Walter Reid

Google/Sony presents the Da Vinci Code Contest

My girlfriend entered the “Da Vinci Code” contest about half way through it’s running because it seemed like a fun way to pass the time and it has a huge pay-off. There is about $100,000 in prizes for the winner at the Sony Pictures prize page making it almost impossible not to take a chance on.

Now everything went well for my girlfriend, she did all the required puzzles and on the last day at 1pm EST she gave her final answer in 3 minutes to get to the final round. Yesterday on Friday May 19th, 2006 at 1pm the final 5 questions were asked. The catch this time was that the winner would not be the person to answer the questions first, but instead the person with the fastest time answering the questions.

My girlfriend decided not to do it right at 1pm because she would be too busy at work and we would do it late on Saturday evening. At about 4pm on Friday I decided to see if people were posting the times so I’d know what time to my girlfriend should shoot for.

This is when I felt like Capt. Renault in Casablanca and was “shocked, Shocked” to find cheating on the Internet. Now I always knew this might happen for the basic game. I mean people need a reason to get people to their websites and what better way than post the answers to the 24 basic questions. Personally I didn’t really think much of it at the time since two weeks ago it was still anyone’s game.

In fact, if I knew about this before hand I would have thought that the people posting these answers were being a little disingenuous. I say this because some of those people taking the easy answer road might get into the final 10,000 people and wouldn’t have played the games at all – instead they would be lost because, I thought, no one would be giving them answers when 100,000 was at stake. Thus instead of 10,000 people to compete against there might be like 1,000.

Well, obviously I was completely wrong. Yes a whole host of people got into the final round of 10,000 contestants – but the cheating didn’t stop there.

Once the game started at 1pm, people started to take the test and to my chagrin posted screenshots of the game to forums all over with the answers! So with an average finish time of one and a half hours dropped to thirty minutes which dropped to fifteen minutes. I haven’t checked today, but I’m sure it’s hit as low as five minutes to finish.

My girlfriend is heartbroken that her chance at winning is now destroyed by the rampant cheating. I don’t really know who to blame for this one. The people who posted the answers (making this no longer a game of smarts but a clicking contest)? Google for getting my girlfriend’s hopes up and the having a contest that was easily co-opted in half a day? Maybe it was the kids that requested the answers?

In any event I feel like there is some answer to all of this:

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