Google images game

Alec Jacobson

October 25, 2009

weblog/

I finished coding a rather simple but addictive and challenging puzzle game, I'm calling the Google images game. The player is presented with the image results of a Google images search for some search word or phrase. The player’s objective is to guess and figure out what that search phrase was. Play it now! The game is an amalgamation of php, javascript and ruby. The ajax javascript for the game is rather complicated by now to handle all of the gaming options, but it's all visible in the game's page source. I use a little ruby program to grab the initial google images thumbnails:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'uri'
require 'net/http'
require 'cgi'

SAFE_VALUES = ["on","moderate","off"]
cgi = CGI.new("html3")
safe = "moderate"
safe = cgi["safe"] if(!cgi["safe"].empty? and SAFE_VALUES.include?(cgi["safe"]))
target = ""
target = cgi["target"] if(!cgi["target"].empty?)

if(!cgi["query"].empty?)
  address = "http://images.google.com/images?q="+
    cgi["query"].gsub(/ /,"+")+"&safe="+safe
  uri = URI(address)
  http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
  headers = {
    "User-Agent" => "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)"
    }

  code = http.head(address, headers).code.to_i
  if (code >= 200 && code < 300) then

      #the data is available...
      response = ""
      http.get(address, headers) do |chunk|
        response = response + chunk
      end
      images = []
      response.scan(
        /imgurl=(.+?)&imgrefurl=(.+?)&[^<]+<img src=(.+?) /
        ) do |img, ref, thumb|
        images<<[img,ref, thumb]
      end
      images.collect! do |e|
        "<a title='"+e[1]+" 'href='"+
        CGI.unescape(e[1]).gsub(/'/,"%27").gsub(/ /,"%20")+
        "' target='"+target+"'><img src='"+e[2]+"' height='100px'></a>"
      end
      cgi.out{
        images.join(" ")
      }
  end
end

I use a little php program to return a random line (initial search phrase/word) from a given file:

  $difficulty = 'easy';
  if (isset($_GET['difficulty'])&&strlen($_GET['difficulty'])>0) {
      $difficulty= $_GET['difficulty'];
  }
  $word_list = 'nouns.txt';
  $possible_word_lists = array('nouns.txt','wiki.txt');
  if (isset($_GET['word_list'])&&strlen($_GET['word_list'])>0) {
      if(in_array($_GET['word_list'],$possible_word_lists)){
        $word_list = $_GET['word_list'];
      }
  }


  $query = "";
  $word_count = 1;
  if(strcmp($word_list,'nouns.txt')==0){
    if(strcmp($difficulty,"medium")==0){
      $word_count = 2;
    }else if(strcmp($difficulty,"hard")==0){
      $word_count = 3;
    }
  }
  for($i=0; $i<$word_count; $i=$i+1){
    if(strlen($query)>0){
      $query= $query."+";
    }
    $query = $query.`ruby -e "a=File.readlines('$word_list').collect{|line| line.strip.gsub(' ','+').gsub('\'','%27')};puts a[rand*a.leng
    $query = trim($query);
  }
  print trim($query);

As you can see, I gave up on php half way through and cheated by calling a ruby one-liner. Someday I'll fix this up...