My Game of Pokemon GO - Stage IV.1: No More Trackers

Three candies were earned when a Pokemon was caught, one extra candy for transferring it, so four candies can be obtained per Grimer caught in wild.  To get a Muk, I would need to catch ten more Grimers, which was nearly mission impossible.  I was so close to complete the Pokedex at this point, I was determined.  Hope came when Niantic introduced the "buddy" feature into the game. I could then choose Grimer as my buddy, one candy earned per 3km walk.  Forty candies would take 120km!  Tough but at least it was a path forward.  By the time I walked about 80km and earn 27 candies, Niantic launched the Halloween event trying to attract players back to the game.  During that special week, walking distance was reduced to one Grimer candy per 0.75km, a sweet deal and the remaining candies were piece of cake.  My Grimer was finally ready to morph into a Muk!

Walking my Grimer buddy for over 81.8km. 

I was still missing the last three: Porygon, Snorlax and Lapras.  Tools had sharpened by that time, Twitter accounts started to report rare Pokemons.  We would just needed to be sitting at the beautiful beach of Coronado Island.  When Twitter feeds reported the precise location of Lapras, drove to it.  However, with only maximum 15min for a given spawn, I figured it was not very productive to do the hunting on my own, as I would barely have enough time after I drove across the island and after managed to win a parking spot from other hunters.  My friend and I decided to visit the island in two weeks, which would be mid-October, as we both had family business before that.  This decision turned out to be a huge mistake, one that I had to pay nearly $200 for.

A pleasant surprise came on a Sunday morning.  I happened to open up FastPokeMap and pure luck stroke me.  I saw a Snorlax one block away from my house with 4min left.  Still could not believe what I saw on the screen, I hurried out in my pajamas!  One down!  Porygon and Lapras, here I come – in just two weeks!  But things turned south quickly.

FastPokeMap got millions of usage per day.  Its database grew to the scale that requires NoSQL database to handle, the web traffic also required the latest Big Data Cloud infrastructure to support.  Spawn rules had been discovered through data mining, biomes patterns were explored.  The FastPokeMap movement certainly caught Niantic’ attention.  Bad news came in the morning of October 8th, 2016.  Niantic introduced more stringent encryption mechanism, where all existing programming interface became useless.  FastPokeMap was shutdown, all Twitter feeds sitting on top of these databases or relying on old interface were dysfunct and were never recovered.  Our plan for the final battle at Coronado Island was complete scraped, as it was pointless to roam on the island without Twitter feeds.  This was the start for a Pokemon dark age.

I wrote the following in that dark morning (hint: my friends were working on drug discovery, so I used related jargons):

"Pokemon hunting is like lead hunting.  In the early days, we could only use "nearby" feature to explore our neighborhood, which was like we shaked test tubes to read out the activities of each individual compounds.  Later Go Radar app provided us a 96-well little gadget, then came FaskPokeMap, which was a modern 1536-well ultra-high-throughput (uHTS) screening system, the rule of PoGo game was reshaped forever.  Several refinements occured afterwards, such as the use of Focus library.  Hunting Bulbasaur at the Hour Glass park was just like finding Gleevec from a Kinase library.  Use libraries of Known Drugs with high hit rates was like visiting hot spots, such as Del Mar, La Jolla and Coronado Island.  Not to mention Twitter feed, that was basically monitoring top journals such as Nature, Science and Cell.  Once a target was published in these journals, we race to win!  Now uHTS has gone, Nature Science Cell has been off the shelf, where is our next innovation?  Beginner players may still rely on Focus Libraries or Known-Drug Libraries, pleasant surprises could still occur once in a once.  However, for our advanced venture capitalists, where is our next Blockbuster opportunity?  Our technical department (hackers) is still fighting hard to crack the code and repair the tools we used to have, but this also presents a opportunity for brand-new ideas.  One possibility is to embrace open science and rely on crowd sourcing, such as use a human-driven GO Radar system.  Let us imagine a few thousands of us standing on the Coronado Island forming an array at 100-meter interval.  Each person is in charge of monitoring his 40-meter sightings radius.  Once a rare Pokemon is discovered, we tweet and disseminate the information immediately.  Forming a coalition is the key to the success of this open science model.  Since we have tasted the power of those modern technologies, we can no longer go back to pick up test tubes and hope to find a Lapras, a Porygon, or a Snorlax that way, nor should we unrealistically dream about obtaining a magic egg, which then hatches into what we desprately need.  These are not real options.  Let us take a break, rejuvenent, wait for the next technology revolution, maybe we will meet again in a total different PoGo battle field."

The original text was sent to my dear Pokemon friends in Chinese and I intended to keep that copy here:

"Pokémon hunting就如lead hunting。我们最早只有在neighborhood用nearby，有如手动地晃动试管读取每一个compound的信息。后来Go Radar给了我们96-well的小机器，FastPokeMap则是1536-well的uHTS，从此改写了游戏的规则。然后又出现了几种技术革新，比如用Focus library。去Hour Glass抓Bulbasaur就是在Kinase Library里找Gleevec。用Known-Drug Set犹如去德拉梅，拉赫亚，科岛这些Hit Rate极高的Library。当然还有follow Twitter feed，那就是跟踪Nature，Science，Cell，一旦别人有了发现，就比谁跑的快！现在HTS当了，NCS杂志下架了，下一个技术革命在哪呢？小盆友们当然还可以用Focus Library，Known-Drug Set，还可以找到惊喜，我们这些只看中Blockbuster的风投该何去何从？技术部门绞尽脑汁也许能修复那些曾有的工具。但这也是给新技术诞生提供了摇篮。一种猜想是embrace open science，用Crowd Sourcing，比如协同合作人肉狗雷达。想象在科岛，几千个我们站成间距100米的阵列，每人负责监视和第一时间Tweet半径内的发现。联盟是open science成功的关键。由奢入简，重新拾起试管去筛找Lapras, Porygon, Snorlax，或者幻想捡到一个magic power egg都不是选项。只有养精蓄锐，拭目以待，迎接下一个场革命，说不准我们会在一个新的战场上。"