by the players to the system comprise said additional words, each player selecting at least one respective additional word.
• the winning points are then allocated to the player who selects the additional word giving the highest score amongst the end scores, or else in a variant (at the choice of the player), to the player who has selected the additional word giving the non-zero score that is the lowest amongst the N scores.
• the additional word is preferably selected so as to maximize the distance between the respective semantic fields of the starting word and of the additional word.
• the game further comprises, between steps e) and f), the following intermediate steps: the gaming site selecting a starting word and N additional words, and determining a real classification for the N additional words as a function of their respective scores; the gaming site submitting to the player the N associated words presented in arbitrary order; and the player drawing up an estimated classification of M words (where M ⁇ N), selected from the N additional words presented, said parameters supplied to the system by the player comprising said estimated classification.
• Step f) is then a step of allocating winning points to the player who has provided the estimated classification that is the closest to the real classification.
• the terminal and the players may be installed in a television studio, with successive sessions of the game being broadcast.
• the terminal may be a cell phone or a personal computer, the gaming site being a remote site connected by telecommunications means to a plurality of terminals.
• the invention can advantageously be implemented by means of an Internet site to which the player can make a connection using a computer.
• the invention may in particular be implemented by means of cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) suitable for exchanging data with the gaming site via a cellular network, using various well-known technologies such as SMS, WAP, GPRS, UMTS-3G, etc. Users of such networks can thus occupy spare time (in public transport, waiting rooms, etc.) by playing the game of the invention.
• PDAs personal digital assistants
• Each microcomputer or cell phone is connected to the gaming site and can display text messages on a screen, in particular information received from the gaming site, with the option for the player of keying in alphanumeric data and sending it back to the gaming site.
• the gaming site also formats messages as a function of the type of terminal in use, computer or telephone: web pages readable using a browser, or WAP pages that are better adapted to display on a screen of small size.
• the gaming site is also coupled to at least one search engine to which it can apply the requests formulated by players and receive in response respective numerical scores.
• the gaming site may be coupled to a plurality of search engines, in which case it will deliver to the player a response that is a combination of the various scores obtained (arithmetic mean of the number of hits, maximum/minimum number of hits, etc.).
• the starting point of the invention lies in the observation that an engine provides not only links to all the pages containing a given word, but also provides additional information, itself of very great value, namely the number of pages on which the word appears (which number is referred to below as the “score” or numerical score”).
• ⁇ celery ⁇ gives a score of 1,400,000 hits (by convention, curly braces are used in the body of the text of the present description to specify the term or series of terms submitted to the engine). This score is higher than the score for ⁇ pepper ⁇ (810,000), but lower than the score for ⁇ caviar ⁇ (13,500,000).
• a finer function of search engines consists in searching for occurrences not of a single word, but of two, three, or more words united in a “phrase” in a given request. For example ⁇ caviar truffle ⁇ returns 137,000 occurrences. From which it can be deduced that amongst the 13,500,000 pages containing ⁇ caviar ⁇ , only about one in a hundred also contains the word ⁇ truffle ⁇ .
• the game is based on the idea that consists in initially selecting a first word (referred to below as the “starting word”), and then finding another word (referred to below as the “additional word”) that will produce a higher score.
• the starting word ⁇ transport ⁇ gives about 48,000,000 hits. It is then up to the player to find an additional word which, in combination with ⁇ transport ⁇ , will produce the highest possible number of hits.
• ⁇ beach ⁇ is a bad choice: the engine finds only about 2,300 hits for the phrase ⁇ transport beach ⁇ .
• a composite word made up of a combination of terms e.g. ⁇ “railway line” ⁇ can be deemed to be equivalent to an additional word constituted by a single term in the above example (where the quotation marks correspond to the syntax used when interrogating search engines, i.e. the engine searches for occurrences of the non-separable string of words between the quotation marks).
