LA is Smarter Than SF, Ha!

A while back, Iast summer, I was in San Francisco and covered the Facebook Developers Conference where I discovered the ginormous amount of attractive nerds there.

Sitting on Building Great Apps panel I attended was the crazy hot Sebastien de Halleux, COO and Co-Founder of Playfish. Playfish has a knack, or shall I say, annoying habit, of making some of those uber-addictive applications on Facebook, like GeoChallenge. One such game, the Who Has the Biggest Brain?, confirms what we all here in LA already know to be true and tell to our out of town friends, who for some odd reason don't believe us: People in LA are smarter than people in San Francisco. (Unfortunately however, it seems that people in Lafayette, Laare smarter than all of us. At least we're better looking than both. Or it could be that we simply have bigger heads.)

I had a very brief chat with Sebastien about how they came up with the victor.

How did the Playfish guys come up with the biggest brain concept?

Playfish wanted to design its first social game as an experience that would be more fun when played with your real life friends rather than on your own. And what could be more fun than a bit of friendly competition about who really has the biggest brain? In addition, drawing from its video games experience, the Playfish team was aware that brain training games have been hugely popular across multiple game platforms (console, handheld, mobile) and yet there wasn't any brain game available on Facebook. And thus was born Who Has The Biggest Brain? which has now been played by more than 10 million people since it was launched a year ago.

How are the results tabulated (meaning it was unclear to me from the numbers I looked at, was it per person, greatest number of points per player or total players)?

The results were tabulated from a random anonymous extract of 500,000 scores distributed around the globe. From the millions of scores in our database we extracted 0.5 million scores (randomly and anonymously). We sorted them by country (and in the US, by states and cities), and then averaged the score by geographical area, discounting any area that did not have at least 30 scores. We used this average score to create our table. This gives a fair representation of how different
areas rank compared to each other. We absolutely do not claim anything scientific behind this analysis. There is also no scientific evidence behind what drives a high score, and if brain size is a factor, so is probably the amount of time spent playing the game.

How on earth does Lafayette, LA have the biggest brain (I'm from Louisiana, I've been there) - is it because they seem to have a lot of time on their hands?

Ahem, we'll leave the interpretation of results to the reader.