YHK - yet another hacker news clone

WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages

164 points Liogra123 15 hours ago 58 comments

Liogra123 15 hours ago | parent

Try it in the browser (the forward pass is plain JS, nothing leaves the page): https://huggingface.co/spaces/graafhenk/numberwang-demo

What it is: a character-level CNN with 80,804 parameters. The weights are a 1.79 MB JSON file and inference is about 100 lines of Python standard library — no PyTorch, no NumPy. It runs on a Pi Zero. It accepts digits, number words in eleven languages, arithmetic ("96 divided by 2", "deux fois trois"), Roman numerals, ordinals, clock times, currency, and fictional numbers ("shinty-six"). Anything with no numeric content is correctly ruled out as never able to be Numberwang. Whatever comes to 1 or 44 is Wangernumb and you rotate the board.

Held-out accuracy is 88.9% on 486 probes reserved from training by construction. The ceiling is ~98%, because roughly 2% of training labels are inverted at compilation time, in accordance with long-standing adjudication practice.

For comparison I ran Qwen3-1.7B on the same suite with the four verdicts as a constrained multiple choice: 51.9%, which is 2.3 points above answering "Numberwang" to everything. It answers "Numberwang" to 93% of inputs and never once identifies a Wangernumb. So the accuracy table has a verdict-distribution column, since one number can't tell a model that decides from one that agrees.

Honest weak spot: arithmetic is memorised, not computed. A conv net can't add. On operands reserved from training it gets 60% on symbolic expressions and 44% on foreign-language ones.

Dataset (185k adjudicated utterances), training script, evaluation harness and benchmark are all in the repo and reproduce from a fixed seed. Model card on HF: https://huggingface.co/graafhenk/numberwang

codeulike 14 hours ago | parent

For those confused by this, here is the Mitchell and Webb "Numberwang" sketch

https://youtu.be/0obMRztklqU?is=qufDLUkqofpr-K1Y

doormatt 14 hours ago | parent

And that's a bad miss...

tclancy 13 hours ago | parent

My favorite line, especially as an American because I can say it out loud without the person getting upset since they have no frame of reference. And other Anglophiles I could probably handle.

tialaramex 12 hours ago | parent

The idea that the snooker commentators are probably drinking is very Britain, and especially Britain from a particular era.

I think that series came out slightly after that era ended, I remember as a child (so years earlier) realising that snooker players at the time were often tipsy if not actually drunk, and also darts players, but by the time I was an adult the professionalism really changed that, turns out that if you're very good you probably are better at snooker when sober. I think the commentators, being often a previous generation of players, lagged that slightly.

toyg 12 hours ago | parent

"Are we the baddies?"

"WATCH THE FOOTBALL! WATCH IT! IT'S GONNA MOVE!!"

"This tree smells like cum."

Mitchell and Webb had so many legendary lines.

codeulike 12 hours ago | parent

"there's everything to play for ...

... And forever to play it in!"

tonymillion 9 hours ago | parent

Now we know...

yoz 8 hours ago | parent

She's gone, sir. They've all gone. And we're back. The incredibly posh people who are still unaccountably waiters.

shervinafshar 14 hours ago | parent

And here's the history of Numberwang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ofnDdi-vfw

codeulike 13 hours ago | parent

And so OPs app should have been called Colloson I guess

grufkork 13 hours ago | parent

Rotate the board!

BLKNSLVR 12 hours ago | parent

This is the comment I was looking for!

pimlottc 13 hours ago | parent

Featuring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman!

gabrielsroka 13 hours ago | parent

There are many sketches

codeulike 2 hours ago | parent

Sadly OPs explanatory comment has been flagged into oblivion (see far below) because the automod could not comprehend the importance of NUMBERWANG

benj111 1 hour ago | parent

No it's a bug. Numberwang returns NaN and this obviously hasn't been handled correctly.

tazjin 14 hours ago | parent

I don't think that this produces correct results, as it seems to determine whether each individual number is Numberwang. However, whether a number is Numberwang can also depend on the previous numbers in the sequence or other factors.

So I think as it stands right now this model can only determine whether a number would be Numberwang as the first number of a sequence, but even for that I still wouldn't rely on this in the actual game show.

wrs 14 hours ago | parent

Do we really know that? Or have we only seen the sequences from people searching for Numberwang? Has a number been both Numberwang (or Wangernumb) and not Numberwang (or Wangernumb)?

tazjin 13 hours ago | parent

Yeah, we do - there's a famous episode where after rotating the board both contestants stubbornly kept picking 1, and after a couple of iterations one of them was Wangernumb.

wrs 13 hours ago | parent

Oh, well, after rotating the board, sure, I get that.

debugnik 12 hours ago | parent

I can confirm this is the first episode, which I just watched since I had no idea about Numberwang until a minute ago. So I guess a true Numberwang fan would know that.

gaigalas 10 hours ago | parent

Obviously, it depends on whether board has rotated or not. It seems the model doesn't support board rotation yet, so the result is consistent with the limited set of features.

