(Image: Maurice Ambler/Hulton Archive/Getty)
Spaces around the Monopoly board always progress from shabby neighbourhoods to swanky locales, no matter whether you play in London in the UK, Atlantic City in the US, or even the Star Wars universe. Now a new program is turning open-data records into custom Monopoly boards based on any location, creating a "data game" that helps visualise social differences.
Computer scientists Marie Friberger at Malmö University, Sweden, and Julian Togelius at the Unviersity of Copenhagen, Denmark, used open-data records from the UK government to generate new Monopoly boards. They wrote software to let users choose which social differences should be represented on the board by assigning weightings to different statistics.
For example, you could create a board in which communities with high levels of volunteering stand in for rich streets like Mayfair or Boardwalk, while those with frequent bouts of public drunkenness represent Old Kent Road or Mediterranean Avenue.
The software chooses communities that are spread out across a particular geographical area - in this case the UK - while also ensuring they are recognisable by checking they have a decent-length Wikipedia article. It then ranks the communities according to your chosen weighting, creating a price for each space based on the real-world statistics.
In the example above, in which volunteering was given a positive weighting and public drunkenness a negative one, the researchers found that the popular UK tourist town Harrogate was the rated highest, while the densely populated Portsmouth came bottom of the list. They will present the work at the Computational Intelligence and Games conference in Granada, Spain next month.
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