[HN Gopher] List animals until failure
___________________________________________________________________
List animals until failure
Author : l1n
Score : 314 points
Date : 2026-02-01 01:03 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rose.systems)
(TXT) w3m dump (rose.systems)
| the_fall wrote:
| It might be an interesting LLM benchmark: how many can they list
| without breaking the rules (repetition or non-animals). Although
| I bet that big bucks would be then thrown at pointlessly
| optimizing for that benchmark, so...
| bronco21016 wrote:
| Might be an interesting problem for understanding how various
| models perform recollection of prior tokens within the context
| window. I'm sure they could list animals until their window is
| full but what I'm not sure of is how much of the window they
| could fill without repeating.
| helloplanets wrote:
| I guess it could be generalized to filling up the context
| window with any token, but just making sure none of the
| tokens repeat.
|
| An interesting twist could be making sure a specific token is
| an anagram of the token N tokens back. This could possibly
| measure how much a model can actually plan forwards.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Even more interesting is if a thinking LLM would come up with
| tricks mitigating its own known limits - like listing animals
| in alphabetical order, or launching a shell/interpreter with
| a list that contains previous answers (which it then checks
| each new answer against).
| OxfordOutlander wrote:
| you might like https://github.com/aidanmclaughlin/AidanBench
| nxtfari wrote:
| there are so many special cases that this game responds to, i was
| shocked that it didn't involve an llm at all at the end. very
| cool.
| helloplanets wrote:
| For anyone wondering: This is based on basic text parsing and a
| key-value lookup table, no AI involved whatsoever.
|
| Here's the table:
| https://rose.systems/animalist/lower_title_to_id.js
| kranner wrote:
| There must be another table. I got "Are you Australian?" for
| "dingo" and for "cicada" "don't you love their songs?"
|
| edit: https://rose.systems/animalist/eggs.js
| helloplanets wrote:
| Yea, there's a bunch of easter eggs. And then there's the
| table for the taxonomy tree.
| jml7c5 wrote:
| Hmm, what's this one? var h = hash(guess);
| if (h==7182294905658010 || h==6344346315172974) { return
| "Adorable guess, but it's spelled "rosy"."; }
|
| I'm guessing they're hashes for "<something> rosie" or
| "<something> rosey", but what?
| moeffju wrote:
| 7182294905658010 "rosey maple moth" 6344346315172974 "rose
| maple moth"
| Retr0id wrote:
| There's a long Indonesian string referencing "weasel" - weird
| https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28521
|
| Edit: someone edited to remove it just this minute!
|
| Introduction:
| https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?diff=2353193943 - just
| random vandalism I suppose.
| l1n wrote:
| https://rose.systems/blog/list-animals-until-failure on how
| it's made!
| maxbond wrote:
| I got 42. I was very impressed by how it handled more and less
| specific categories. It also understood rotifers were a
| microscopic animal, which I half expected not to work. Great
| project.
| julianeon wrote:
| We should be friends. I got 47. In my defense, I was tired.
| maxbond wrote:
| I was the first to post my score and I thought I did pretty
| well. Pure hubris! Looking forward to brunch (/j, I'm pretty
| far away).
| themanmaran wrote:
| 68. The unique title texts are really fun. But I strongly
| disagree that "chipmunks are squirrels".
| jmtulloss wrote:
| This is what I'm saying. Chipmunks are not squirrels. I will do
| my best on this hill.
| eutropia wrote:
| is "do my best" some kind of weird censorship-speak euphemism
| for "die"???
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I think it's meant to convey "I'm not willing to _die_, but
| I do feel strongly"
| bmitc wrote:
| There are some weird ones. It knew red-bellied woodpecker but
| not yellow-bellied woodpecker.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Similarly, it insisted to me that a pigeon is the same thing as
| a mourning dove. Not true! But your case is even more
| egregious.
| meatmanek wrote:
| "pigeon" and "dove" are both words for the same family of
| birds. The bird most people think of with the word "pigeon"
| is the rock dove (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dove) or
| domesticated / feral variants of it.
| skylurk wrote:
| Yep, but importantly "pigeon" and "dove" are not exactly
| interchangeable words, there is just no consensus for which
| is which.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbidae
| gilleain wrote:
| Toads and frogs are another pair like this, where there
| is no clear distinction
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| True. But I did not ask about "pigeon" and "dove." I asked
| it about "pigeon" and "mourning dove" which are
| unambiguously different species. Different genuses, even.
| Zenaida macroura v. Columba livia.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Homing pigeon has a nice response :)
| pests wrote:
| Well TIL prairie dogs are actually squirrels
| divbzero wrote:
| Instead of trying to think of just any animal, I found it easier
| to add a constraint...
|
| 1. Animal that starts with A
|
| 2. Animal that starts with B
|
| 3. Animal that starts with C
|
| ...
|
| (I also appreciated the easter eggs: "Are you Australian?" and
| "You listed both dingos and dogs, so I gave you the benefit of
| the doubt, but there's disagreement on whether the dingo is its
| own species of canid, a subspecies of grey wolf, or simply a
| breed of dog.")
