[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 : 624 points
Date : 2022-02-20 19:19 UTC (1 days 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.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Using less strength in your solving algo is a peak shape
| rotator skill. It's yet another kobyashi Maru incident.
| emschlr wrote:
| IIRC 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 wrote:
| Shape 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
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I 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.
| fenollp wrote:
| ESC freezes it on Chrome on Linux.
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Oh, this one is an easy fix - thanks for letting me know.
| [deleted]
| iamwil wrote:
| For those that enjoy this sort of thing, the exam for dentistry
| involves a lot of literal shape rotation.
| 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.
| tallanvor wrote:
| Doesn'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 wrote:
| worked fine in my ff v97.0
| 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.
| hexman wrote:
| I'm shocked. I have the same mindset. For example, if I need
| to predict how technologies can potentially evolve, I
| visualize them in different planes based on the history of
| technologies, such as centralization/decentralization cycles,
| compute networks growing, and the shift to centralization.
| Also, I visualize how some technologists like Kubernetes go
| into decentralization (like this is some of primitive form of
| life, where Datacenters/Bigdata some sort of prebiotic soup
| for the first vertebrates (Edge Computing devices)). And
| decentralized solutions such as blockchain are superimposed
| on this infrastructure. In my head, it looks like a huge
| visual picture with different levels of abstraction. It
| constantly evolves
|
| I see how human sins are the drivers of technology
| development
| 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
| karmakaze wrote:
| 13 shapes 9.23/shape (2nd try no brute force)
|
| no qualifications, other than liking physical 3d puzzles
| acid__ wrote:
| Does anyone else feel their brain "heat up" when doing intensive
| thinking like this?
| [deleted]
| hexman wrote:
| Yes :)
| tcgv wrote:
| I 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 ;)
| ookdatnog wrote:
| If you're curious about this phenomenon, you may be interested
| in the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman :)
| 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.
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| This 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/
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 27x1 would again be the smallest 2d area.
| [deleted]
| fernly wrote:
| Feedback: 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.
| shostack wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with the meme context of "shape rotators":
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...
| noobermin wrote:
| It 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.
| 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?
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Hey, 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 wrote:
| Thanks for that! If I do I'll certainly let you know.
| 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).
| brianzelip wrote:
| Not on iOS -- just a gray background with the centered "code"
| link to the repo. No shapes, no interactivity.
| 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.
| pg_bot wrote:
| Suggestion, show the matching pair when the timer runs out.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| The 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
| 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!
| xmddmx wrote:
| A classic experiment, Shepard and Metzler (1971), Mental Rotation
| of Three-Dimensional Objects: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1731476
| dataangel wrote:
| I wish it showed you the right answer when you lose. A few times
| I have sworn there are no matches ;_;
| noobermin wrote:
| A 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.
| ohwellish wrote:
| in 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
| 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.
| mimentum wrote:
| I believe those with schizophrenia (and/or schizotypal
| personality disorder) have greater difficulty with these types of
| visual and spatial reasoning.
| ksec wrote:
| Interesting, I thought it would be people with Aphantasia that
| would have problem with this test.
| yaronka wrote:
| Yep, as aphant, I can't rotate. Instead I describe the shape
| to words and look for a match. Something like - the shapes
| short tail facing outwards, long tail straight.
| zacharycohn wrote:
| It's fun! I'd love to see some sort of more obvious feedback when
| you're wrong.
| [deleted]
| soheil wrote:
| It's easy to just guess a few times and get it right. At least
| wrong guesses should have time penalty.
| dlkf wrote:
| The 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
| batch12 wrote:
| I don't follow. Wrong post?
| ineiti wrote:
| There should be a way to share our shapes/minute in Twitter :)
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| For 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/
|
| [2] https://constructarcade.com/game/plockle/
| ztauras wrote:
| This link had me auto banned for one day in FB with no chances of
| review by human :(
| ztauras wrote:
| For sexual content
| 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.
| ..
