!!Con 2018: If at first you don’t succeed at beating HQ Trivia, try cheating! by Hung Truong
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 30/05/2018

If at first you don’t succeed at beating HQ Trivia, try cheating! by Hung Truong

HQ Trivia is a game about what you know, what you can guess, and ultimately, luck. Twelve multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty make it very unlikely that anyone will win by chance alone. And the questions get really obscure and hard towards the end! So what’s a player to do? Cheat!

I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty about how I wrote an iOS app (and later a MacOS app) that takes advantage of Apple’s Vision framework, open source OCR software, and plain ol’ Google to help me decide on my answers while playing HQ Trivia. I’ll also talk about why I haven’t won a single time (though I’ve gotten close), and why some problems are just really hard for software to solve.