• Account can be taken of the number of attempts made by each player in order to reduce winnings with increasing numbers of attempts. Conversely, a bonus may be offered to the player who finds the winning word in a single attempt.
• the game prior to delivering the score for the phrase containing the selected additional word, provides for verifying the score of the additional word taken in isolation, and for refusing the additional word if, on its own, it presents a score that is higher than that of the starting word. This makes it possible to avoid the game being biased by selecting as additional words terms that are relatively meaningless, such as an article or an adverb, thereby necessarily giving a high score.
• the starting word is a trademark: a trademark for food, cars, cosmetics, banking, etc.
• the starting word i.e. the trademark
• the trademark is selected using rules established by an advertising space purchase service as a function of guidelines concerning the way in which the advertiser seeks to ensure presence of the trademark: duration of trademark exposure (conditioning the duration of the game or of a round of the game); time(s) of occurrence; periodicity; etc.
• the game of the invention enables the trademark to be presented throughout the entire duration of a round, and to make players reflect on combinations of words involving the trademark, so that the trademark is used actively while playing, unlike operations in which games are sponsored by trademarks, in which case the trademarks appear only in the background.
• the words are words of ordinary language selected from groups of words belonging to previously-identified fields.
• these fields may be: cinema, literature, history, politics, celebrities, music, etc.
• a part of the preparatory work consists in identifying fields, and also the starting words that are derived therefrom, in such a way as to make the game more interesting.
• the user may select a particular field, with the gaming site automatically selecting the starting word from that field, and with it then being up to the player to find the most pertinent additional words.
• the score may be presented either as a number of hits for the combination ⁇ (starting word) (additional word) ⁇ , or in the form of a ratio between the combination score and the starting word score taken in isolation.
• the additional word is a word off topic, i.e. the additional word does not belong to the same semantic field as the starting word.
• a recompense can then consist in giving the winning player the option to select a combination of words to be used as the starting word for the following round in which the other players compete.
• This other implementation is referred to as “three horse sense”.
• the gaming site selects a plurality of words (e.g. ⁇ bus ⁇ , ⁇ train ⁇ , and ⁇ subway ⁇ ) and presents these words to the player without giving the scores and in an arbitrary order, asking the player to select amongst these words the words which according to the player will give the highest score—or in a variant will give the best two scores or the best three scores, which amounts to the game being one of classifying the words in order of decreasing score.
• the game can be played alternatively and/or cumulatively on a variety of media, essentially:
• players are present in the studio and the game is broadcast, preferably live so that viewers can also participate;
• the telephone medium can be associated in particular with the television medium, in order to enable viewers of the broadcast game to participate directly, with viewers being invited to submit their own suggestions for additional words by SMS.

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• Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
• Theoretical Computer Science (AREA)
• Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
• Computational Linguistics (AREA)
• General Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
• General Physics & Mathematics (AREA)
• Mathematical Physics (AREA)
• Data Mining & Analysis (AREA)
• Databases & Information Systems (AREA)
• Audiology, Speech & Language Pathology (AREA)
• General Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
• Health & Medical Sciences (AREA)
• Artificial Intelligence (AREA)
• Information Retrieval, Db Structures And Fs Structures Therefor (AREA)
• Management, Administration, Business Operations System, And Electronic Commerce (AREA)

Priority Applications (7)

Applications Claiming Priority (1)

Publications (1)

Family

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Family Applications (1)

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Cited By (8)

Citations (12)

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• 2006
  • 2006-11-13 US US11/598,229 patent/US20080113801A1/en not_active Abandoned
• 2007
  • 2007-03-20 EP EP07290334A patent/EP1921550A1/fr not_active Withdrawn
  • 2007-11-12 EA EA200702230A patent/EA200702230A1/ru unknown
  • 2007-11-13 JP JP2007293862A patent/JP2008171395A/ja active Pending
  • 2007-11-13 BR BRPI0704407-0A patent/BRPI0704407A2/pt not_active Application Discontinuation

Patent Citations (12)

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