15 ms·
Show HN: Test your shape rotation skills
Hi all, hope someone enjoys (or not) my weekend project. See how many matching pairs you can find in two minutes.
This is written in C++ and built to WebAssembly with Emscripten. The code is at https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/rotator https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/rotator
- blhack 5y ago11 shapes! This is a fun game. I think it's testing something other than shape rotating though.
- moralestapia 5y agoFinally, that semester of topology has paid out.
- oh_sigh 5y agoIf you're recording stats, I would love to know the distribution of correct guesses per game.
- V__ 5y agoThis is a fun little game. I find the small movements confusing, though. Maybe a fixed camera (isometric?) would work nice.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway73838 5y agoThis sounds interesting. Will it be available on mobile?
- PuddleOfSausage 5y agoWorks fine on mobile for me. Fun game!
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoIt should work on mobile browsers (though I haven't tested yet).
- ithkuil 5y agoTried on Android chrome. I select two shapes which I'm pretty sure match and nothing happens. The only thing on the screen is a "code" hyperlink. Is there supposed to be a "accept" or "go" button or something?
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoThere's no "accept" button, it should move to the next set when the two correct shapes are selected. But as someone else pointed out in this thread there may be multiple matching pairs - looking into it.
- drivingmenuts 5y agoSeems to have an issue in Safari on iPad - there’s no way to submit my guess. The shapes highlight but then nothing happens. The timer just keeps running. I’m pretty sure I’ve selected correctly.
- Lio 5y agoWorks well on iOS on iPhone. I like it. Great fun, thanks.
- layer8 5y agoI only see a tiny “code” link on iOS, rest of the page is blank (gray).
- brianzelip 5y agoNot on iOS — just a gray background with the centered “code” link to the repo. No shapes, no interactivity.
- jack_riminton 5y agoVery cool! I feel I'm a bit rusty on rotating shapes, I got 5 right in the time (1st and only attempt)
- yablokoffya 5y agoJust played 5 times, super cool although UX is a bit vague in the first session. What's the max matches you have?
- sudosysgen 5y agoI managed 14 after a couple of tries, I feel like if I continued anymore I'd end up procrastinating my entire day!
- svet_0 5y agoSmall bug: occasionally there are multiple matching pairs, although only 1 works (screenshot: https://ibb.co/JpRp0Pm https://ibb.co/JpRp0Pm) Additionally, the auto rotation itself is mostly confusing, could be better to enable manual mouse rotation. Cool game nonetheless! Edit: The bug seems to be that shapes with different "DNA" can still be isometric in some cases: https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/rotator/blob/master/demo.cc#L468 https://github.com/0xf00ff00f/rotator/blob/master/demo.cc#L4...
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoOuch. Thank you so much for noticing this! Looks like I need a more robust test.
- blamestross 5y agoIsmorphism is hard to detect, even in reduced spaces. Really hard in arbitrary graphs. For a "fast filter" generate the center of gravity for each (just the average of the voxel points as doubles) and abs+sort the resulting vector and assume they match if the "Sorted Cog Vector" matches. It will have false positives sometimes but no false negatives.
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoGreat suggestion, thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amelius 5y agoIn chemistry, there is the problem of normalization of molecule identifiers that looks like this problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Chemical_Identifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Chemical_Identif...
- ag8 5y agoLooks great! Maybe add a small time penalty for guessing wrong? It's currently way faster for me to try ~7 combinations (takes about 5 seconds per round) than to honestly figure it out.
- evanmoran 5y agoNice. It’s very fun and quite hard. If you are looking for tweeks consider calling it Shapdle and put them in a row, and color yellow if close and green if right (only slightly joking :)
- whatshisface 5y agoSometimes the initial rotation hides a part of the shape. Also, I have always wondered if there's a way to translate these shapes to strings for quick "mental algorithm" matching. Something like, "5, left turn, 3, right turn..." I guess you'd need a normal form. The first turn can be defined as always "right" or "left," and subsequent turns can be right, left, up or down. The first turn that's "up" or "down," can be defined as "up." That leaves two ways to read any shape, but that's an uhh constant-factor overhead. :) (I can't think of a way to define a normal form reading direction that wouldn't involve potentially reading an arbitrary distance in before having to re-start the other way.)
