[HN Gopher] Show HN: GeneGuessr - a daily biology web puzzle
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Show HN: GeneGuessr - a daily biology web puzzle
I made a web game inspired by Geoguessr and Wordle, where you get
shown a 3D model of a random human protein each day, and you have
to triangulate its gene name using similarity clues. My background
is in wet lab molecular biology and I intend this game to be
engaging mostly to other biologists. But if you're outside the
field, I'm interested to know if you can still solve it with
browser use LLMs, and if you learned something interesting doing
so. Let me know what you think. I made it with Claude over the
last 2 months. My coding experience is limited to basic python data
analysis and figure making. I've seen people online asking, "Now
that we have coding AI, why isn't there a deluge of awesome AI-
generated apps made by non-coders?" - if this sounds like you,
check out Geneguessr to understand what a web app by a non-coder
looks like. I might write more about the process if there's a
demand, but what really unlocked the project for Claude was Linear
MCP, where it could put each individual issue on a shared Kanban
board. This, and Playwright MCP for testing on live site, were the
two workhorses that got me through this. For bugs Claude couldn't
one-shot, Linear was great for consolidating issue information so
that I could dump it into ChatGPT Codex - it would usually think
for like half an hour, output very confusing explanations, but the
bug was gone. Game is free, no log-in required, sorry if you run
into any mobile bugs - didn't test it much there.
https://geneguessr.brinedew.bio/
Author : brinedew
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-12-23 09:40 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (geneguessr.brinedew.bio)
(TXT) w3m dump (geneguessr.brinedew.bio)
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| For a moment thought this was gonna be some ethnoguessr clone
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Dayly, that means one puzzle per day? And how many of them in
| total?
| brinedew wrote:
| You can play more than once in the practice mode. It turns on
| after you complete the daily puzzle.
|
| There's almost 20k entries in my human gene database. You can
| choose any of them as your guess, but the "gene of the day" is
| chosen from a subset that has decent 3D structure coverage
| (meaning, not falling back to alphafold2 for visualization).
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Thank you
| noduerme wrote:
| Huh. Is this kind of manifold something that a group of humans
| can now identify on sight and associate with a part of a DNA
| sequence? That's pretty spectacular. I have a friend who worked
| for years on AlphaFold, but wasn't aware that people had gotten
| to this level of confidence in visually identifying proteins.
| brinedew wrote:
| My dream is forming a team of Tetlock-style superbiologists who
| can identify gene names on sight like Rainbolt, beat prediction
| markets on shorting biotech stocks, and smell out pre-cancerous
| cells like it's the final round of amongus.
| noduerme wrote:
| Hahahaa ... I kinda love this, along with humans who can sit
| at a piano and play a song they've only heard once, or cook a
| complicated dish they only tasted once. That seems like the
| great Turing test... zero-shot humans.
|
| But seriously, there probably are a few people who can see
| genes from proteins like that, faster than a whole datacenter
| of GPUs. Putting together such a brain trust could be
| invaluable.
| wigglewoggle wrote:
| I went straight to cd-4 and was crushed to find out I didn't
| get it in one guess
| oreilles wrote:
| Clicking the leftmost menu icon raise the following error:
| Geneguessr encountered a problem: runtime-error
| SyntaxError: redeclaration of const NAVIGATION_START
| brinedew wrote:
| That's the frontpage link, fixed it, thank you.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| This seems super well-done, albeit completely impossible for
| laymen. Great work, I'd love to see someone with the necessary
| knowledge play this.
| boldlybold wrote:
| Great work! I really like the interface here, I think you put a
| lot of taste into the way this all came together. It's quite hard
| (appropriately so!) I would love to see a experienced structural
| biologist go at this.
| brinedew wrote:
| Thank you. I started the development with the interface first,
| basically making a mockup of how the finished game should look
| like, and then prodding LLMs with a stick to make a backend
| that would support this interface without crashing.
|
| Making a nice-looking web GUI without knowing relevant
| vocabulary was a very clunky process in comparison to code
| pipelines, basically just pasting screenshots into the chat
| window and asking LLMs to "line up stuff properly", which they
| still couldn't manage to do in places.
| andrewrn wrote:
| This is a super cool game, nicely done.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Missed opportunity to call it:
|
| GeneGuesserIt
| jfarlow wrote:
| This is a challenge, even for someone who has professionally used
| the breadth of proteins. I really like the test. I'm actually
| kind of surprised at my own pulling on knowledge to make a guess
| - it's an orthogonal way to think about the question than is
| usually posed.
|
| I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in
| 'correct' features of the guesses: if your guess is a
| 'transmembrane' then it reveals that as a property. On the other
| hand, I don't think the annotations are clean enough - and are
| often designed for 'at all' rather than 'primary' features. For
| one of the examples, once I noticed it was an adhesion protein,
| it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell
| types as opposed to just continuing to shoot in the dark based on
| the structure alone.
|
| I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of
| the predicted structure? Please do.
|
| You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too - there's
| a weird familiarity with those given how often the structures
| themselves have historically not been so accessible. BLASTING
| each of the guesses would be another interesting thing to see.
| brinedew wrote:
| I'm glad you enjoyed it.
|
| > I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling
| in 'correct' features of the guesses
|
| Rather than allowing players to guess individual features, I
| opted for the "highlight" system where all hidden features that
| match your guessed protein's features get auto-revealed. This
| way, if you suspect a transmembrane protein, you can just guess
| a known transmembrane protein and see which features auto-
| reveal.
|
| > it would have been interesting to sift through classes or
| cell types
|
| You're welcome to suggest databases with good coverage over the
| proteome that I could use for these.
|
| > I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions
| of the predicted structure?
|
| Yes, any residues in the files I fetch get rendered. I rank by
| coverage before fetching.
|
| > You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too
|
| I'll consider it.
| pks016 wrote:
| Cool game. Harder for me. I have background in most of the
| undergrad and some grad molecular biology. Still, the hints
| didn't help much. The most useful hints were on function of the
| gene and cellular components. Also, I have been out of touch with
| gene names from the last few years. I tried searching using a
| gene's function but didn't work as much. At the end I got 81%
| close but far from the answer.
|
| You could start with popular gene names.
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