How to play
Peaks
A decade of lookups, no labels. A spike is news, a sawtooth is a season: name it in four.
- One curve, no labels: how often the world looked a single subject up, month by month, for about a decade.
- Read the shape, then name it from the list. You have four guesses.
- Each wrong guess buys a hint: the category, then the month of the biggest peak, then the shape in words, then the first letter.
How it is scored
Only the number of guesses matters, so there is no partial credit for being close. Getting it in one is rare and mostly luck; two or three is a good read of the shape.
The shape is the clue, not the height. One enormous spike is a news event. A repeating sawtooth is something seasonal. A slow climb to a plateau is something that entered normal life and stayed. A rise and a collapse is a fad. The numbers are Wikipedia pageviews, which begin in 2015, so nothing here reaches further back than that.
How to get better at it
Read the shape before you think about the subject. The silhouette narrows it down faster than any guess about topic.
One enormous spike from nothing is an event, and the month tells you which. A repeating sawtooth is seasonal, so think holidays, sport and weather. A slow climb to a plateau is something that entered normal life and stayed. A sharp rise and a total collapse is a fad.
Look at where the curve begins. The data starts in 2015, so something already high on the first day existed long before, and something flat at zero for years arrived later.
Spend a wrong guess deliberately if you are stuck. The hints arrive in order of usefulness, and the peak month in particular usually settles it.
When it resets
New puzzle at your local midnight.