- musingsole 5y agoI think that's basically what I did, just without elevating the forms to anything conscious. By the end, I was matching shapes too fast to have actually counted much of anything -- some sort of consolidated memory had started.
- akomtu 5y agoA small improvement: use a vowel to encode turns, and consonants to encode segment lengths. So each shape would be encoded by a "word", e.g. "bakitux". Brains have dedicated "word-processing units" and those are much faster than number-processing units.
- Teever 5y ago> Brains have dedicated "word-processing units" and those are much faster than number-processing units. *In most people.
- biomcgary 5y agoAbstracting into words will lead to invention of words that are disconnected from the underlying geometry (i.e., shapes that are not possible due to collisions), but have strong verbal associations. Eventually, the word thinkers will redefine the system to allows them to play word games without dealing with the pesky geometric limitations.
- 5y ago
- amar-laksh 5y agoThis is brilliant! (Especially after the rotating puzzle post yesterday, exactly what I needed!) Thank you! (I managed to get 14 at 8 seconds but damn this is pretty hard) feedback: Sometimes the shapes get too occluded by it's own body. Not sure bug or a feature. Also could be fun to increasing or decreasing difficulty curve depending on performance
- TrianguloY 5y agoCan someone post that rotating puzzle post from yesterday? I think I missed it (and can't seem to find by searching)
- amar-laksh 5y agoThere you go: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?utm_source=url https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words?...
- mfashby 5y agosurprisingly difficult, only scored 1 the first try!
- krick 5y agoDamn, that's surprisingly difficult. But I think I shouldn't be allowed to brute-force answers (that's really tempting in the current design) and I'd probably appreciate if shapes were standing still, since the movement is distracting and barely relates to the skill being tested.
- otherme123 5y ago-10 seconds if you fail a pair should work against brute force.
- oneoff786 5y agoAgreed. I found by the end I was better off rapidly tapping out the answers due to no penalty for incorrect guessed
- ravi-delia 5y agoI think they move so that they aren't accidentally covering up crucial bits, and so you get a sense for them in 3d. I'd also like it if they moved less, or had a pause button though.
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoAdded a time penalty on misses and an accuracy percentage at the end, hopefully this should discourage brute forcing.
- renewiltord 5y agoI liked it, might I suggest some tiny things? - Turn selection outline to green on success - Show incremental progress (num matched)
- aaron695 5y ago
- silisili 5y agoThis brings back nightmares of mech eng school! I essentially quit because of my inability to do such things :(.
- greatwave1 5y agoWaiting out for the wordcel version of this
- jdminhbg 5y agoI believe The NY Times just bought it.
- sudosysgen 5y agoYou mean Wordle?
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoIt's a 4chan meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato... So this game going to the top of HN is likely part of the meme where shape rotators strike back against wordcels after wordle became popular, something like that.
- sudosysgen 5y agoIt's actually a Twitter meme by @tszzl on Twitter. It was a 4-chan meme to add "-cel" to words, but the shape rotator vs wordcel meme is from Twitter.
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoYou should read the article
- sudosysgen 5y agoI did despite my better judgment. The 4chan part is just adding "-cel" to words and doesn't form a direct lineage to the modern meme.
- deleted 5y ago
- rbobby 5y ago12 matches, 10 seconds per shape.
- hexman 5y agoAwesome!
- chungy 5y agoI know it's not the point, but I find it way easier to just brute force it. Got 31 pairs matched that way (three matches in the last two seconds, even).
