We’re really keeping the momentum going this week - lots more quotes are available starting today as well as a “Scores for this quote” section at the end of each race!

If you’ve ever wondered how some of the top players fare on a particularly hard quote, now you can find the answer in the Top 10.

Ever get the feeling of déjà vu when you start typing some quote?  I certainly do! Now you can see exactly how many times you’ve actually typed that quote in the past (and hopefully how your speed on this quote has improved)!

The screenshot below shows the improvement of a real TypeRacer user!

Now you might be wondering what are the chances of seeing the same quote again, since they are chosen at random for each race.  We did a Monte Carlo simulation to answer this question.  Turns out that with the current number of available quotes, you are likely to see one repeated quote after about 19 races and 10 repeated quotes after about 75 races.  

The shaded area in the graph below represents the quotes that have been added this week.

Chances of Quotes Repeating

September has been rather quiet on this blog, but things have been heating up on TypeRacer with almost exactly 1 million games played this month!  We’re ending September with some major improvements to the site.  While you won’t actually notice many of these changes, they are acting behind the scenes to make TypeRacer work faster and more reliably than ever.

One thing you will notice is that we’ve added more quotes - 40% more!  You’ll see new quotes from movies like The Godfather, The Dark Knight, V for Vendetta, and Sexy Beast.  A broad range of books including classics like Discourse on Method, Animal Farm, and the The Great Gatsby, more recent masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five and The Alchemist, topped off with a few titles most relevant to current events, like The Limits Of Power and Bonfire of the Vanities.  Many of these quotes were contributed by racers like you.

Now you also get to see your accuracy at the end of the race.  Accuracy has a significant impact on your overall typing speed and will be highlighted red if it’s below 98%.  See if you can get it in the green!  Accuracy is calculated as the ratio of mistyped characters over the total number of characters in the text.

We’ve also compiled a large selection of texts about typing.  We read several “learn how to type” books from different decades and looked at some historical perspectives on the origins and longevity of the Qwerty keyboard.  The Greatest Stories Never Told, for instance, claims that other keyboard layouts, like Dvorak, “are demonstrably more efficient, but the original continues to thrive,” due to “the power of inertia and the reward of being first,” while Famous Fables of Economics argues the opposite: that the Qwerty keyboard has withstood the test of time and that “the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard.”

We hope you enjoy the new texts!

Spaces are filling up fast!  TypeRacer now only shows one entry per player on the list of 20 Latest High Scores (each player’s entry is his or her best score within the past hour).  This means there’s now room for more people in the top 20!

Many of you have asked for this change, because you didn’t want to see the scoreboard totally dominated by one or two of the best typists.  I was looking forward to this as well, but alas, my high score of 81 wpm was still knocked off the list in just a few minutes.  Hope you type faster than I do!

The wait is over - you may now create an account on TypeRacer and have all your racing results recorded, sorted, and graphed!

Screenshot - Saved Scores

There is also a new section called Fastest Typists.  Unlike Recent High Scores, which only last for an hour, “Fastest Typists” is a permanent tribute to the best players.  Sign up for an account to get your spot on the list!

Screenshot - Fastest Typists List

You will also notice that TypeRacer is now keeping track of two additional statistics - your best race ever and the number of races you have won.

One significant change is that your overall score is now your average WPM for just the last 10 races.  This is the number you see in the upper-right corner of the screen, and it’s used to rank players on the various scoreboards like Fastest Typists.

If you are using TypeRacer from a social network like MySpace or Orkut, your historical scores (the My Scores section) will become available some time in the future.  For now, the main thing that has changed is that you will be ranked among your friends using your average for the last 10 racers only (instead of the all-time average that was used previously).   We introduced this change to make it easier for you to improve your standing.

Accounts on TypeRacer will allow lots more exciting capabilities in the near future.  Subscribe to this blog for upcoming anncouncements!

After you’ve been using TypeRacer for a while, you start to feel like you’re getting better at typing.   Wouldn’t it be great to see exactly how much you’ve improved?  This is just one of the things you’ll be able to do when you sign up for an account on TypeRacer!

The new “My Scores” section will let you see and graph the results of all the races you’ve ever done!

We hope to have permanent accounts ready by the end of the month.

