The Simpsons Screenshot Guesser is a quiz created by Ethan Armbrust that tests your knowledge of The Simpsons TV show. You are shown a randomly selected screenshot from The Simpsons and it is up to you figure out which episode it's from.
The Simpsons Screenshot Guesser features two modes: Easy and Hard. In Easy, you are shown a screenshot an given a choice of 4 episodes to chose from. In Hard mode, you are given a screenshot and only a text box to enter your guess. Get three wrong guesses in either mode and you lose.
The Simpsons Screenshot Guesser is a web application written in Javascript. The Github repository is here.
This project was made for the University at Buffalo's CSE199 class. I began the project on October 14. To start, I needed lots of Simpsons Screenshots and I needed them fast. Using my Simpsons DVDs, I wrote a C++ program (not the best language for the job, I admit) to go through all of the episodes and screenshot them with FFMPEG. The screenshots were organized into a folder stucture created by the program, which can be seen in the github repo. The program would start an episode in ffmpeg 2 minutes in to avoid including the introduction of each episode. It's important to avoid the opening titles because they look the same in almost every episode and it would be really unfair. The program would use FFMPEG to screenshot the episode every 30 seconds. It would then delete the screenshots from the last two minutes, which would typically contain the credits. Then the program would use ImageMagick to compare every screenshot taken to a black image and delete any screenshots that were too similar the black image. This would allow the user to play the quiz without getting any all-black images that are typically found in the act breaks of the show where the TV network would put commercials.
Seasons 1-10
As long as you have all the letters in the right order, you'll get it right. When you input a title, your input is removed of spaces and most kinds of punctuation. Entries are not case sensitive. The word "the" is ignored when entered. You can use "and" and "&" interchangably, as well as "1" and "one", and "2" and "two"
There are 225 episodes in the guesser (The Twisted World of Marge Simpson did not make it in), and 39 screenshots per episode, giving a grand total of 8,775 screenshots.