- sowbug 5y agoWould you please add keyboard shortcuts? Numbering 1-6 and letting each key toggle a shape would suffice. Repetitive mousing on a non-touch display can trigger RSI flareups.
- microjim 5y agoScored 7 my first go but that was aided by one or two that were more or less had the same orientation and could spotted pretty easily.
- bemmu 5y agoI thought I'd be good at this since I do 3D editing all day, but apparently not. In my first try I couldn't get even one. Practicing some more I got up to 4 in a game. I wonder if this game can distinguish between people who have rich mental imagery and those who don't?
- musingsole 5y agoYou might have too rich of a mental geometry framework such that each shape was rendered more thoroughly, but not necessarily in a way that helped compute matching objects.
- 8note 5y agoWhen you don't know the shapes, you have to do lots and lots of comparisons since you don't know what info you're missing behind the shape. Once you do it a couple times, you can skip a lot of the conparison
- fenollp 5y agoESC freezes it on Chrome on Linux.
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoOh, this one is an easy fix - thanks for letting me know.
- hexman 5y ago10 shapes 12 sec/shape (2nd try, no brute-force, mobile) 16 shapes (3rd try) 18 shapes (4th try) 24 shapes (5th try, no brute-force) P.S. I had 7 years of art school in addition to engineering
- Graffur 5y agoWow, that's impressive. After figuring out the game I got 8 shapes which I thought was good!
- jyscao 5y agoYou're the shape rotator of shape rotators. I only managed to break 10 after about a dozen tries..
- whatshisface 5y agoIs this the singularity?
- hexman 5y agoidk bad in wordceling
- exikyut 5y ago-> 7 (Notices this comment) "...Hmph!" (Tries harder, focuses) -> 12 -> 10 :( Nothing like neural training, eh? Hmph :) Now I'm curious what you think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409693.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoI'm in the same ballpark: 21 2nd try, and 18 3rd try. I've sort of always known that I've had good spatial reasoning, and this is one way to confirm it. I tend to think about most problems spatially, even molding things like code and social relations into this medium, because it's my strongest skill. I also tend toward the hyperphantasia side of the spectrum. I'm curious if other highscorers also tend toward hyperphantasia. If the site is recording telemetry on scores, but it would be fantastic to have a percentile rank at the end.
- 1270018080 5y agoIt's hard when part of a shape is hidden even with the rotation.
- jb1991 5y agoWow, the scrolling does not work at all for me on macos, using FF or Safari.
- jcims 5y agoI think this is the first time I realized that wasm wasn't just some kind of funky javascript. Fun game!
- sudosysgen 5y agoPretty weird, the first two are consistently way harder for me! They take 20+ seconds each, and then the subsequent ones take only 3-7 seconds. In my third try I managed 14 shapes, 8.33 seconds per shape, on my first I did 7 - it's pretty clear that you can train yourself to get a lot better. Also, once, there were two matching pairs, but only one was accepted, I'm pretty sure.
- eternityforest 5y agoI'm amazed that some people can actually rotate objects. On of the reasons I don't drive is for fear of driving directly into traffic, if I make a mistake figuring on which lane is "on the right side" of the new perspective when turning. Mental rotation is one of the very top causes of mistakes for me and I've learned to always be on the lookout for it, and assume my conclusion is wrong if I find myself doing it.
- sudosysgen 5y agoIn the end I found it way better to not rotate the shapes but use my intuition to match pairs then verify by counting squares and checking chirality. Actual rotation takes me like 10-15 seconds but the intuition+check technique is more like 4-5 seconds.
- zuminator 5y agoMaybe an advanced mode where extra seconds are deducted for each wrong pair guessed? And along with that the ability to skip a turn for extra seconds deducted. That way, since brute force would no longer be an option, you wouldn't find yourself getting hopelessly stuck early on behind a particularly difficult set.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoThat's a lot of fun, I'm sure pmarca loves it :-). Initial rotation can result in feature hiding that is critical, perhaps making the wobble selectable (easy = big wobble, medium = current wobble, hard = no wobble) The follow on should be the folding one (planar surface with dotted lines, pick the folded version) I always thought those questions in IQ tests were put there so that there would be some "easy" questions that everyone got right, but found later my wife couldn't do them!
