1) Would be nicer if it wasn't just an endless list of question cards. Maybe have new ones sliding in on the right, with answered ones going off to the left.
2) Visually separate the question, your answer, the correct/incorrect answer and the explanation.
3) Scores! How many right, how many in a right in a row, how did your guess compare with others etc
4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
5) Pictures? Was just thinking you could have a 2x2 grid, with number and labelled picture of object in a colum, then you click on whether you think column 1 or 2 is the heaviest.
6) Stats - maybe on landing page or as commentary on your selections
"Did you know the weight of the Blue-whale has the most over-estimated mass"
7) Difficulty curve (or setting), feels a bit odd after you'd put some estimate into guestimating to just be asked "does a gorilla weigh more than 5 tins of beans?" Or maybe it just currently feels too-random. I might get 20 in a row, but I can't compare myself to somebody else who got another 20 in a row right.
8) "Is greater than" is nice, but simple <,> choice makes it too simple some times.
Maybe, "Which is closest to?" - which would give you multiple options to choose from.
> 4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
But please don't decide that you need to shove a popup in my face repeatedly to persuade me to do so. I don't have "socials" and have no intention of sharing anything. Being obnoxious about it is a "Dick Move" imo
9) Coloured success/failure feedback, even just the words correct or wrong being coloured, it takes me a few moments to pick the result ouf of the new text being shown to me. This is why my bash scripts usually colour the output too.
My friends and I always talk about how big a social problem scale-blindness is, so this is awesome!
Suggestions:
1. Show progress towards some fixed number of questions so you can see your score at the end so you can see how well-calibrated you are and compare with friends.
2. Add other things than weight, so people can get calibrated for other things too. Time. Probability. Money. Risk of death. Deaths (in war or from disease, e.g.). Stuff like that!
3. Have a speed mode where you have to learn to do these calculations really fast, so that you can incorporate this awareness into your day to day life and awareness of things.
4. Have a slow mode where you are trying to get everything right, so that you learn how to proceed when you really want to be sure.
5. Have a mode where nothing is within 100 or 1000 of anything else, so that you're purely focused on scale awareness and so that your ability to estimate on a 10-100 scale doesn't matter so much.
It is hard for humans to visualize in their heads the difference between 1 billion and 10 billion. Our brains weren't created to think of such massive amounts of objects. I don't think it is too big of a social problem though.
It's probably because cavemen had to carry 10 rocks at a time, 15 max. We didn't have to use such large numbers until recently in human history.
To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
I watched that with my kids a couple of weeks ago. Definitely one of the inspirations. Also been listening to the "What If?" audiobook and Randall Monroe is never afraid to think about things like 80,000 gorillas.
I did about 15 questions waiting for the game to "end", not realizing it would go on forever.
IMO if the game is infinite, count how many questions I get correct in a row, and have the game end when I get one wrong. Keep track of my high score and display it somewhere on the page, so I have a baseline target to beat. That way the game is replayable and now has a metric for how well someone plays it.
I got all questions right except for the ones involving the moon... for some reason I got all those wrong. Moon is big!
I have a suggestion: the huge numbers are not quite readable. Maybe add the scientific notation as well.
Comparing 73,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 with 844,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is tricky, especially since the numbers are not right aligned.
Adding a 73.4×10^21 vs 844×10^21 would be helpful.
OP here. Thanks! Will be testing with my 6 year old later. He actually hasn't seen it yet. Yeah, I agree. I wanted something that everyone can read and where the physical size of the number on the screen gives a great idea of the size (in terms of order of magnitude). Alignment is a great idea. I'll have a think about that one.
Yeah. A friend was playing with a group in a room and one of them was trying to read out the questions. Not a problem with 800 gorillas but it is with bigger numbers. Hmm, not sure what to do. The Greek prefixes I find really hard to remember! For simplicity and debugging it was easiest to just slap the numbers up.
Advice: make the answer much more visible. First text, visually separated (bigger font, bold, line ...), green/red. Separate the explanation part into its own block of text.
As long as there's also a non-color differentiator (like a checkmark / X) I think it's fine. Just like traffic lights having different positions. The word itself is possibly enough, although on the other hand words take longer to process than shapes/colors so best to offer a shape if also offering a color.
At least one question has its figures wrong. It asks which is heavier, Space Shuttle or 747, and goes on to say that the Shuttle weighs 2 million kg. But that is not just the shuttle: “The stack, as the composite of orbiter, tank and boosters is called, has a gross liftoff weight of 2000 tonnes” (which I presume includes liftoff weight of fuel as well).