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Without considering if it's a distinct species, a dingo is
| descended from the same wolf population as dogs.
|
| They are feral dogs. IE wolf -> domesticated dog -> became wild
| again.
| bmitc wrote:
| I went by groups and families of animals.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| What comes after C?
| Buildstarted wrote:
| drop bear => Already said Koala. but if you type it before you
| say koala the answer drops from the top of the page. so many
| great easter eggs. got 92 in the end
| pilaf wrote:
| I entered plankton, which technically isn't an animal and so it
| rejected it like any other random word, but then after I lost
| it offered me a link to the Wikipedia article on plankton. Very
| thoughtful.
| bspammer wrote:
| There's also an Easter egg if you said sponge before
| plankton.
| echelon wrote:
| 106, I feel like I should have done much better. (I feel like I
| cheated by naming a lot of dinosaurs and insects.)
|
| The clown emoji is great. :)
| alterom wrote:
| Another 106 here. I got to the point where I was just blanking
| out looking at the countdown timer.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Strange, I also scored 106. A common sticking point?
| cvhc wrote:
| 49 as ESL speaker. Fun little game to practice English words :)
| agnishom wrote:
| I got 48 animals
| linhns wrote:
| I got 50, and that accounted for me typing with a hurt finger
| rogual wrote:
| 140. Good fun. I like how it teaches you things, too. I learned
| that toads are considered frogs, axolotls are salamanders, and
| that it's "anemone" not "anenome". If you type in Unicorn it
| accepts it as "Unicorn spider" with a fun message. Don't forget
| to think of insects, birds and fish too, all of which it accepts.
| I love this kind of detailed, handcrafted thing that someone put
| a lot of time and effort into.
|
| If you wanted to develop this more, some fun features might be
| telling you the most commonly entered animals you missed and the
| most unusual ones you thought of. Appreciate you probably want to
| keep it a static site though.
| mberning wrote:
| It accepted tardigrade which I thought was interesting.
| pilaf wrote:
| It pulls its data from Wikidata, which is _very_ thorough, so I
| 'd be more surprised if you managed to enter an animal it
| didn't know.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Presumably inspired by this tweet:
| https://x.com/Fredward3948576/status/1763363909669388588
| vunderba wrote:
| That and probably Sporcle. Name X from {group Y} is a very
| popular quiz archetype.
|
| https://www.sporcle.com/games/jjjjlapine2nd/name-every-anima...
| bitwize wrote:
| ARE YOU THINKING OF AN ANIMAL? yes
|
| DOES IT SWIM? no
|
| IS IT A BIRD?
|
| https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4
| jll29 wrote:
| BTW, that's a great game if you are on a road trip with bored
| kids.
| adt2bt wrote:
| 157. Very neat! Started a, b, c then found much more success when
| thinking about biomes (sea, mountains, forest, jungle, etc).
| locusofself wrote:
| nice score! I got 129, and yes, same experience.
| tptacek wrote:
| No LLMs is impressive. Also recognizes "drop bear". Well played.
| defrost wrote:
| The Australian Museum recognises them also:
| https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/
|
| Somewhat more impressively, it recognises bungarra .. although
| it stalls out and fails on other similar words for various
| local animals.
| wincy wrote:
| Hahah in a moment of desperation I put "unicorn" which its
| response made me laugh out loud.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Ahah. After trying myself, I immediately tried "Obama" and it
| works ! But oddly enough, most personality with a name in the
| "List of organisms named after famous people" doesn't work.
| Nether does bacterium or fish !
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_named_after_.
| ..
| yorwba wrote:
| The flatworm genus Obama is not named after Barack Obama.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_(flatworm)
| vekerdyb wrote:
| "Haggis" also gets a good response
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Because the dataset is pulled from Wikidata: (drop bear)
| https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4819356
| dudewhocodes wrote:
| Accepts the word "human" as well.
|
| update: Start with "human" or "homo sapiens" and the website
| keeps changing as you add new words.
| hillcrestenigma wrote:
| I like how it triggers an overlay when you try "human", it's a
| nice touch
| troyvit wrote:
| I said "ape" after and it wouldn't take it because I'd said
| human already :)
| ivanech wrote:
| this was really delightful. The Easter eggs in particular made it
| feel like someone was actually on the other side
| Cyphase wrote:
| 95. Definitely feel like I should have done better; will try
| another time with more sleep.
| lepolas wrote:
| This was fun. I definitely could feel the fatigue slowing me down
| until the timer got me. I also wasted a bunch of time trying to
| spell specific animals like the wobbegong.