- ggerganov 5y agoCool! Small issue I found - when I run this as native app, always the 2 bottom-left shapes are the answer.
- cousin_it 5y agoThanks a lot for making this! Really exciting and difficult game, makes my mind tired. I just got 16 several times in a row, seems like that's my level, will try tomorrow to see if it improves after sleep.
- modernpink 5y ago12 matches on my first go. Not very impressive, but likely an indicator of my middling IQ.
- omnicognate 5y agoThat's impressive to me. I got 4 on my first go, 6 on my second and I doubt I'll be going much higher without significant practice. I find it extremely hard and made several wrong atttempts in addition to being slow.
- ionwake 5y agoPlease forgive me for being cynical but it feels like he is boasting especially as he starts talking about intellect then downplaying it. Just my take but maybe I’m just jealous ! I could only get to 6 shapes.
- faangiq 5y agoWordcels can’t cope with this.
- nickpeterson 5y agoI’d be really curious to collect gender before testing, because I feel like this is always one of those go to examples of the difference and male and female brains, would be curious to know if there is any substantial actual difference.
- MrsPeaches 5y agoDifficult to control for the effects of "building toys" such as Lego being primarily marketed at boys. These types of toys help train this kind of spacial awareness from an early age. See also early computers being marketed almost exclusively at men and boys, potentially being the cause of a major drop off of women in computer sciences in the 1980s: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
- alisonkisk 5y agoNot really. Babies show sex differences in spatial skills. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209100948.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209100948.h...
- relaxing 5y ago…and once they grow up?
- nickpeterson 5y agoReading that study, I’m not convinced, it’s 20 boys and girls, and the method doesn’t appear foolproof to me. To be clear, I don’t really have an issue accepting there may be some difference, but I feel like it’s extremely overstated.
- armchairhacker 5y agoI read in a psychology book that this is one of the (few) cases where there’s a big gender difference in intelligence: males statistically do a lot better at this than females, and I believe those with higher testosterone also statistically do better.
- sshb 5y agoCurious about group theory take on this. It seems that symmetry helps to easily exclude multiple shapes at the beginning of each round.
- whatshisface 5y agoIf you can turn one into the other with a single reflection, then you can't rotate them. Two reflections, and you can.
- leto_ii 5y agoI would suggest also adding some sort of error counting into the mix (perhaps allowing 3-5 lives in total, maybe with bonus lives if you're fast or you get it on the first try). Right now it's a bit too easy to semi-brute force shapes that are somewhat similar. It would also be good to have increasing levels of difficulty. Eventually you could add a leaderboard. As a side note, it's fun to see the amount of humble-bragging going on in the thread right now ;))
- larusso 5y agoVery cool indeed. One can get quite lucky from time to time when some forms are not rotated quite too far from each other or other forms are simply too different. Very nice idea!
- anyfactor 5y agoFirst game - I briefly go through each shapes - Anchor on a particular shape - Check other shapes based on that shapes - Realize the number of cubes is the distinguishing factor not the shape itself - Exclude the first focused shape from future comparison - Try to compare 2 shapes randomly - And after 4 clicks of match attempts I find a match 2nd Game - Go through the first 2 rounds with ease as they were essentially in the same row or the same column - Second game I get confused as the obvious matches aren't obvious - I time out - I didn't even notice how the timing worked in the first game 3rd game - I try to count the number of blocks between each 'lines' of shapes - But for shapes that have 3 or more turn of these lines matching them is very difficult
- capableweb 5y agoFirst game - I quickly glance each shape - Select the ones that "feel" more similar. - Scored 13 on my first run Sometimes I think thinking less is better. Same for a lot of sports, things that require careful motor control and fast-pacing.
