What about a program that grabs the mystery pic image and checks it against a database of neopets images? Just a thought I had when I was bored this morning. Let me know if it's plausible or not. Thanks!
Hmmm.... this would be very difficult, but doable. I know it's something way beyond my means. I think the biggest concern would be checking it up against every single neopets image. There are thousands, and some aren't even real images, but screenshots of games. So to answer your question of plausibility, I'm going to say no.
BUT... :lol: on a serious note, I've been thinking about this for a LONG time but right now, I'm considering the effort is not worth it.
The reason I thought of this because I did some small work with images before and I was just wondering if the images could be translated into numbers based on pixel colors and then arranged in some sort of matrix that would then be scanned through. Yeah, it would be a time consuming process but couldn't there just be some sort of loop searching a 16x16 pixel grid (or whatever the mystery image is), advancing by one across then descending rows through images? Again, I don't have much experience with this and so that's why I wasn't so sure about the plausibility. I haven't seen any as screenshots yet, sorry I wasn't aware they did this. How often have they been screenshots? If it's 1 or 2 out of an average 10, I'd still love to take the other 8 or 9! Haha =] I understand it would be a bit slow, but I mean hey, you could somehow run a preliminary program like when you convert the image to numbers you like set up a certain range of the numbers in the image (like a range of colors) and just use that as a quick way to eliminate something instead of searching through. Like if the image only has blues and the mystery pic is reds, then it would automatically be eliminated. I'm sure there's possible ways to shrink the process. but even if it took like ten or twenty minutes, that's still pretty darn good considering that not too many people are getting it either.
The process is simplier than that with SCAR. In fact, the big part is having ALL the links form ALL images in ALL neopia. I'm wondering how much bandwith that will use if you browse all the images 1 by 1 :lol:
Or what if you just downloaded teh images once, converted to some sort of text file, then each time it would just run the process from the archived images ? True, it's a bit of a long shot. Haha I guess it was set up to have a major fail =p Thanks for all the input everyone!