1k Words: A Writing Contest

tom1337890

Looking forward to some writing assignments. Like in school. Sometimes I miss that in my day to day job. Using just human intelligence. Or maybe "dog intelligence" ;-)

kmoser

> Does it have to be 1,000 words? > Yes. That’s what a picture is worth, after all. Not to be pedantic but does this mean "1,000 words or fewer ," " at least 1,000 words," or " exactly 1,000 words?" I'm asking because with school assignments the number is usually a lower bound, but with writing contests it's often an upper bound (sometimes even a fuzzy limit).

random__duck

I am partially worried of discovering that writing a 1000 words is actually much harder for me now than it was when I was 13.

moron4hire

Sounds kind of like they are spending $1500 on an email list of people interested in creative writing, plus gaining writing samples.

esquivalience

For all the people asking whether or not it is exactly a thousand words or only more or less than that, I think it is very plain from the content. For example: > "Write 1,000 words about it" > "you are writing the definitive 1,000 words for this photo. Make them count." > "Does it have to be 1,000 words? Yes...Your entry must be exactly 1,000 words" It also says that the prize is $1,000, and there's 1 picture - but I haven't seen anyone asking whether each of those is an upper or lower bound!

ChrisMarshallNY

I used to exercise, by writing “mini-sagas.” 50 words exactly. Got the idea from Dan Pink, although he didn’t invent it.

debo_

This is an exceptionally boring picture to write about. You can of course be imaginative about anything, but seriously.

HaphazardGuess

they say "a picture" is worth thousand words....not every picture....certainly not this one. fun idea but the choice of picture is dubious, but hey its not my money on the line.

stuxf

Been looking to write more, this looks great! I love the general premise of just converting picture => 1000 words.

omoikane

I can't find any restriction on the submission language, maybe that should be explicitly spelled out. 1000 words in German would carry a different amount of information from 1000 words in English or 1000 characters in Japanese.

gregsadetsky

Very fun! I submitted this more 'nonfiction-y' entry: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/gregsadetsky/08b6cdd56902... It looks like it's only one entry per person, so I'm playing fair and not submitting this second entry, which encodes a compressed version of the image using a 128 word dictionary (ie each word encodes 7 bits). The explanation + the dictionary + the encoded image result in 1000 words. https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/97ac9c8efe9c2a9f08c9cfe...

ingvay7

Curious if allowing AI-based submissions was because there is no reliable way of filtering this out 100%? Would have loved to read these submissions in search of some stellar non-ai writing.

danteocualesjr

sounds fun!

avaer

It really depends on what a word is... If a WORD is 16-32 bits, you could pack in quite a lot. If a word is a Unicode word, that's even more bytes. Or you could do this in German and go nuts.

random__duck

Here is my contribution, titled "The human zoo": https://gist.github.com/Essenceia/c54a8d8fe0d693f96fb7c036f2...

bethekidyouwant

How are they going to review thousands of submissions?