- keithnz 5y agoyeah, I was similar, my brain just told me the right ones, I didn't really have to work it out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- screye 5y agoCan't wait for blind to be like 'shape rotator score or GTFO'. /s It's a fun game. The difficulty does vary quite drastically accross attempts. Occlusion in particular can be a pretty big issue.
- kebsup 5y agoA different version could be about rotating the shape to correct position. A lot of times I've just eliminated impossible matches, rather then seeing how they match.
- holtkam2 5y agovvvvvvvv-----Scoreboard-------vvvvvv
- acid__ 5y agoDoes anyone else feel their brain “heat up” when doing intensive thinking like this?
- hexman 5y agoYes :)
- brotchie 5y ago+1
- tcgv 5y agoI feel really anxious seeing time running out and wanting to find more matches. Fun game, but definitely not something to relax, at least for me ;)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ookdatnog 5y agoIf you're curious about this phenomenon, you may be interested in the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman :)
- soheil 5y agoIt’s easy to just guess a few times and get it right. At least wrong guesses should have time penalty.
- boppo1 5y agoNeeds to place you on a bell curve against prior completions.
- Ericson2314 5y agoThis is great, but I wish length never mattered. Counting blocks is drab, and length not mattering makes the equivalence class more exciting, IMO.
- pininja 5y agoThis is great! I work on visualizations all day and it’s a real skill to interpret size and angle of 3D shapes. 10 seconds per shape on my first play through. I think I would have been a lot worse if the shapes didn’t move.
- stygiansonic 5y agoVery nice. One nitpick: it would be nice if the outlines turned from red to green (in addition to the other feedback already provided) to indicate a match.
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoDone!
- exikyut 5y agoA totally different style of game which also seriously stretches spatial reasoning: https://vladimirslepnev.itch.io/zigzag https://vladimirslepnev.itch.io/zigzag Inspired by Super Hexagon (remember that?), you need to repeatedly tell a "snake" which way to go with the left and right arrow keys... while the game viewport twists and rotates randomly as it continually zooms out. GoOd lUcK. (It's from here, 1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29923707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29923707) I incidentally find I have to mute the background music, as I really get into it (used to listen to it often!) and zone out... welp (Also, for completeness - the APK link is sadly dead, but it still lives on on the scary APK sites that are out there, and my phone doesn't seem to mind it.)
- typon 5y agoThis make is making me feel really stupid
- jonnycomputer 5y agozigzag is pretty wild. A kind of reversal task.
- ajot 5y agoAnother good one is the eyeballing game, by Matthias Wandel. You have to eyeball half-distances, half-angles, center of a shape, etc. https://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html https://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html
- exikyut 5y agoWowch, I'm really bad :) 9.29: https://i.imgur.com/BEEqbKL.png https://i.imgur.com/BEEqbKL.png Thanks for the pointer!
- jck 5y agoThanks for this. I was a huge fan of super hexagon and enjoyed this too.
- jck 5y agoMuch like super hexagon, I found that "turning my mind off" and going on instinct/intuition is a surprisingly good strategy for this game - till it isn't.
- steve_adams_86 5y agoSo cool, I love this! I’d love to play around with it, but I don’t see a license at a glance. If I were to make a variation of this, would I be allowed to share it with attribution to this version?
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoHey, just added a license. It's public domain, but if you do something with this I'd love to hear about it!
- steve_adams_86 5y agoThanks for that! If I do I’ll certainly let you know.
- dataangel 5y agoI wish it showed you the right answer when you lose. A few times I have sworn there are no matches ;_;
- fsckboy 5y agobecause of the "vanishing point" style 3d perspective it's difficult for me to tell relative sizes of things, so I had to frequently resort to counting bricks on the front leg vs the rear leg for extra-dimensional-L pieces; it was more about that than things like chirality. The result was, didn't really feel like a shape matching game to me, felt like a brick counting game. I guess in a certain way I was expecting something that felt more like those "which cube matches this piece of paper folded up" type matches Also, don't mind being timed to the nth of a second, but I'd prefer a clock that was not so frenetic in my field of vision, just showing seconds would be enough.
