Press Start: The Game to Save Life on Earth — Part II: Hidden Treasures

In the previous post, I mentioned that folks have described QuestaGame (QG) as ‘Pokémon Go meets David Attenborough’.

We are absolutely honoured that people compare QuestaGame’s nature engagement with David Attenborough 🤩 — who has done more to connect humanity with nature. And sure, it’s not hard to see where the comparison with Pokémon Go comes from. After all, QG gets players outdoors with their phones, exploring for amazing creatures. 🕵🏽‍♂️🪲 Yet, the comparison with Pokémon Go misses some of the complexity that is the magic of QuestaGame.

When we think of Pokémon Go, we immediately think of a fun-filled hunt for some hidden ‘treasure’, where the ‘treasure’ has a ‘rarity’ score attached. QG also helps players hunt for treasures — the treasures being the diverse life forms in the outdoors, captured as photos.

In Pokémon Go the mobile device’s GPS and clock determine the player’s location and time; these in turn dictate which creatures and rarities (allocated by an algorithm) appear in their vicinity. Simple.

In QG though, there is no guarantee that a creature will ‘appear’ in your vicinity nor is there any expectation that your find will be rare. In other words, the gameplay in QG involves searching for treasures both ‘hidden’ and of unknown ‘rarity’. ‘Hidden’ because the exact location of a life form at any given time cannot be predicted and, it follows that its ‘rarity’ is unknown too. So QG gameplay is dealing with ‘unknown unknowns’. Not so simple.

To reward players for their finds, the player must first figure out the identity of the ‘unknown’ treasure, and secondly figure out its ‘unknown’ rarity.

It turns out that once the identity of the lifeform spotted by the player is known, determining its rarity is trivial.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.org) is an open data portal consisting of over 2 billion records of biodiversity observations made by various individuals and scientific expeditions globally. From this data, we are able to deduce the number of times a given life form has been observed in that region for that time of the year and convert it to a ‘rarity score’.

The complexity actually comes in trying to identify the life form in the first place. At the last count, there are at least 1 million scientifically described species (with a latin binomial). So which species of this 1 million did our player find? 🔎 To solve this problem, again the team put on our thinking caps and viola! 🤔 The birth of the BioExpertise Engine.

What is the BioExpertise Engine (BEE)? In short, it is an Artificial Collective Super Intelligence (ACSI) system that allows for the collective to propose and verify the identity of a life form in a blind review process. Big and important sounding words, so time to simplify…

In the next post, I will discuss the thinking that went into designing and developing the mighty BEE (BioExpertise.org)…

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We are Guardians of Earth — building the first ever Play-Earn-Protect game where your real world knowledge and in-game actions help protect life on Earth.

• Visit our website to learn more — https://www.guardiansofearth.io/
• Follow us on Twitter and join the conversations — @GuardiansofE
• Join us on our GoE Discord server for exclusive updates — https://discord.gg/3NEDbsgdSK