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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by xkcdbot@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world

xkcd #3110: Global Ranking

Title text:

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

Transcript:

[Cueball is seated at a desk, and uses a laptop. White Hat is standing right behind him.]
Cueball: I'm ranked 7,145,000^th^ globally on this chess platform.
Cueball: It's hard to be ranked that low in any activity.

[Zoom on Cueball talking]
Cueball: Few pastimes even have 7 million rated players. Until the Internet, it wasn't really possible. You could be this bad, but only unofficially.

[Cueball is now facing White Hat]
Cueball: So in a sense, I'm worse at chess than anyone was at anything for most of human history.
White Hat: Why are you still doing it?

[Cueball is back on the laptop]
Cueball: Well, no human has ever had this many friends to play with.
White Hat: That person is calling you some very obscene names.
Cueball: Our friendship is complicated.

Source: https://xkcd.com/3110/

explainxkcd for #3110

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[-] charonn0@startrek.website 22 points 6 months ago
[-] otacon239@lemmy.world 10 points 6 months ago

I hear a dead rat is actually pretty good at this game. Way better than I was.

[-] WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 1 points 6 months ago

Have you tried playing it with a live rat that you shake and squeeze?

[-] marcos@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Of all the games that I would expect to have a global ranking, that is the absolute last.

[-] pyre@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

the absolute last

just like Stanley

[-] ksigley@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Happy cake day.

[-] davidgro@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

At one point I was ranked dead last in the entire world for number of seconds lived.

[-] trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Chances are you shared that position with someone else.

Edit: There are 86400 seconds in a day while globally on average about 362,000 babies are born per day.

[-] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Not if it's measured with a fractional part.

I wonder if the rate is high enough and the distances large enough that relativity could make it so people on opposite ends of the world disagree on which baby was born first. Then again, birth takes a lot longer than a second and it's not really possible to pinpoint an exact timestamp when the baby is born and wasn't previously.

[-] ksigley@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

There really is an xkcd for everything.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
127 points (100.0% liked)

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