In other news:

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, recently published an article on the benefits of online recreation for office workers, with a large portion of this article dedicated to TypeRacer!  Unfortunately the article isn’t available online without a subscription, but you can check out this excellent post in their blog, titled “A game for the fastest hands in the office.”

To be more consistent across different texts, TypeRacer is changing the way it measures WPM today.  Instead of counting the actual number of words typed, we are now counting the total number of characters in the texts, using the convention of 5 characters per word, as defined on Wikipedia.  This means that your WPM will likely improve for some of the harder texts – those containing lots of big words.

We are also changing the way the typing test works.  (In case you missed our last post, we started asking everyone with a score of over 100 wpm to pass an “un-cheatable” typing test.) This only affects our fastest typists, but if you’re in this category, please continue reading.

The first anti-cheat typing test we deployed two days ago turned out to be too hard.  Some users pointed out that they could get a really high WPM on a race with an easy text and then not be able to pass the typing test because it contained a much harder and unfamiliar text.  The change to the WPM calculation should fix this discrepancy.

We also made quite a few changes to the typing test itself.  It now only kicks in at 110 wpm (previously 100), and is much more lenient - it asks you to type within 25% of the wpm you got in the race (previously, this was +/- 20wpm fixed).   For example, if I you get 145 wpm in a race, the typing tests now asks you to type only 108 wpm, whereas before, it asked for 125.  Furthermore, it now saves the greater of your test score and your race score.  So if you passed the test in this example with, say, 109 wpm, you will actually be certified for 145 wpm since that was your original race score.  Similarly, if you passed this test with 150 wpm, you’d be certified for 150 wpm, since it’s greater than your race result.  Being certified to type at X wpm means that you won’t be asked to take the typing test unless your score exceeds X+25%.  So if you’re certified at 150 wpm, for example, you are clear to type up to 187 without having to take the test again.

You may have noticed that some people were still able to cheat on the old typing test.  That’s because it was too easy to use OCR on the text images.  This made it necessary to start giving the test as a CAPTCHA.  We understand that it makes it harder to read, but keep in mind that you do not have to get every word right.  If you skip a few words or a few letters in some of the words you can still pass the test.  Also, the text in the image should now be much easier to understand than the Star Trek text we used before. 

Finally, you now have the ability to retry the test several times!  With all these changes, we don’t anticipate any trouble for legitimately fast typists to pass the test.  We hope that taking this test proves to be worth it for our fastest typists in order to prevent cheaters and have accurate high scores.  Let us know what you think!

Cheating at TypeRacer was sort of like slacking off in your 7th grade typing class. It was easy to get away with it, but you were really just cheating yourself out of all that free time other kids had in high school and college while you were trying to get your essay typed at night. I know because I was there.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for the slackers, cheating at TypeRacer has just become a lot harder. Starting today, everyone who gets a score higher than 100 wpm has to pass a typing test to prove that they are a fast typist. The test asks you type not less than 20 wpm below the score you achieved in the race. If you fail the test your score for the race doesn’t count. If you pass, you are cleared to type 20 wpm faster than your test score without having to take the test again.

For example, say I finish a race at 110 wpm – I would have to get a score of at least 90 wpm on the typing test. If I get, say, 98 on the test, then I’m cleared to type up to 118 wpm in all future races. If I then get lucky and type 119 in some future race, I’d have to take the test again and score at least 99 wpm on it.

Truthfully though, I only type 60 wpm, and if you’re like me, you will never actually get to see the new typing test; so here is a screenshot.

The test asks you to type a randomly-generated Star Trek plot summary from an image. Having the text in an image means that the tricks cheaters had been using no longer work. I know some of you are reading this and thinking “OCR.” Sure, but if we see people doing that, we’ll just distort the text like a CAPTCHA, so, alluding to Star Trek, “resistance is futile!”

Once TypeRacer gets permanent user accounts your typing test score will be saved permanently. Until then, you’ll have to take the typing test every time you log in and finish a race faster than 100 wpm. We apologize to all our fast typists for this temporary inconvenience, and assure you that permanent user accounts are coming soon.

