Blog: Pete Loshin

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Money Games, Ad Hoc Databasing, and Serious Science

Look in your pocket. No, the other one, where you stash your cash. That's right. Now, pull out your currency and go check out Where's George?, a website that's a front end for entering US bills into a database and figuring out where they came from, where they are, and where they are going.

Every note has a serial number, a denomination, a series (year) and a few other bits of information that remain static; the only thing that changes is the location. So, you enter the information, along with your zip code. Then, you go on with your life. Chances are good that you'll get the most bang for your bucks by spreading them around, maybe down at the corner deli or maybe buying a paper at the airport across the country. Eventually, someone else will check out Where's George, too, and enter a new location for what once was your currency.

The whole idea is kind of interesting, in a kind of geeky, weird way. I'm not sure I'd bother looking up or registering my cash, unless I had a lot of time on my hands. It all started out in 1998 as a sort of fun thing to do, for no other good reason (though maybe as part of the dot-com boom, when anything that could generate traffic was thought to be a potential money-maker).

Oddly enough, though, all that data turned out to be useful after all. Scientists are now reporting that tracking currency is a valuable tool for modeling the spread of infectious diseases.

What a cool example of how a game, really, based on openly-available information, when looked at as a database can actually return a worthwhile result.

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