Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by redfloatplane 315 days ago
I like the concept but it's basically a bisect / binary search simulator. Guess a reasonable but definitely high number as a high bound, a reasonable but definitely low number as a low bound, guess the average of the two, then the average of that and the high or low bound, etc.

This is especially the case when the question is asking for a bounded number in the first place (eg a percentage). In fact I'm pretty certain you should _always_ succeed within 4 steps given +-10 on a percentage question and nearly always within 3 steps. ChatGPT says it's provably so but I'm not smart enough to verify. Rings true though.

Certainly made easier by knowing whether it's higher or lower, and especially with the yellow arrows if you're not too far off.

One UX change that might be nice is to have a "spoken" version of your guess live-update below the input. I keep having to count zeroes and it would be nicer to see "Eleven billion".

2 comments

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?

Yeah, that's a great idea. I think perhaps after the fourth guess you could also show the guess direction arrows, so the user can know if they're in the ballpark and they won't get too frustrated? But it's hard to keep the simplicity of a wordle-style game!
The UX change you propose would be quite an improvement and it is unfortunate that I haven't considered that myself. I'll implement that in the next few days.