My most striking instance yet of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: yesterday, I ran into a colleague I hadn't seen in months, and he recommended I check out this incredibly cool website where you build a basic computer starting with logic gates called nandgame.com. Just now, I was about to check it out, but thought I'd skim Hacker News first... To stumble upon this post, and a comment from the nandgame creator himself. Thank you in advance for building such an awesome educational resource!
Just played through it and really liked it! I think this is just the right level of abstraction for a beginning CS student. Makes it easy to grasp the compositional nature of computers without having to deal with all the details that make circuit design hard, like the non-instantaneous response of real components.
This is really awesome.. I too love the book Code by Petzold. I was wondering if I could help translate this into German? I have some work colleagues that could really benefit, but I think it would be easier if the explanatory text was German.
Have spent some time playing it - something that would be interesting is a view switch which expands your design again into NAND gates such that you can really appreciate the complexity of what's going on.
If I make a XOR circuit with 4 NAND gates it says I can do better. My 3 gate solution is to use an AND, OR, and NAND gate which would have been 6 NAND gates. However it gives me full marks for my 3 gate solution.
Yeah it currently only compares the solutions towards the minimum number of components of any type. I also intend to compare against the minimum number of nand gates overall, but this is not yet supported.