- jvandonsel 5y agoI understand that the shape motion is necessary to reveal hidden parts of some shapes but it found it very distracting. A “freeze” button would have been very helpful,
- akomtu 5y agoThat's brutal. On my first attempt I've matched only 2 shapes. The naive approach is to match each pair, and with 15 pairs total, that's gonna take time, even though you need to check only 7.5 pairs on average. A better approach is to "hash" each shape and find the duplicate hash in linear time, which is 3 comparisons on average. The hash can be computed logically, by counting turns the shape takes, or, after looking at hundreds of such shapes, one should be able to "hash" shapes subconsciously, and that will be a dramatic speed up. I suggest you make a similar problem: matching small isomorphic graphs. I think that's what a lot of software engineeting is really about.
- cryptica 5y agoI consistently get around 8 to 10... I get approximately the same performance if I try to use my gut to match shapes or if I mentally rotate the shapes one at a time. The focal length distortion is a bit too extreme for me. I would prefer if it the shapes were a little bit more isometric-looking. With the current focal length distortion, shapes look as if they're a few inches from my eyeballs so it's kind of hard to visualize without counting the blocks.
- barrkel 5y agoIMO this would be more enjoyable if the shapes were more different morphologically, and fewer (ideally no) close pairs which differ only in the length of a segment by a single block. After the first couple of wrong guesses (though I'm pretty sure one guess was correct - could be the bug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408567) I started to count segment lengths rather than relying on mental shape rotation.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoI don’t think it’s a bug. I resorted to some guessing because I saw shapes that were similar but different only by length. But the view was obscured so I couldn’t count the blocks.
- _3u10 5y agoUsing less strength in your solving algo is a peak shape rotator skill. It’s yet another kobyashi Maru incident.
- emschlr 5y agoIIRC Kobyashi maru incident involves a no-win situation where you change the rules of the game to create a winning situation. How are we looking at a Kobyashi maru incident here? Can you explain?
- _3u10 5y agoShape rotation is often used as a proxy for G. The shapes generally progress in difficulty until they are deemed “impossible” for any human shape rotator to figure out. If you reduce the problem to counting instead of shape rotation (3D matrix multiplication) many humans can “shape rotate” to impossibly high levels of IQ
- emschlr 5y agoWow! Nice way to look at it. Appreciate the explanation.
- Shadonototra 5y agogreat idea but the UX is very poor, it's not intuitive at all
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoHey, I'm not an UX person, would appreciate any suggestions
- princeb 5y agodid a similar assessment when i was conscripted into the singapore armed forces - guessing it was a way to filter people into the air force pilot program.
- stevage 5y agoI found this interesting, played for a bit, but at no point did it feel like fun to me. Just felt like hard work and reminded me how bad I am at this task. (I do really like other shape matching games, just not in 3d apparently)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xmddmx 5y agoA classic experiment, Shepard and Metzler (1971), Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1731476 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1731476
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thisisrandom 5y ago
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoHow did you do this in only a weekend?!
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoMost of the graphics code (font rendering, texture atlas and so on) was copied from an older project, I wrote just the game logic.
- shostack 5y agoFor those unfamiliar with the meme context of "shape rotators": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...
