Freerice

[November 14th, 2007]
A friend of mine (Paul) sent me the link. http://www.freerice.com. The endeavor is by “John Breen”, who is a US fundraiser. The idea is to use a game to build vocabulary, to donate rice to the needy. For every correct answer, the website donates 10 grains of rice. Companies advertising on the website provide the money to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to buy and distribute the rice. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7088447.stm

While, I do not know why go by grains-of-rice, rather than grams-of-rice, I was free to check the website and contributed to about 500 grains of rice. For many words, (and they keep getting tougher), I had to refer to dictionary.com, but for once there was no guilt factor for cheating. While I was at it, I was thinking that .. this is a great way to increase someone’s vocabulary but this is a game that requires time, and my objective is also to donate more and more rice, which I can achieve only by correct answers. If technology can be used to raise money, I can also use technology to manipulate towards helping the eventual goal.

I can think of writing a program so that I can just keep running it the whole day. J How? Think of writing a simple selenium test case to run through the website, capture the element that contains the word requested, and also capture the choices given. Once I know the requested word, an Ajax call to any semantic search system can give you the results, and run a simple regular expression to match against the choices to come up with a rating. Again, use selenium to select the best possible answer and submit the request. Put this in a loop and keep running through out the day. With java 6’s new scripting apis, you can probably do without a selenium test case. More on java scripting api later.