Who would Twitter like to bone: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Javier Bardem, or Franklin D. Roosevelt? Finally we can know for sure.*
If you've ever been on a road trip with your friends, chances are you've played Fuck, Marry, Kill: The Decision-Making Game Of Extremes™. Thanks to some clever programming and a new Twitter bot, now you can play the game on Twitter, too.
The bot in question is FMKVote, created by internet roustabout Darius Kazemi. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Kazemi is responsible for a number of cool bots and generators, including the Spelunky Generator, the Startup Generator and the always enjoyable "AmIRite bot."
Here's how the FMK bot works. First you'll see a tweet:
Then, you respond to the tweet with three letters in the order of your choosing. In this case KFM, because that seems like the most obvious way to go.
Four hours later, the bot will tally the votes and issue a verdict:
The FMK bot currently has 356 followers, so the voting pool isn't particularly dense for each choice. As it grows, the voting will no doubt get funnier and funnier, particularly if you know other people who follow it and can see their votes.
The results so far are about as weird as you'd imagine:
Earlier today, I chatted with Kazemi a bit about the bot over email. "I've been meaning to do a bot that takes user input for a while now, but didn't have any particular ideas," he said. "It was witnessing a few friends play "Fuck, Marry, Kill" in a group chat when I immediately realized it would make a great Twitter bot."
Kazemi initially seeded names from a popular "100 most famous people ever" list online, then bolstered it with IMDB's list of the 50 most popular Oscar-winning actors and directors born after 1950. After that, he manually added a few names to the pool—like, say, Beyonce—that he felt needed to be there. After that, the bot randomly chooses from the list and all voting is handled automatically.
Have any of the choices or picks been particularly surprising? Not yet, Kazemi says, though there have been a few ties and close calls. "Everyone wants to kill Hitler, which is reassuring."
*The answer? Javier Bardem, of course.