So now you’ll be able to see how fast people really type. Tonight, for instance, I’m seeing that “Chrozlol” has the top score of 152 wpm. Very impressive! Let’s see if anyone can beat that. The world’s fastest typist, Mrs. Barbara Blackburn, set a world record of 212 wpm. Perhaps the next world record will be set on TypeRacer!

TypeRacer has been fortunate in attracting lots of attention in the past weeks. We wanted to take a few minutes to supplement the links on our first post with the latest articles from the blogosphere.

But first, a quick update. Many of you have noticed a few cheaters in the game. Why anyone would want to cheat at typing is beyond me, but I’m happy to announce that we have a solution on the way really soon - will post more on this when it comes out.

Have you tried the private racetracks on TypeRacer yet? A few of you have posted your racetrack URLs on blogs and forums, which is awesome! However, these URLs currently expire 30 minutes after the last person leaves the racetrack. This is clearly a problem - we’re working out a way to make these URLs permanent.

—

Okay, back to what’s been said about TypeRacer in the past week! (The links take you to the full stories)

“I know a few of you are already addicted to TypeRacer… The cool thing about the site is that its typing tests incorporate passages from cool movies, songs and books, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, A Clockwork Orange and Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!).” - USA Today PopCandy

“I’m not the only one who has compared the insanely addictive “TypeRacer” to educational typing tool Mavis Beacon.” - Interview with MTV Multiplayer

“If you’re like me and love typing speed tests, I suggest checking out Typeracer, a fun game that lets you compete with other typing hotshots — forewarning, it’s truly addictive!” - Geeksugar

“Website attracted one-quarter of a million visitors in a single week… What’s next for TypeRacer?” - Interview with GameCyte

“I’m a sucker for typing games of any sort. If you make it online and competitive, then I’m going to be hooked.” - TIGSource

“We have covered several online typing games before but this one is one of a kind.” - MakeUseOf

We’re happy to announce that within the next 24 hours you will be able to invite your friends to race you live in a private chat room on TypeRacer! Many of you have been asking for this capability and we’re thrilled to be releasing it!

You’ll know that private racetracks have become available when you see these two new options on the main menu:

Select “Race your friends” to host a new racetrack. Once you are in the racetrack, you’ll see a URL that you can give to your friends (in an email or instant message). This full URL is for everyone who doesn’t use TypeRacer from the social sites. For those friends who use TypeRacer from Okrut, Hi5, or MySpace, you’d use just the numeric code, which they will be able to enter from the main menu (by clicking on “Join a private race”) after logging into TypeRacer from their social site.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about this new feature after you’ve had a chance to try it!

We wanted to start this blog by answering two of the most important questions – why is typing a sport, and what makes TypeRacer so much fun? It turns out both questions are related – TypeRacer is so much fun precisely because typing is really a sport! Just like any athletic pursuit, typing is a skill that honors speed and accuracy, and just like physical fitness, it gets better with practice! And any human ability that fits this description absolutely demands competition! With TypeRacer you do just that – improve your typing while competing with others.

March 7 is no longer just the day Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone or Rob Roy’s birthday - it shall go down in history as the day typing became a sport! On March 7, 2008, TypeRacer opened its doors to a group of users on Orkut. Within days, many of those early users had already finished hundreds of races each, in a contest to dominate their friends on their profile TypeRacer scoreboards. In the following weeks TypeRacer also launched an application on MySpace and Hi5, while in recent weeks people from all over the world have been discovering TypeRacer from articles throughout the blogosphere and social filtering sites like StumbleUpon. We began receiving lots of email from our users, and it became clear that we had to start this blog to keep everyone up-to-date with the latest features, which we’ve been releasing on almost a daily basis.

So while we get back to building those new features, we’d like to leave you with some links to those blog articles about TypeRacer. And, of course, we welcome your input! Do you agree that typing is similar to an athletic skill and should it be considered a sport? Do you think the creation of the world’s first multiplayer typing arena will revive interest in the classic genre of typing games, topped off by Typing of the Dead?

Articles about TypeRacer:

• Kotaku, MTV Multiplayer, Webware, GameCyte, The Orkut Blog, Urlesque, Goodyblog, Gawker, Attuworld

In other languages:

• Spanish, Dutch, Slovene

Discussions:

• I-am-bored, Fazed, MetaFilter, Reddit