The AI behind The Hundred
Have you got what it takes to win The Hundred? You will have to breed dragons, level up heroes, forge gear for your battles, and amass a wealth of knowledge to help out your teams. We know it is not easy to do that. But don't worry, The Hundred will help you along. The game will use AI to make you level up your quizzing skills as quickly as you level up your heroes and dragons.
Introduction
For an AI, making players amass knowledge fast and remember it for a long time so that they become better at quizzing is an abstract mathematical problem.
You don’t really have to know how the AI works, because in The Hundred, all the geeky things are done automatically and without you noticing. You get the full gaming experience. The AI uses its clever tricks and algorithms in the background so that you can go from strength to strength fast and beat ever more difficult beasts with the sheer power of your mind.
If you do want to know how it works, put your nerdy glasses on. This page explains the geeky AI of The Hundred and how it will make you a better player.
What the AI does
An AI works like brewing a memory potion. It takes a couple of ingredients and brews them in a huge cauldron. It then checks if the new recipe has made your memory any better. And after a while, it figures out which potion works best for your memory.
In The Hundred there are two things the AI improves: The time it takes for you to memorize something and the time it takes to you to forget. It brews a potion that makes it easy for you to take in new knowledge and it makes it hard to forget.
But the potion only works when you are in a receptive state of mind. You got to be in the zone! The Hundred is a proper game with great pacing and rhythm as the main ingredients to get you into flow and keep you there. And once you are there, the other ingredients start to work.
We will make The Hundred a great game. It will make it so much easier for the AI to make your memory better: You will amass vast amounts of knowledge quickly and you will remember everything for a long time.
Spaced Repetition
Have you ever been on a swing? If you want to swing higher and higher you have to stretch and tuck in your legs just at the right moment. If you wait too long and stretch them at the highest point of your swing you don’t get any extra height. And if you stretch them well before the lowest point it does not work either. You have to time it right and do it just at the moment you are going through the lowest point.
Your memory works a bit like that. Memorizing something is like being on a swing. The first time you memorise something gives you a first push and you swing up, but only a little bit. Then it only takes a few moments until you are ready for your second push. For a swing you have to stretch your legs, for your memory, you need a repetition. If you get it right, you swing a bit higher and it takes a bit longer until the time is right for your third stretch. And then, it takes even longer until you need your fourth push. But even the hardest stretching and tuckinng in your legs don’t help if you get your timing wrong.
Unlike on a swing, you don’t really know when the time is right to repeat something to make your memory stronger. This is what the AI of The Hundred does: It looks at how your mind swings and then it places a quiz question just at the right moment to give you a push and make you fly higher.
Spaced Retrieval
Spaced Repetition is like someone else giving you a push on a swing. Spaced Retrieval is when you do it all by yourself with your legs. Obviously, you are getting better at the swing when you do it all by yourself!
The same happens when you memorize. Your memory gets much stronger when you have to work hard and dig out the answer to a question. It gets much stronger when you finally find the answer at the bottom of your mind. This makes the answer as memorable as discovering a nugget at the bottom of a gold mine.
This is why The Hundred is full of quiz questions. You discover new knowledge on your quests and you win quiz questions. The AI quizzes you just at the right time when the swing is at the best point to stretch your mind. Then you dig out the answer and you end up swinging higher and higher and your memory gets stronger and stronger.
Boredom? No thanks!
The Hundred AI will figure out what you already know in no time. It will not ask you to stretch and tuck in your legs when it won’t make you swing any higher. Really easy questions are boring and will never come up. The AI will wait until you start forgetting the answer and you have to dig it out.
This kind of question is a lot more fun. Once you know a map of Europe like the back of your hand and you know how to find Italy blindfolded, how about Uruguay? Can you find that? Just like any decent game, The Hundred will not make you go through the easy levels again and again. It unlocks the challenging levels for you where you can show how good you are.
But unlike in other quiz games, in The Hundred it does not matter what you already know. It does not matter whether you are already great in Science or whether you struggle with History. You don’t win The Hundred by being good at quizzing, you win by becoming a lot better at it.
Some Data
But this is not where the story ends. She kept on playing and after a few more months, her memory strengthened enormously. Now the stick lasted for 256 days. That is 18x longer! And it only took 40 more minutes of quizzing spread over three months. It is easy to see what would have happened if she had stopped the game in April: By May she would have forgotten most of the answers! She eventually stopped playing at the end of September and will forget more than half of the answers within a year. But this is not because she is not clever, on the contrary, she is very bright!
