The Krillion Game, but Endless - Krillion Unlimited

rarity tiers, from Plankton to One in a Krillion

6

points for an answer nobody else gives

100

the depth of a perfect 700-point dive

7,000 m

English has a family of invented big numbers, zillion, jillion and gazillion among them, which the linguist Stephen Chrisomalis has named indefinite hyperbolic numerals. They borrow the ending of million and billion to mean more than anyone could count. Krillion swaps in krill, and the phrase it belongs to is a play on one in a million. It comes from the 2011 animated film Happy Feet Two, directed by George Miller, where Will the Krill, voiced by Brad Pitt, leaves his swarm and announces: "I am one in a krillion."

The joke works because of what krill are. Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, grow to about six centimetres and gather in swarms that can reach 30,000 animals to the cubic metre. Their combined weight is estimated at about 379 million tonnes, among the largest totals for any single wild animal species, and they rise towards the surface at night and sink by day. The word itself is Norwegian, for the small fry of fish. To be one in a krillion is to be the single krill that did something different from the swarm, which is exactly what the Krillion game pays for.

1. 1969

   Psychologists count the answers

   William Battig and William Montague ask hundreds of American students to list members of 56 categories, "a bird", "a fruit", and publish how often each answer was given, replicating and extending an American study of 1957. Their category norms are the best-known rarity tables in psychology.

2. 1976

   The survey quiz

   Family Feud goes on air in the United States. A hundred people are surveyed and contestants win by naming the most popular answer. Britain's version, Family Fortunes, follows in 1980.

3. 1988

   Duplicates score nothing

   The party game Scattergories makes originality the rule at the table: an answer another player also wrote down earns no point.

4. 2009

   The survey, inverted

   The BBC quiz Pointless keeps the hundred-person survey and flips the aim: the fewer of the hundred who gave your answer, the better, and an answer none of them gave is a pointless answer, the best there is.

5. Now

   The crowd is everyone

   The Krillion game drops the panel of a hundred and grades an answer on how familiar it is to people at large, which is why one prompt can run from the first answer anyone gives to one that almost nobody reaches.

• Categories have favourites

  Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, from the 1970s, showed that categories are built around best examples. A robin is a better bird than a penguin in everybody's head, so it is named first and named by everyone.

• Easy to recall feels right

  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named the availability heuristic in 1973: what comes to mind most easily gets treated as the most likely and the most important. In this game the most available answer is the cheapest one.

• The tail is long

  In the counted norms, a few answers take most of the votes and hundreds of correct ones are each given by almost nobody. In one British study of 2022, more than half of all the different answers collected were given by a single person. Every prompt has that shape: a crowded head and a long, quiet tail where the points are.

Once players know the obvious answer is worthless, they all skip it and land on the same second thought. The economist Thomas Schelling described this in The Strategy of Conflict in 1960: people who cannot confer still converge on focal points, the choices that seem natural to everyone. John Maynard Keynes made the same observation about markets in 1936 with his newspaper beauty contest, where the winning move is to guess what average opinion expects average opinion to be.

A rarest-answer game is that contest in reverse. You are trying not to meet the crowd, and the crowd is trying not to meet you, so the clever answer fills up fast. The real rarities lie a step further out: the specialist's example, the regional one, the member of the category that is correct and that nobody thinks of as typical.

1. 01

   Say the obvious answer, then bin it

   Your first answer is the prototype. Naming it to yourself clears it out of the way and tells you what the crowd will say.

2. 02

   Bin the second one too

   The answer that arrives next is usually the focal point for everyone who thought the same way you just did.

3. 03

   Change the angle, not the effort

   Rare answers come from a different slice of the category: another country, another century, a trade you have worked in, the smallest or oldest member.

4. 04

   Stay inside the prompt

   An answer that is not accepted scores nothing, so obscure only pays when it is unarguably correct. Pick the rarest answer you are sure of, not the rarest you can imagine.

Sunlight zone, to 200 m

The epipelagic. Enough light for photosynthesis, and home to most of the life people picture when they think of the sea.

Twilight zone, 200 to 1,000 m

The mesopelagic. Light fades to nothing. Vast numbers of animals shelter here by day and climb at night to feed, the largest daily migration on Earth.

Midnight zone, 1,000 to 4,000 m

The bathypelagic. No sunlight at all, near-freezing water, and the light that exists is made by animals.

Abyssal zone, 4,000 to 6,000 m

The abyssopelagic, over the great flat plains that make up most of the ocean floor.

Hadal zone, below 6,000 m

The ocean trenches, for the most part. The Danish oceanographer Anton Bruun proposed the name in 1956, after Hades, the Greek underworld.

Challenger Deep, about 10,935 m

The deepest known point of the ocean, in the Mariana Trench of the western Pacific.

A perfect classic dive ends 1,000 m into the hadal zone. Endless mode in Krillion Unlimited keeps going, past the depth of any real trench, into an ocean that was drawn for the game.

An accepted answer lands in one of 6 tiers according to how many other people would have given it, from Plankton, the answer everyone gives, to One in a Krillion, the one nobody else reached. Speed earns nothing: the clock only decides whether you answer at all. A refused answer costs the seconds it took and no more, so a reach is always worth trying. There is no daily cap either: a new dive is one refresh away.

Sources: Atkinson and colleagues, Deep-Sea Research I 56 (2009), and the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, on krill biomass; Australian Antarctic Division, Antarctic krill; Stephen Chrisomalis, Umpteen reflections on indefinite hyperbolic numerals, American Speech 91 (2016); Battig and Montague, Category norms of verbal items in 56 categories, Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph 80 (1969); Banks and Connell, Category production norms for 117 concrete and abstract categories, Behavior Research Methods 55; Van Overschelde, Rawson and Dunlosky, Category norms: an updated and expanded version, Journal of Memory and Language 50 (2004); Eleanor Rosch, Cognitive representations of semantic categories, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1975); Tversky and Kahneman, Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability, Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960); John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936); U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, layers of the ocean; Happy Feet Two (2011), directed by George Miller.