Yet another Hacker News

61 points smilelamp 1 day ago 11 comments

torben-friis 1 day ago | parent

What a mess of an educational game.

Sorry to be so negative, but one can barely parse the LLMish introduction, and thosebcontrols seem like a half finished personal obsidian document.

Kind of weird coming from tao, I remember his math notes being quite approachable and well written.

voidhorse 23 hours ago | parent

The slop monster gets us all eventually. Some come to their senses and escape, others are never seen again.

thinking_cactus 23 hours ago | parent

Tbf I think this is a tall order for someone who has never thought deeply about game design, I think something pretty cool could emerge from just a little bit of collaboration with a good game designer, or just putting a lot more thought and playtesting into it!

thirtygeo 22 hours ago | parent

Maybe someone here should reach out and offer? Seems to have been lots of posts lately by people who are between gigs

rustyhancock 17 hours ago | parent

Somewhat reminds me Eucledia the game that tries to teach mathametical construction.

But gamification is it's own art and science.

baq 20 hours ago | parent

Terry’s love of math is at odds with us normies here. A ‘math game about math’ is everything he wants from a game, or so it seems.

A proper normie should take the game and make it about dragons and lasers and swords and robots and princesses to save in another castle and it could be a success, like slay the spire. Or maybe a zachtronics-like game. Or spreadsheet spaceships um excuse me eve online is a thing right?

IsTom 18 hours ago | parent

I've thought a bit about a game like this in the past and came to the conclusion that UI would be a nightmare. It's might be manageable as long as you stick to propositional calculus, but it's pretty limited and if you try to go further then substitution rules for quantifiers come into play. Maybe there is a way to make it work, but I don't think it's something you can just walk into without some consideration.

conjectures 17 hours ago | parent

> Kind of weird coming from tao, I remember his math notes being quite approachable and well written.

Ai psychosis type phenomenon?

nh23423fefe 13 hours ago | parent

You are bikeshedding because you thought it was important to repeat your nebulous hate.

kloimhardt 10 hours ago | parent

Because published by Prof. Tao, solving the puzzles made me feel like a one permille Fields medalist. Imagine a more polished browser game with puzzles centered on the stories of "six math essentials", in the vein of "The Fool and His Money" (now a free browser game). Maybe with some feature to share proofs/recipes like in Wordle. To paraphrase Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be a Fields-medalist for 15 minutes.”

tomcatfish 9 hours ago | parent

This is fun! Reminds me of The Incredible Proof Machine

https://incredible.pm/