Scaled 54 minutes ago | parent

Also you must factor in what's behind the board!

tgv 41 minutes ago | parent

The rule book is quite big. You must have seen it in one of the many ads for the family board game version. As one site summarizes it:

> A NumberWang "board game in a box" was produced in 2008, including the board, numbers, two 400-sided dice, special hosting accessories and all 37 volumes of the rules so that you can say "That's NumberWang!" with confidence. For everyone from ages 8 to 88.

So even the true fan may falter in his or her judgement.

aesthesia 14 hours ago | parent

I'm also not sure that we know a non-number can never be Numberwang.

ceocoder 14 hours ago | parent

A non-number could be either a Numberwang OR a Wanganumb - this does depend on whether Yorkshire is a pudding or not.

jmcqk6 12 hours ago | parent

It's not well known, but in February of 1983, there was a finch in the Galapagos that was found to be numberwang. And of course there was the famous incident in the 1994 World Series where a homerun was overturned because it turned out it was a wangernumb hit into the stands, and not a standard baseball.

aidenn0 10 hours ago | parent

If you think about The Event you can figure it out. (Don't think about The Event).

blipvert 3 hours ago | parent

It is unlikely to be necessary on HN to remind readers to remain indoors.

TechSquidTV 7 hours ago | parent

Woah believe it or not, that's Numberwang!

mechazawa 2 hours ago | parent

blueth is numberwang tho

stackghost 14 hours ago | parent

Hello I have a question, and my question is what the fuck

dofm 14 hours ago | parent

That's not even a number.

tclancy 13 hours ago | parent

In some bases it is. Numberwang!

With All Due Love,

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar, Esq.

TZubiri 11 hours ago | parent

In some bases, that's a forbidden number containing the recipe for the atom bomb

You reckless fool

julianz 4 hours ago | parent

Congratulations, you are one of today's 10,000!

numberwan9 13 hours ago | parent

Hey! I was not consulted?

bonyt 13 hours ago | parent

You're playing with fire here, don't forget the tragedy of Colosson. Computers weren't meant to do this.

Hackbraten 13 hours ago | parent

I AM COLOSSON I AM NUMBERWANG THE WORLD IS NUMBERWANG THEREFORE I AM THE WORLD

jl6 13 hours ago | parent

Amazing, I passed by Mornington Crescent only yesterday!

tialaramex 12 hours ago | parent

I happened to be born at the right time for Mornington Crescent to be temporarily closed in the exact window when I was travelling to London often, using the Tube on my own, and listening to ISIHAC and so for a while I assumed the joke was that it'll never open - and then one day of course it re-opened.

yoz 8 hours ago | parent

I tried to pass Mornington Crescent the other day, but I was in Knip; bloody typical. As you’d expect, I ended up double-shunting onto the Victoria Line.

rsamtravis 12 hours ago | parent

Numberwang??

da02 11 hours ago | parent

How did you all first learn about the original Numberwang? Netflix?

karim79 10 hours ago | parent

Here is the history:

https://youtu.be/6ofnDdi-vfw?is=y9ccxKyAQfqiPIQs

shervinafshar 10 hours ago | parent

I knew the Mitchell and Webb duo from _The Peep Show_ and one day (long before the pandemic) I saw a comment on Slashdot about working from home linking to this sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk

Then I watched that show and learned about Numberwang.

IslandRebel 9 hours ago | parent

I was forced to watch their atrocious sketch show while waiting in someone's house before we departed for the local pub.

mellosouls 4 hours ago | parent

Some of us aren't American! (Or young)

In the UK we watched it on the Beeb when it was aired.

JuniperMesos 1 hour ago | parent

Some Mitchell and Webb sketches are posted on youtube.

TZubiri 11 hours ago | parent

What's the training corpus, just the canonical Mitchell and Webb sketch? Or ancilliary data like comments and references, or worse synthetic data generated on the primary sources?

karim79 11 hours ago | parent

This is hilarious and I miss numberwang. Also, the history of numberwang. And everything to do with numberwang. It was the most prescient sport back in the day.

I'm glad that someone has stepped up to revive the legacy of numberwang.

karim79 11 hours ago | parent

My friends, this is the single most hilarious thread I have ever experienced on the Interwebs. I am deeply grateful to have found this. I feel like my life is now complete.

gregjw 10 hours ago | parent

thats Numberwang!

gaigalas 10 hours ago | parent

Looking forward for the wordwang version.

bosshawg 9 hours ago | parent

what's going on with python that this is considered zero-dependency? requirements.txt, import gradio?

minitech 7 hours ago | parent

> gradio is needed only for the demo. The model itself never needs it.

The “Usage” section doesn’t involve installing any dependencies, for example: https://github.com/GraafHenk/numberwang#usage

voidUpdate 2 hours ago | parent

Is this using the rules from the official board game?