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Hey, this should be fixed now. Thanks again!
| aimor wrote:
| I still run into the bug
|
| https://i.ibb.co/y4p4JSM/20220220-231734.jpg
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| I feel stupid. _Now_ it should be fixed, for real.
|
| Thank you!
| 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.
| joebidenenjoyer wrote:
| 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.
| crdrost wrote:
| > The first turn can be defined as always "right" or "left,"
|
| No it can't, not in 3D... it is just a turn.
|
| You can however choose to rotate about the first segment until
| the turn is Right, then use this orientation for the rest.
|
| In terms of normal form and restarts, who cares? Just generate
| the string both ways, it's 2n computations, choose the lowest
| in lexicographic order, and life is good. If you get to
| billions of turns are humans really going to be doing the
| comparison? Surely we'd just stream the string into a hash
| function or something...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Right-handed rotation is different from left-handed rotation
| no matter what coordinate system you choose.
| emschlr wrote:
| The keyword is "define"!
|
| You can just _define_ the first turn to be Right no matter
| how it is oriented.
|
| If you are not happy with that then just rotate the first
| segment until it looks Right to you. Then label the other
| turns.
|
| If you are still not happy with the word Right to denote the
| first term then just make up new notation. Define the first
| turn to be 1. Use numbers to denote turns if you object to
| using Left and Right.
| kuhewa wrote:
| > No it can't, not in 3D... it is just a turn
|
| Not if it is chiral. then whatever turn is defined as right
| is _not_ left
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Playing on mobile, it would be cool if the accelerometer
| rotated all the pieces at once.
| djtango wrote:
| >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 was once measured to have abysmal spatial reasoning (which is
| probably backed up by poor hand-eye coordination and sense of
| direction) but I had no problem doing molecular geometry and
| group theory, I suspect it was because I applied logic rather
| than visualisation to compensate. (I am terrible at walking
| into an empty place an imagining how I might want to fill it)
| 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.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Abstracting 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.
| dima55 wrote:
| If you like this, you should apt install
| blockout2
| ANMiller wrote:
| Fun, keybinding 1-6 to the shape selection could be nice!
| 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.
| thisisrandom wrote:
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| How did you do this in only a weekend?!
| baryphonic wrote:
| The 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Love it!
| 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!
| sebastien_b wrote:
| Can't even rotate the individual shapes to see them in their
| entirety.
| 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.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Agreed. I found by the end I was better off rapidly tapping
| out the answers due to no penalty for incorrect guessed
| 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)
| makach wrote:
| 9 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.
| 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.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I remember this fact being cited a lot as well, but honestly
| I question it, as others said, boys toys have traditionally
| been much more building / schematic oriented. I honestly
| doubt there would be a huge discrepancy in kids today
| whatsakandr wrote:
| I used to do a lot of 3D CAD professionally,and I remember
| being able to mentally rotate around IKEA instructions no
| problem. Haven't done that in several years. Now IKEA furniture
| is much difficult. I question whether this gender difference is
| nature or nuture.
| 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:
| Not really.
|
| Babies show sex differences in spatial skills.
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209100948.h.
| ..
| relaxing wrote:
| ...and once they grow up?
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Reading 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| From playing around with it, it's pretty obvious this is an
| extremely trainable task. I was able to double my performance
| within a few seconds, and I got a really strong feeling that I
| could become even better with training. I don't think it would
| be an obvious way of telling apart female and male brains
| because of all the differential relevant training.
| xvilka wrote:
| Shape rotation is great but what about shape shifting? How to
| test those skills?
| silisili wrote:
| This brings back nightmares of mech eng school! I essentially
| quit because of my inability to do such things :(.
| beliu wrote:
| This reminds me of Shaple: https://swag.github.io/shaple
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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.)
| ajot wrote:
| Another 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
| exikyut wrote:
| Wowch, I'm really bad :) 9.29:
| https://i.imgur.com/BEEqbKL.png
|
| Thanks for the pointer!
| typon wrote:
| This make is making me feel really stupid
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| zigzag is pretty wild. A kind of reversal task.
| 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.
| topher200 wrote:
| I 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/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
| spicybright wrote:
| It would be cool to show some stats on what other people scored.
| ouid wrote:
| 20 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.
| ak39 wrote:
| First attempt is 5. But anxiety levels were sky high. Throwback
| trauma.
| sizzle wrote:
| Giving me some anxiety from having to rotate molecules in my
| mind during organic chemistry exams
| rbobby wrote:
| 12 matches, 10 seconds per shape.
| hexman wrote:
| Awesome!
| sigmaprimus wrote:
| Good Job! Even better you shared the code!
|
| Thanks
| 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
| folmar wrote:
| Also the need to manually unselect a pair to try new one
| favours brute forcing over thinking.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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
| fragmede wrote:
| This 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.
| 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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