Fun! Thank you, last_one_in. @last_one_in, it was not obvious to me at first that you were the author - adding that to some comments would have helped me!
Glad you like it! It's my first ever post to HN. I've been reading it daily since forever. Had to create an account to post.
I did the shuttle in a rush TBH. I have no idea if that's with the main tank and boosters or not!
No way, I had the Airfix kit of the shuttle+747 combo when I was a kid. poof mind blown.
I haven't really had time to recheck all the values. If there are any chemists here who can help with the weight of a caffeine molecule (in kg) then I'd appreciate it!!
Someone posted on HN a few days ago about always including your units in the variable names. Good advice.
“The Space Shuttle weighed 165,000 pounds empty. Its external tank weighed 78,100 pounds empty and its two solid rocket boosters weighed 185,000 pounds empty each. Each solid rocket booster held 1.1 million pounds of fuel. The external tank held 143,000 gallons of liquid oxygen (1,359,000 pounds) and 383,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (226,000 pounds). The fuel weighed almost 20 times more than the Shuttle. At launch, the Shuttle, external tank, solid rocket boosters and all the fuel combined had a total weight of 4.4 million pounds. The Shuttle could also carry a 65,000 payload.”
Edit: that’s approximately 3e-25 kg per Caffiene molecule and I’m not a chemist, but I do enjoy captivating books about chemists/chemistry like Ignition[1], PiHKAL[2], Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks[3].
Edit 2: From above I noticed 1 litre of liquid Hydrogen is unexpectedly light at 0.15604 kg and one litre of liquid Oxygen is similarly heavier at 2.517 kg - I hope you find more things to add that challenge our intuitions.
No way! I got the weight of a caffeine molecule right! I am so proud of myself right now. Thanks! I've got water as 3e-26 but that doesn't seem right. Water molecule x10 lighter than caffeine molecule?
"The fuel weighed almost 20 times more than the Shuttle" - makes me want to go play KSP.
Yep, I think I've got the fully loaded shuttle + external tank + boosters weight.
I did about 20 questions and didn't miss one. Because most plants, animals, etc are made of water, you really just have to compare volume. I found that visualizing the order of magnitude of the volume was a pretty good strategy for estimating weight. (Water has a density of about 1000 kg/m3)
I don't know if I was just lucky but I also did a lot of them (where's a counter?) and had all of them right.
I think the game should try to pick answers that are closer to each other. Perhaps even have an inconsistent difficulty so some questions are easier than others.
It picks choices where the winner is about 10 times the weight of the loser. Very simple. Still trying to come up with something better that increases difficulty over time.
Another comment about the joke: I think in English the standard joke is "What's heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?" but here in Argentina the standard joke is "¿Qué pesa mas un kilo de plumas o un kilo de plomo" ("What's heavier, a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of plumber?".
Aww man, I'm going to have to watch that again tonight. True story: in one of my tech jobs me and my boss had a game to try to get Monty Python quotes into meetings. In a client meeting I talked about search engine behaviour and how you don't want the search engine to just return any old results like "I found this spoon" (Life Of Brian). My boss nearly fainted trying not to laugh. Nobody else got it.
Yeah..... um, so I picked min max ranges which would accomodate 50-90% of something. The human one is probably a bit narrow. It was a manic day of googling. Trying to work out what one molecule of caffeine weighs nearly broke me.
That's because it's forwarding the traffic to some entirely unrelated website for some reason. Not sure if the DNS went screwy, but something is not right.
OP here. Everything went screwy! Should be working again now. I don't even work in tech anymore. I haven't been involved in a website launch in over a decade. It's been one hell of a day. My plan for the day was literally to put the site up and then do some craft work, spinning wool into yarn for making my friends a couple of hats (it's wool from their sheep). I'm not even joking! My day went so off the rails.
OP here. It all came out right in the end! The server was bought to it's knees. Sysadmin thought I (as a very new customer) was up to something bad (my email address is james@rootdev.com and he feared I was a bad actor) and froze my account. The webserver didn't know what to serve and decided the best bet was to serve the first thing (alphabetically) that it could find (some insurance company beginning with the letter A). Now on a different server. And got to meet my lovely sysadmin who put everything right straight away (who wasn't even pissed off at me). What a day.
Yeah, things did get hectic. Still pretty busy today. The support and feedback from here was amazing though. I didn't expect that. It really helped me get through. And takeaway food. I literally posted to HN just as I was about to go shopping cos I didn't have any food - I didn't make it, still haven't!
