Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 27 “Google Ja. Apr. 1”

—

in

Google Ja. Apr. 1

Expected solvable difficulty

  • 1sample: experienced solvers knows past April Fools’ jokes from Google Japanese IME team
  • 3samples: other experienced solvers
  • keywords+: most solvers

Level design

This level was inspired by the past Google Japanese IME April Fools’ jokes. These are the jokes I’ve been watching every year until the pandemic stopped all the fun. Each year Google (Gboard) Japanese IME team makes a new text input product of a new theme. Recent products would also release a hardware blueprint and software source code so that you can make it on your own.

An interesting thing is that the page name always reflects nature of the joke product, and sometimes cryptic. Here are some of the past products:

Google 日本語入力キーボード ドラムセットバージョン
Drum set keyboard
-.-. (Japanese Morse, web demo, circuit diagram and firmware source)
patapata (Flap display, web demo, circuit diagram and firmware source)
___o (Party blower, web game, build instructions)
m9 (Magic hand, circuit diagram and firmware source)
furikku (Physical flick keyboard, circuit diagram and firmware source)
ooooo (Bubble wrap, archive, circuit diagram and firmware source)
tegaki (Physical handwriting, web demo, circuit diagram, source and training model)
---o (Bending spoon, circuit diagram and firmware source)
yunomi (Yunomi cup, web demo, circuit diagram and firmware source)

Expected thought process

Find out the sample answers are pointing to the codename of Google Japanese IME April Fools’ jokes, and search for the code name of the given year in the question.

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post’s permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post’s URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.) 要在你自己的网站上回应，请输入你的回应页面的 URL，该页面应包含指向此文章永久链接 URL 的链接。你的回应随后将显示在此页面上（可能需要经过审核）。想更新或删除你的回应？请更新或删除你的文章并再次输入你的文章 URL。(了解更多关于 Webmention 的信息。) 自分のサイトで返信するには、この投稿のパーマリンク URL へのリンクを含む返信ページの URL を入力してください。あなたの返信は（承認後に）このページに表示されます。返信を更新または削除したい場合は、あなたの投稿を更新または削除し、再度その投稿の URL を入力してください。(Webmention について詳しくはこちら。)