The Chicken Challenge
22Nov06
Roger Magoulis from O’Reilly came to my NLP class, and while he was lecturing, he inadvertently showed us an official-looking paper that contained only the word chicken.
I had one helluva time finding it, and I want people to go through this miserable process to find the funniest paper ever.
Can you find the research paper found in this screenshot? If you can, let me know how you found it! Don’t post the link to the paper, I’m curious what strategies people use, when the only term in the document is “chicken.”
And try not to look at the comments, where people have posted their “solutions.” I’m curious how many unique or innovative search tactics we can come up with.
It took me longer than it took you. I figured the 4-gram “chicken chicken chicken chicken” would be kind of unusual, and indeed, I believe it turned up a link to this paper as the first hit. But the link was dead. From there I tried different n-gram chicken strings, adding the name of the presenter who’s talk we originally noticed this paper in, and adding the string “pdf.” What ended up working was using Google’s advanced content type filter to search only for PDFs that contained “chickecn chicken chicken chicken.”
Chicken.
so i too found that dead link at isotropic.org using the query “chicken chicken chicken chicken” (in quotes). then i found the powerpoint presentation from UW. had been using scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html) so i switched to google, and used the “View as HTML” functionality. from there, you can find the author’s name. with the author’s name, and the filetype:pdf query term, i was able to pin it down
bad ken-ichi ! i didn’t come to the comments section until i found the doc, but if i had, you would have destroyed the challenge!
took me a couple minutes. i tried about about 10 different searches and ultimately got a working copy as the first google hit.
ugg; wish you could leave images in the comments. i was gonna post another page out of the doc.
vladypus, i’m looking into how we can allow images within the comments. I found this: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/37290
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Chicken,AK&ie=UTF8&z=10&ll=64.075202,-141.933746&spn=0.419672,1.332092&om=1&iwloc=addr
Here is the paper:
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~k7lim/misc/chicken-12-5.pdf