GPTDash

Benny and I have been playing our "reverse turing test" game — aka GPTDash — at Datenspuren for two years now, so we decided it's time we took it to the big stage. We wanted to play it with like a hundred people, but didn't expect to get the big stage™ at 39c3, hall 1 that seats like 3k people. At the prime time gameshow slot late on day 2. That was quite humbling, especially since the app wasn't even close to ready at the time.

We had the foresight to test the hell out of the app, but were still met with a few stupid issues on-stage. We've been told it wasn't half as bad watching it live, but oh wow did we have a hard time keeping everything running. The app was built to easily handle 3k concurrent websocket connections, the server was almost idling during the event, but at some point it still just decided to drop and no longer allow WS connections. HTTP worked fine. No clue what happened there, it felt like the network was just not allowing any WS packets to go through. I realize that makes no sense. I'd love to figure out what happened there some day.

In hindsight it definitely was fun though. We saw around 2.5k people participating live at some point — it was open to the live stream viewers as well. I can't remember there being a gameshow at Congress that's directly interactive for the audience with a large crowd, maybe it was a first in that regard!