What if?

Rewrite history.

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Inspiration

The obvious way to win a hackathon with theme "Travelling through Time" is to build a time machine - so that's what we did. But a digital version.

What it does

  • Go to any Wikipedia page
  • Open the Chrome extension
  • Write a prompt to change history
  • Watch Wikipedia rewrite itself

How we built it

  • Chrome extension built with React, JavaScript and HTML/CSS
  • Visual animation effects powered by Three.js and CSS transitions
  • Advanced prompt engineering with AI agents

Challenges we ran into

  • Gemini being limited to 15 requests per minute and only 2 brain cells per prompt
  • Chat GPT being far too expensive (thank you Reply for the free API key)
  • Fine tuning animations to perfection
  • Communication between the React Chrome extension and the DOM

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works, surprisingly for even the most erratic of cases and the animation looks clean. At first we thought it may have been a very ambitious project to complete in 24 hours but we're really pleased with the outcome.

What we learned

  • Prompt engineering (or arguing with AI bots) is a lot harder than perceived
  • The opportunities with Three.js are limitless
  • Of course, a lot about the importance of teamwork, organisation and planning

What's next for What if?

Maybe better maintain the format of Wikipedia changes? Links and sometimes paragraph formatting is sometimes ignored by the rewriting AI agent which isn't significant in context but would be relevant to the idea of the project.

Perhaps fine-tuning the prompt as well, rewriting multiple parts of the Wikipedia page (such as the tables and images), instead of just the core text, would improve the accuracy and the completeness of the tool.

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