[HN Gopher] Show HN: Test your shape rotation skills
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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
Author : 0xf00ff00f
Score : 272 points
Date : 2022-02-20 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (0xf00ff00f.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (0xf00ff00f.github.io)
| barrkel wrote:
| IMO 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) I started to count
| segment lengths rather than relying on mental shape rotation.
| fenollp wrote:
| ESC freezes it on Chrome on Linux.
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Oh, this one is an easy fix - thanks for letting me know.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| great idea but the UX is very poor, it's not intuitive at all
| moralestapia wrote:
| Finally, that semester of topology has paid out.
| princeb wrote:
| did 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.
| [deleted]
| stevage wrote:
| I 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)
| hexman wrote:
| 10 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
| exikyut wrote:
| -> 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I'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.
| Graffur wrote:
| Wow, that's impressive. After figuring out the game I got 8
| shapes which I thought was good!
| jyscao wrote:
| You're the shape rotator of shape rotators.
|
| I only managed to break 10 after about a dozen tries..
| whatshisface wrote:
| Is this the singularity?
| hexman wrote:
| idk bad in wordceling
| acid__ wrote:
| Does anyone else feel their brain "heat up" when doing intensive
| thinking like this?
| hexman wrote:
| Yes :)
| brotchie wrote:
| +1
| cousin_it wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| 12 matches on my first go. Not very impressive, but likely an
| indicator of my middling IQ.
| omnicognate wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Please 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.
| blhack wrote:
| 11 shapes! This is a fun game. I think it's testing something
| other than shape rotating though.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| So 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?
| larusso wrote:
| Very 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!
| throwaway73838 wrote:
| This sounds interesting. Will it be available on mobile?
| PuddleOfSausage wrote:
| Works fine on mobile for me. Fun game!
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| It should work on mobile browsers (though I haven't tested
| yet).
| layer8 wrote:
| I only see a tiny "code" link on iOS, rest of the page is
| blank (gray).
| ithkuil wrote:
| Tried 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 wrote:
| There'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.
| Lio wrote:
| Works well on iOS on iPhone.
|
| I like it. Great fun, thanks.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Seems 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| It's hard when part of a shape is hidden even with the rotation.
| anyfactor wrote:
| First 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 wrote:
| First 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 wrote:
| yeah, I was similar, my brain just told me the right ones, I
| didn't really have to work it out.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Wow, the scrolling does not work at all for me on macos, using FF
| or Safari.
| stygiansonic wrote:
| Very 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.
| jcims wrote:
| I think this is the first time I realized that wasm wasn't just
| some kind of funky javascript.
|
| Fun game!
| dataangel wrote:
| I wish it showed you the right answer when you lose. A few times
| I have sworn there are no matches ;_;
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Pretty 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.
| soheil wrote:
| It's easy to just guess a few times and get it right. At least
| wrong guesses should have time penalty.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Very cool! I feel I'm a bit rusty on rotating shapes, I got 5
| right in the time (1st and only attempt)
| [deleted]
| yablokoffya wrote:
| Just played 5 times, super cool although UX is a bit vague in the
| first session. What's the max matches you have?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I managed 14 after a couple of tries, I feel like if I
| continued anymore I'd end up procrastinating my entire day!
| eternityforest wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| In 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.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Needs to place you on a bell curve against prior completions.
| svet_0 wrote:
| Small bug: occasionally there are multiple matching pairs,
| although only 1 works (screenshot: 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#L4...
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Ouch. Thank you so much for noticing this! Looks like I need a
| more robust test.
| blamestross wrote:
| Ismorphism 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Great suggestion, thanks!
| amelius wrote:
| In chemistry, there is the problem of normalization of
| molecule identifiers that looks like this problem.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Chemical_Identif.
| ..
| phreeza wrote:
| I encountered the same bug and it was also a donut kind of
| shape, maybe something to do with the closing of the loop?
| svet_0 wrote:
| Probably. L-U-R-D is the mirror of R-D-L-U but not the mirror
| of L-D-R-U, although isometric to both.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Ok so I'm not crazy. The shapes moving had me second guessing
| myself trying to compare them.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is great, but I wish length never mattered. Counting blocks
| is drab, and length not mattering makes the equivalence class
| more exciting, IMO.
| ag8 wrote:
| Looks 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| because 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.
| zuminator wrote:
| Maybe 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.
| evanmoran wrote:
| Nice. 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 :)
| faangiq wrote:
| Wordcels can't cope with this.
| jvandonsel wrote:
| I 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,
| whatshisface wrote:
| Sometimes 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| > Brains have dedicated "word-processing units" and those are
| much faster than number-processing units.
|
| *In most people.
| V__ wrote:
| This is a fun little game. I find the small movements confusing,
| though. Maybe a fixed camera (isometric?) would work nice.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That'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!
| screye wrote:
| Can'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.
| pininja wrote:
| This 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.
| amar-laksh wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Can someone post that rotating puzzle post from yesterday? I
| think I missed it (and can't seem to find by searching)
| amar-laksh wrote:
| There you go: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-
| shapes-and-words?...
| mfashby wrote:
| surprisingly difficult, only scored 1 the first try!
| kebsup wrote:
| A 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.
| ggerganov wrote:
| Cool!
|
| Small issue I found - when I run this as native app, always the 2
| bottom-left shapes are the answer.
| krick wrote:
| Damn, 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 wrote:
| -10 seconds if you fail a pair should work against brute force.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I 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.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| vvvvvvvv-----Scoreboard-------vvvvvv
| boppo1 wrote:
| 11
| holtkam2 wrote:
| 10 shapes
| renewiltord wrote:
| I liked it, might I suggest some tiny things?
|
| - Turn selection outline to green on success
|
| - Show incremental progress (num matched)
| aaron695 wrote:
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I'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.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I 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.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Difficult 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...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| silisili wrote:
| This brings back nightmares of mech eng school! I essentially
| quit because of my inability to do such things :(.
| greatwave1 wrote:
| Waiting out for the wordcel version of this
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I believe The NY Times just bought it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You mean Wordle?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It's a 4chan meme:
| 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| You should read the article
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I 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.
| exikyut wrote:
| A totally different style of game which also seriously stretches
| spatial reasoning: 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)
|
| 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.)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If you're recording stats, I would love to know the distribution
| of correct guesses per game.
| akomtu wrote:
| That'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.
| sshb wrote:
| Curious about group theory take on this. It seems that symmetry
| helps to easily exclude multiple shapes at the beginning of each
| round.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If you can turn one into the other with a single reflection,
| then you can't rotate them. Two reflections, and you can.
| rbobby wrote:
| 12 matches, 10 seconds per shape.
| hexman wrote:
| Awesome!
| chungy wrote:
| I 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).
| 8note wrote:
| Makes sense, you have to wait to see enogh information to be
| able to actually submit choices, vs being able to start brute
| forcing immediately
| cryptica wrote:
| I 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| Would 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 wrote:
| Scored 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| When 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
| leto_ii wrote:
| I 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 ;))
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(page generated 2022-02-20 23:00 UTC)