Forgetting happens to all of us when we stop revising. But just imagine what would have happened if she had stayed on! One or two more hours of quizzing spread over a few more months and she would have remembered the answers until she is old and grey.
This is why The Hundred is such a long game. You can play it on and off for a few minutes every day for a couple of weeks and months. You will amass a lot of knowledge and some of it will stick. But once you have played for a year, you start getting massive memory boosts. Like on a swing, when you get the timing right, you are sent flying!
If you play The Hundred you will notice two things: It will be easy and quick to memorise and things will stick for much longer. The diagram below show this in action. The data was collected in Spark, a simple game built on the scintilla AI that was played by 10,000 people. This diagram has 64,000 data points and shows how quickly one of the players managed to memorise and how long it took her to forget. It shows what happens when you play for about 9 months.
You can see that whenever she plays the curve goes up and on days where she doesn’t play forgetting sets in and the curve goes down again. At the end of March, she played a lot and you can see a big peak going up to nearly 100. The AI timed the quiz questions well, and the answers stick for about 14 days. If she had played with the AI switched off, the peak would not even have reached 60 and the stick would have lasted only for 5 days. But with the AI it becomes a lot easier and quicker for her to take the knowledge in.
The unique scintilla AI
Spaced retrieval is not new but it is hard to get it working. People are very different. Some have great memories and some forget quickly. Some already have solid knowledge when they start and some are completely new. Some are great in Math and Science, others are better with Languages.
Spaced retrieval relies on good pacing. You only get a memory boost when you engage at the right time. But what if you are simply not around at the right time? This is where many spaced retrieval applications stop working. They don’t adapt to your pace and you fall behind. This makes all your retrievals too late. You don’t get your memory boost any more, and worse, you can’t remember any of the answers. There is no point to continue.
This does not happen in The Hundred. The scintilla AI notices when you have fallen behind. It slows down the pace to keep your boat afloat and it gives you a gentle breeze so that you catch up. When it spots that the quizzes are easy for you it sends a strong gust and drives you forward quickly. And sometimes, when you find something particularly hard, it calms down the sea. Whoever you are and however fast you are going, in the Hudred, you always sail in a favourable wind.
Teach your dragon
Once your knowledge is getting to a good level you are ready to take the next step: Explain it to your dragons. This is a lot more difficult than simply answering quiz questions. You have to know the facts, of course. But you also have to know how they hang together. You may have to use some special words for a great explanation. You can get a huge score when you tell a dragon how a volcano works and you use words like eruption, crater and vent.
The Hundred uses the scintilla AI to find out when you have reached the level where you should share your knowledge with your dragons. You will then be able to level up a dragon by explaining something to him. The dragon will use generative text (like ChatGPT) to ask you questions and you can answer and explain in full sentences!
This is the hardest part of The Hundred and it needs a bit of practice. Your first dragons will be happy with simple explanations and they will win small upgrades. But once you become a master teacher, your dragon’s wisdom levels will go through the roof and they will develop terrifying battle skills.
Mastery
You have reached the level of mastery when you don’t have to think about something any more. You just do it or know it. And you are correct every single time! What you master has become part of your second nature, you have it in your muscle memory.
You can make your memory last longer with spaced retrieval, but you can not achieve mastery. The scintilla AI waits until you are starting to forget about something, then cleverly places a quiz question, you have to dig out the knowledge and you get a huge memory boost.
Coming up with the answer instantly will not give you a memory boost - but it will make you even faster and more precise. This is where The Hundred mastery levels come in. You unlock them once you have shown you know a topic well, you have built up a solid long-term memory and you score high when you explain it to your dragons.
Now it is all about speed! Shell your opponents with rapid-fire quiz question answers and shower them with breath-taking response times. You are a true master now!
Pace and Rhythm
The AI can not make you a master of knowledge. Only you can bring this out yourself. What you need to get there is pacing and rhythm. Just like an Olympic athlete, you aim to become a little bit better every day. You train more and harder when you are feeling great, and you rest and take breaks when you need to recover.
But giving yourself pacing and rhythm is hard. This is why Olympic athletes have coaches! They monitor your heart rate, work out when you should train for speed or endurance, when to hit the gym, and when to do your stretches. They book you into your competitions and they help you get stronger and better. All you have to do is win that medal.
The Hundred is your Olympic coach. It monitors your knowledge, it spawns beasts to spar with, it gives you heroes and dragons to work with, it gives you events and competitions, and it does this over many months and years. All you have to do is play.