Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lorenzohess 314 days ago
Would be nice to show users their % off between their first guess and the answer. If I'm close but get unlucky and it still takes me 3+ guesses, at least I can see that my initial guess wasn't too far off.

Then report the average of this metric over time with each game.
1 comments
danielfetz 314 days ago
That sounds good! Would you also say that the win criteria should be loosened up a bit? More like ±25%?
link
hereonout2 314 days ago
No, if anything I was disappointed to read within 20% was correct! (I played it before reading your post!)
link
danielfetz 314 days ago
Initially the win criteria was within ±10% of the correct answer, but 15 minutes ago I changed it to ±20%. My rationale here is that the goal of the game is to get within the ballpark of the correct answer. And a guess of 80 billion when the correct answer is 100 billion seems quite good and indeed should probably win the game.
link
munch117 314 days ago
Thank you for making this.

I have an idea for a gameplay that I think I would enjoy more:

  - If the first guess is within a factor of sqrt(10), then you win.
  - If not, you are given two choices for the second guess: Up or down.
  - Up and down are 10x higher and lower guesses (making them adjacent ranges to the first guess).
  - If the second guess is wrong, you lose. No more guesses.
The point is that the second guess makes you rethink the original question once more, to figure out what it was that you missed. Which is more fun that doing bisection.

I wrote 10x and sqrt(10) to make a game literally about orders of magnitude, but you could of course you smaller numbers, like 4x and sqrt(4), to make it harder.

link
danielfetz 310 days ago
I greatly appreciate your suggestions, munch. I really like it, but I worry that the game loses some of its mainstream appeal through that. I don't know, I have to look into this in more detail.

However, I did find a solution to bring the focus a bit away from the binary search/bisection.

Namely, the game now shows a hint after the second incorrect guess. For example the hint "The US covers 1.87% of the Earth's surface." is displayed for the question about what percentage of the Earth's surface is land.

This of course lets you, just as you wanted, rethink the original question once more now in light of new information.

text: I think I found a solution to bring the focus a bit away from the binary search and would greatly appreciate feedback from you.

The game now shows a hint after the second incorrect guess. For example the hint "The US covers 1.87% of the Earth's surface." is displayed for the question about what percentage of the Earth's surface is land.

How does the new information received through the hint impact your guess and assumptions? help

link