- noobermin 5y agoIt is important that people don't take this thing seriously. As an undergraduate in physics, I sort of prided myself on being able to "derive things from scratch" which is the culture in physics, given profs gave tests with the formulae and physical constants so you never really had to memorize, you just needed to show your work. At the time, honestly, I looked down humanities and history and even bio students as they were just memorizers who didn't have a deep understanding of things. When I went to graduate school, one of my best professors said he heard people amongst my cohort saying things like this, that physicists are good a deriving and are not memorizers, he made the joke that he thought that people saying this were doing so to weaken the competition, so to speak. The idea that any set of skills is not necessary to be a scientist just makes you a worse scientist than others who have those skills. At this point in life, I've learned that holding on to things like your MBTI scores as if it's your identity honestly just limits you. Like imagine saying, "I'm a python person, I'm not able to do ruby. It's against my personality," instead of it really being what it should be seen as, just another skill to learn or one your just haven't learned yet (or might not even want to!) Instead, saying "I use python in my daily work, I'm less familiar with ruby" makes more sense because that's how it is. So, ditto that with everything else honestly, I feel like people can have preferences and that's fine, like you can enjoy reading a book more than playing a video game with spatial reasoning, but limiting yourself to being a "math person" or a "people person" or a "reading person" is just that, limiting yourself.
- sebastien_b 5y agoCan't even rotate the individual shapes to see them in their entirety.
- spicybright 5y agoIt would be cool to show some stats on what other people scored.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pg_bot 5y agoSuggestion, show the matching pair when the timer runs out.
- noobermin 5y agoA few of them were repeats, as in the same orientation (although the random perturbations were different), others had more than two of the same kind, which might be okay. That said, that this is a meme some people take seriously (like the idea of wordcels) really makes me irrationally mad.
- sigmaprimus 5y agoGood Job! Even better you shared the code! Thanks
- iamwil 5y agoFor those that enjoy this sort of thing, the exam for dentistry involves a lot of literal shape rotation.
- mimentum 5y agoI believe those with schizophrenia (and/or schizotypal personality disorder) have greater difficulty with these types of visual and spatial reasoning.
- dima55 5y agoIf you like this, you should apt install blockout2
- fernly 5y agoFeedback: I would like to start with a simpler game, where the top left shape is given, and the challenge is to find its mate among the other 5.
- zacharycohn 5y agoIt's fun! I'd love to see some sort of more obvious feedback when you're wrong.
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoJust added some!
- topher200 5y agoI wrote a "smart" random clicker. It iterates through all the shapes and clicks their locations in a double-for loop. I added some jitter because it can't tell when it succeeds (so sometimes it starts in the "middle" of a loop and get stuck). Paste this in the console and go! https://gist.github.com/topher200/aead3fd53b0f26bf880e7752eb8ba70a https://gist.github.com/topher200/aead3fd53b0f26bf880e7752eb... I got a score of 33 on the first full run, which seems to be the highest in the thread (just barely beating the manual brute-force 31 run from @chungy[1]). I think it could be improved by being smarter about the when to click a random guess (or figuring out a way to remove the random clicking completely). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408693
- CodeIsTheEnd 5y agoThis reminds me of a very poor interview question I asked a couple of times (and then never asked again because it is a terrible, terrible, interview question). The snake cube puzzle [1] is a puzzle where you have to fold up a string of 27 cubes, with fixed "turns" like the shapes in the OP, into a 3x3x3 grid. The goal was not to find a solution to the puzzle, but to find the smallest 2d area the snake could fit into without folding against itself. It turned into a modeling problem (how do you represent the puzzle in code?) and a recursion problem (try all possible folds), but, uh, even with a physical puzzle to play with, it was a little too abstract A commenter on the link below asked another question over 13 years ago: can the puzzle be folded into a plane without any holes? Obviously if you just lay out the puzzle from end to end it will be in a plane, and without any holes, so maybe the question should be: what is the smallest 2d area the snake can fit into without creating any holes? [1]: https://mypuzzles.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/the-snake-cube/ https://mypuzzles.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/the-snake-cube/
- orthoxerox 5y ago27x1 would again be the smallest 2d area.
