Comments on: Gasp… Is This the End of the Weekend Genius Challenge?

By: MH

MH — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:28:39 +0000

I don’t like the usual puzzle ones, only because I know by the time I’ve seen the post, somebody has probably already solved it. Creative ones give everyone a more level playing field, making it more about skill than speed.

By: heather

heather — Mon, 12 May 2008 05:37:38 +0000

I think that making the WGC’s more creative is a great idea. It’s not often that people are given the chance to flex their right-brain muscles.
What I always think is fun is the ‘out-of-context’ game. it’s basically where a group of people (usually bored, and usually my friends) sit around and build a while conversation on a random sentence that can be taken completely out of context, and the others chime in and add to it. For example: if someone started out by saying “That thing finally broke. Thank God it didn’t hurt anyone!” and someone else says “Yeah, it almost knocked that guy out yesterday”, and so on. Hilarity and nerdiness ensues.

By: david w

david w — Sun, 11 May 2008 23:32:16 +0000

what about special guest writer once month from submissions from readers? I’m new to the site and enjoy it very much.

By: buddz

buddz — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:39:11 +0000

Please keep the WGC! It’s always an entertaining experience, whether one is participating or just reading others’ responses. Just keep ‘em coming.

Personally, I prefer the difficult ones, puzzles and posers dealing with logic, vocabulary or math. But the creative ones are great fun, too, and everybody has a chance to win. That’s the American way — fair and equal to all. [cue music]

You could say: Mental_Floss put the *us* in Genius!

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:50:34 +0000

Oh I forgot logical, what is the best logical answer to the question, this too is a challenge, each person has a different logical answer, this is what I like about the challenge

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:36:39 +0000

I think there is a challenge in just about everything we do in life, take for example common sense, what is common sense? The word today should be uncommon sense, since most people do not have it. Point is that’s the challenge,you could be smart and not have common sense.

By: Ste

Ste — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:54:41 +0000

Please, oh please keep the challanges-the creative ones are the best. I read the mental floss blog everyday but I honestly look forward to the weekend challenge. Especially the ones like that where I can read about it before work on Saturday and think about it for two work shifts and spit it out Sunday night. I’ve yet to win-but please keep it up-it is appreciated!!

By: Evil Timmy

Evil Timmy — Sun, 11 May 2008 03:34:29 +0000

Maybe not the most amazingly genius thing ever, more a test of imagination and luck, but the IMDB Keyword Quiz, which I came up with while a couple friends laughing at some ridiculous keywords that popped up for IMDB movies. You list off the plot keywords from a particular movie’s IMDB page, and people have to guess the movie. The general frequency of any given word makes searching the web a futile exercise, and as IMDB does only single-keyword searches, the most its search would do is narrow the choices.

Here’s an example set of keywords: Stepbrother | Breakup | Leg Injury | Oral Sex | Musical

Apparently you’ll find all these things in the recently-released Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The more obscure you go movie-wise, the stranger the keywords get, mainly due to people tossing out many keywords with little popular consensus, so if the movie itself is older or rare, you may want to narrow down the field to make the competition winnable and reduce the likelihood of frustrating someone into cheating the hard way by checking every movie with a particular keyword.

By: Carole

Carole — Sun, 11 May 2008 01:55:31 +0000

I really look forward to the weekend challenge. I do enjoy the creative ones the most. However, I think my favourite WGC was last fall, when there was a series of word puzzles for names of countries. I liked it because it took awhile to solve.

By: Anna

Anna — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:47:45 +0000

I like the creative challenges the best as well. You can’t just google them and get away with it! I definitely think you guys could do creative questions alone for a while and come up with tons of great challenges.