The concept of wild card is used in certain games to name the face of a die , the token or the card that allows it to replace another or that is applied to obtain some type of benefit. Jokers emerged in the second half of the 19th century and became popular over time.
In current decks there are usually two jokers . The figure chosen to represent the jokers, like the color of the card, depends on each printing company. Usually the wild card is represented as a jester or a minstrel , although this choice may vary.
The use of the wild card depends on each game. In chinchón , for example, the wild card allows you to replace any card. Because the goal is to keep as few points as possible, it is important to get rid of the wild cards since they add up to 25 or 50 points. On the other hand, in the trick , to cite another card game, the jokers are not used.
In colloquial language, it is said that an element or individual is a wild card when it can fulfill multiple functions : “The young Venezuelan became the wild card of the team: he can play in defense, in midfield or even in the offensive sector.” , “For the president, Gómez is a wild card: he has already held positions in four different ministries” , “This coat serves as a wild card for me since I use it both at formal events and on informal occasions” .
In the field of computing , this term is also used, although it is a symbol that can replace one or more characters of all the possible ones in the system. Among the wildcard characters most used in this context are the asterisk, the percentage sign, the underscore and the final question mark ("*", "%", "_" and "?", respectively).
It is important to understand that different wildcard characters can be used in each application; for example, while in DOS the asterisk is used to represent any number of characters (from one to the limit of the file name or its extension, within the possible characters according to the naming rules), in databases programmed in SQL The percentage sign is used to replace a string of characters from zero to the field limit, and the underscore is used for a single character. In regular expressions, on the other hand, the period is usually used as a wildcard character.
In current operating systems , the wildcard is used in file searches even without the user being aware of it. For example, when we want to open a file to edit it in Photoshop, the program presents us with the last folder we used and the files that correspond to one of several formats in a list: "*.png, *.jpg, *.psd ", etc.
A few decades ago, when operating systems did not have a graphical interface, a text command had to be used to search or list files with a given extension; For example: " DIR *.jpg " is used in DOS to display all files with the "jpg" extension in the current directory.
Although many people do not know it, most Internet search engines also support the use of wildcard characters to represent words that we do not remember at the time of searching. For example, on Google we can search for "Mount * is the highest mountain in the world" if we have forgotten the name "Everest", and we will obtain the desired results. This is also used to replace characters within a word.
In this particular case, it should be noted that Google's technology is so advanced that it is not necessary to use a wildcard character, since its " intuition " allows it to get almost all of our searches right and it often seems to read our minds when it completes our sentences before we.
In some countries , finally, the subject who always seeks his comfort is described as a wild card: “John is a wild card, you can't expect much from him.”