The Wrath of Khan

Scott Hardie | December 12, 2014
Samir's Legends goo has created a conundrum.

The correct answer is not Genghis Khan as two players guessed, nor it is Attila the Hun as one player guessed; it's someone else entirely. However, the same painting appears online attributed to all three men on different websites.

I have no way to tell which man the painting is a true representation of, since they're all historical figures for whom we have no record of the true face. Comparisons to other images of the men are inconclusive. (For all I know, there may be even more places online where this same painting is attributed to fourth or fifth or sixth persons. Apparently it's a popular stand-in for whoever you're writing about on your history website.)

I'm forced to make a change to the Advanced Rules: In the event that an image appears online under a different name than the correct answer, and there's no way to tell which person it actually is, and someone guesses that other name, I will disallow that guess and allow the player to re-guess. The players who guessed Genghis or Attila now have until Saturday night at midnight to guess again.

I can tell already that this is going to create another problem someday, because the Advanced Rules also say that if the image definitely is attributed to the wrong name online and you guess that wrong name, your guess is to be ruled incorrect. This happens all the time with aggregation sites like Google that scrape content from the web and don't carefully parse what they're scraping. It just happened a few weeks ago with the Judit Polgar goo, where an article about Judit appeared on her sister Susan's website, and Google served the photo of Judit under searches for Susan, and so several players guessed Susan and were ruled incorrect. Be careful. :-(

"There's no way to tell which person it actually is" is a fuzzy distinction. All I can do is promise to referee the game as fairly as possible when this happens, as I always try to do. If you have a proposal for handling this scenario better, please share it. Thanks for your understanding.

Also: Congrats to Denise for being the only player so far to find the official correct answer to Samir's goo. :-)

Scott Hardie | December 14, 2014
Further thoughts now that the answer is revealed: I doubt that Inalchuq is the man in the image, since there are arrows and armor on display, and Inalcuq was just a governor and not a warrior. That clothing design is similar to how Genghis Khan is typically portrayed in Western art, so if I had to bet on one of the three men, I'd bet that it's Khan. But who knows? It's a good thing the difficulty was set to Hard. :-)

Steve West | December 14, 2014
I agree it's probably a depiction of Genghis Khan but the clever clue clearly led to Inalchuq. Nicely done.

Denise Sawicki | December 14, 2014
I was shocked to have the only correct guess for as long as I did :). Surely we have a lot of Game of Thrones fans here? Probably it was the fault of the image.

Chris Lemler | December 14, 2014
It was a well given clue I was completely stumped :) Excellent work Samir