I got most everything right until it asked about the moon compared to some huge number of elephants and again with tyranosaurus rexes. I picked moon both times and was wrong. I felt like those are mathematics questions that don't test your sense of scale as much as the rest because there's just no real-life experience.
Really fun game! There's no social incentive to share with others, or hook to return to play again, though. I learned a lot about how much thing weigh though.
I added a share results button. Thanks everyone for such amazing support yesterday. Much appreciated. Thanks for feedback on the weights. I think there are definitely some mistakes in there. I'll be checking them this morning. After I finish my coffee!
This is fun! I don't know if this would make it too easy, but it would be helpful to have the numbers in scientific notation (like 1.6e12), at least as an option. It would make it much easier to read for the larger ones.
That was wonderfully silly. But some comparators are vague, like "a can" or "a teabag" (used vs unused is a lot of weight difference). But making things more specific could detract from the silliness.
It's common sense that a space shuttle would be heavy, but this heavy? The thrust needed to lift the damn thing must be weight x 9.8m/s^2 = 19,992,000 Newtons.
OP here. I was absolutely frazzled creating data to chuck into it. Yeah, I think the shuttle data should be correct for shuttle, external tank and boosters. And fuel. A whole lot of fuel. See robocat's answer.
I love that you are using plain JS for this. I was the kid who unscrewed the Rubik's cube and screwed it back together because I am too dumb solve that.
What is the deal with min_mass_kg and max_mass_kg?
Thanks. Simplest thing that works. I haven't programmed in years. I just had the idea. The last game I had released was in 1991. Seriously. I check min mass of the heavier * its multiple against max mass of the lighter times its multiple.
It was really fun, but maybe throw a few combos closer in weight in? I played for maybe 5 minutes and didn't get any wrong. I would have played longer if I got some wrong.
OP here. Nah man, not bait and switch. The server got fried! Username is my reddit username. Of 11 years, although I hardly use it. I read HN daily but never created an account (not that I can remember anyway). Should all be getting fixed now.
TBH my HTML and CSS is so rusty. I haven't built a webpage in about a decade! I love number 2 and number 2. That's awesome, especially sending a question to a friend. Love it.
i wish i could dare to make a game this stupid. it's simple. and a touch stupid. but definitely enjoyable for a little bit. that was fun. way more fun than cow clicker. don't tell ian bogost.
Weird you should say that. The idea came to me after a long conversion with my 6 year old. He was telling me about a friend of his who said he was god or a god and we talked about how you could test to see if he was. That seemed to trigger off a whole synaptic storm.
When you get some time to breathe, I would love to hear a "retrospective" about how an account suspension turned into a redirect to a loans website. Did a bad actor notice your account was suspended, took over it somehow and then they sent traffic to their website? Is this standard protocol for your hosting provider (similar to those domain landing pages which link to all sorts of weird crap)?
The sysadmin thought I was up to no good and suspended me, which seems pretty reasonable to me. He was really cool and not even pissed off that I wiped out a server. All got cleared up. The site is on a different server now.
Yeah, because I got suspended the webserver decided to just serve the first site alphabetically. Nice behaviour. I scared the ** out of me, I thought it had been hacked.
Yeah, really sorry about that. Wasn't my doing. The rather unexpected surge of traffic fried the server. Hopefully resolved now. I was never expecting to hit the front page of HN let alone number 1.
Firefox refuses to show me the site due to a bad certificate, apparently its certificate is valid for domains belonging to arrowloans.co.uk - this is consistent with other reports saying they're being forwarded to a loans company.
Looks like your site got hacked, or maybe some weird DNS problem?
Few (hopefully helpful) bits of feedback:
1) Would be nicer if it wasn't just an endless list of question cards. Maybe have new ones sliding in on the right, with answered ones going off to the left.
2) Visually separate the question, your answer, the correct/incorrect answer and the explanation.
3) Scores! How many right, how many in a right in a row, how did your guess compare with others etc
4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
5) Pictures? Was just thinking you could have a 2x2 grid, with number and labelled picture of object in a colum, then you click on whether you think column 1 or 2 is the heaviest.
6) Stats - maybe on landing page or as commentary on your selections "Did you know the weight of the Blue-whale has the most over-estimated mass"
7) Difficulty curve (or setting), feels a bit odd after you'd put some estimate into guestimating to just be asked "does a gorilla weigh more than 5 tins of beans?" Or maybe it just currently feels too-random. I might get 20 in a row, but I can't compare myself to somebody else who got another 20 in a row right.
8) "Is greater than" is nice, but simple <,> choice makes it too simple some times. Maybe, "Which is closest to?" - which would give you multiple options to choose from.