- ouid 5y ago20 matches is my high after spending 20 minutes with it. I think I could probably get that to 30 ish with another hour. Obviously you should not be rotating, but finding features of the shapes that are invariant with respect to rotation to calculate. We can think of the two middle segments as defining two coordinate axes which I'll just call the body, with the remaining segments the legs. There are three cases. 1) both legs coplanar with body: W, question mark, and O. 2) neither leg in the plan of the body: The lightning bolt, and the forklift. 3) one leg coplanar with body: Z with leg, Hook with leg. Unfortunately, the lightning bolt, Z with leg, and Hook with leg are all chiral, (and are therefore more likely to appear, reducing the effectiveness of this heuristic), but just guessing among matching classes is sufficient to get 20 matches. A quick test of chirality could maybe do better, but I suspect it's most just about speed of guessing after this. edit: 32 is my high score after playing for an hour. Which is at least higher than the brute force clicker guy's score, so I feel like I can be done. The human brain is very good at optimizing its solutions to this problem.
- throwawayHN378 5y agoThe shapes are often rotated at an angle which doesn’t give you great viability. One three of them are positioned like that it’s anyones guess
- jimmySixDOF 5y agoFor VR (Quest/Steam) There is a beautiful minimalistic game called Cubism that uses a similar set of shapes in 3 dimensional space where you need to fit the group of blocks into increasingly complex forms. It's a very soothing environment and the graphics are so clear with technical touches like a high frame rate (120hz), perfect hand controls, and use of AR/passthrough, all possible due to the relatively simple game requirements. Highly recommend the experience if you can do it. There is also a free open version similar to Cubism built in WebXR called Plockle that follows the same theme [2]. [1] https://www.cubism-vr.com/ https://www.cubism-vr.com/ [2] https://constructarcade.com/game/plockle/ https://constructarcade.com/game/plockle/
- dlkf 5y agoThe nod to culture war bs is pretty funny, but this is also a deep and interesting problem. In this talk Hinton relates it to conv nets (and their shortcomings). The shoe example is also great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Vxk9twXlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Vxk9twXlE
- batch12 5y agoI don't follow. Wrong post?
- baryphonic 5y agoThe shapes often render with extremities occluded, leaving me to random guessing. Maybe render them in a more canonical way so that we can see at least a decent hint at the extent.
- makach 5y ago9 on my first try. Spent ages on the first one to figure out what was going on. I guess, reading from the comments, that it is possible to get real good at recognizing these patterns and with practice you can reach the upper limit of how fast you can click and match the objects.
- xvilka 5y agoShape rotation is great but what about shape shifting? How to test those skills?
- tallanvor 5y agoDoesn't seem to work in Firefox - all it shows is a grey screen and a link to the code. Not exactly a good experience.
- ohwellish 5y agoworked fine in my ff v97.0
- 0xf00ff00f 5y agoI only tested it on Firefox (97.0), works fine here. Maybe you have WebGL disabled? Are there any messages on the console?
- ohwellish 5y agoin case you need more stats, first 7 trys 4 12 (10sec) 8 (15sec) 1 (120sec) 11 (10.91sec) 9 (13.33sec) 10 (12sec) first try was with touchpad, rest of them with mice that 1/120 was brutforcing, there was at least 4 or 5 similar shapes with deadzones maybe there should be a way to rotate viewport manually (for some time penalty?) and bruteforcing should be time taxed as well though
- chrisweekly 5y agoLove it!
- ineiti 5y agoThere should be a way to share our shapes/minute in Twitter :)
- fragmede 5y agoThis is fun as a game and I wonder how it would do as a captcha. I haven't seen innovation in the captcha space in a while.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beliu 5y agoThis reminds me of Shaple: https://swag.github.io/shaple https://swag.github.io/shaple
- joebidenenjoyer 5y ago
- ztauras 5y agoThis link had me auto banned for one day in FB with no chances of review by human :(
- ztauras 5y agoFor sexual content
- ANMiller 5y agoFun, keybinding 1-6 to the shape selection could be nice!