|
| I like the emoji output as well: 203 animals listed:
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| Possum => opossum is erroneous. I was planning to list both
| species, it wasnt a typo.
| kalmyk wrote:
| lots of animals
| TZubiri wrote:
| The background is alternating between cyan and black, which is
| very distracting. Not sure if that's on purpose.
| disillusioned wrote:
| 205 and I very much was scraping the bottom of the barrel at the
| end. Starting a bit generic and adding specificity helped a lot.
| The little meta-commentary was great. "you already said dogs.
| dogs are dogs." when I tried "golden retrievers" after already
| typing dogs.
| jammaloo wrote:
| 267, I was going pretty strong and had about 2 minutes racked up,
| until I hit a wall, and couldn't think of anything else. Thinking
| in groups helped the most, e.g. reptiles, flightless birds,
| african animals, etc.
|
| Extinct animals also work, including the dinosaurs!
| pards wrote:
| Yep - dodo worked for me
| themk wrote:
| One of the few sites with a fun "you have javascript turned off"
| message.
|
| > This game requires JavaScript. Or, if you've superior taste,
| take out a pen and paper and start listing animals.
| sublinear wrote:
| I think that's meant to be a gentle insult, but I'm glad it had
| it's intended effect!
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Nice! I added this to the HN Arcade
| https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/list-animal...
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Thanks for actually maintaining this instead of leaving it as a
| one-off dump!
| Client1003 wrote:
| Fantastic. Thanks for this.
|
| Might you want to add Super Monkey Ball too if you haven't
| already?
|
| https://monkeyball-online.pages.dev/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789961
| schnaars wrote:
| This is awesome. I made it to 100, but I know jack about animals.
| cellis wrote:
| 79. I feel like i should have done better but got stuck in a
| local minima of "farm animals, which _obvious_ farm animals haven
| 't I said??", then tried thinking of names of fish which worked
| until it didn't.
| jojobas wrote:
| Some animals replace vaguer definitions, but say "snake" is there
| forever, no cobra or viper for you. Strange.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| Lazy daisy: (async () => { for (c of 'red
| black white brown blue green yellow golden grey arctic mountain
| forest spotted striped'.split(' ')) for (a of
| 'bear lion tiger wolf fox eagle shark whale snake frog cat dog
| horse bat rat mouse owl hawk duck crab ant bee spider deer
| penguin elephant rabbit'.split(' ')) {
| guessbox.value = c + ' ' + a; uncomment(); attempt();
| await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 75)); }
| })();
| nerdsniper wrote:
| (async(s=new Set(Object.values(PARENT)))=>{for(i in ID_TO_TITLE
| )if(!s.has(i)){guessbox.value=ID_TO_TITLE[i];uncomment();attemp
| t();await new Promise(requestAnimationFrame)}})()
|
| This is a concise, pretty naive way highest possible high-score
| by just guessing everything in the internal animal database,
| and avoiding "parents". I'm not sure how many points it would
| get us because it would take like 3 hours to complete. However,
| we can do a lot better for the score by analyzing some
| additional things:
|
| (The following numbers may be off a bit due to overlapping sets
| or just recording them at different stages of
| investigation/understanding, but they're darn close)
|
| The game has 379,729 animals in its list (ID_TO_TITLE), mapped
| from 768,743 input strings (LOWER_TITLE_TO_ID).
|
| 52,546 are parents of some other animal, so it's best to skip
| those: If you guess "bird" first and then guess "eagle", then
| eagle won't count for points. Unless...well, more on that
| towards the end!
|
| 4,485 rows are considered to be "too specific". For example,
| there are 462 species under _Mordellistena_ but the game says
| "nah screw all that, _Mordellistena_ is specific enough ".
|
| 3,127 are duplicates, they're the same species but have
| different names from different era. e.g. _Megachile harthulura_
| was discovered in 1853 but renamed to _Megachile cordata_ in
| 1879. The game counts these only once.
|
| 3,116 are...weird: I think these are mostly errata caused by
| the input parser redirecting guesses to different IDs than the
| raw/full database expects. The parser maps the text to some
| "correct" ID but leaves a different, perhaps similar ID
| uncredited. This could happen because the text parser strips
| out hyphens, e.g. there's an entry for _Yellow-tail_ which
| should be a duplicate of _Yellow-tail moth_ but "Yellow-tail"
| gets parsed to "yellowtail" which gets mapped to the fish
| _Japanese Amberjack_. Sometimes it 's skipping ranks in the
| taxonomy, like the beetle _Neomordellistena parvula_ maps
| directly to a Subfamily, which skips the Genus level required
| to verify the lineage. Sometimes it 's things that got
| reclassified from one genus to another. And sometimes there are
| rows that are a family which get mapped to a genus, which is
| also a row ( _Dilophosauridae_ - > _Dilophosaurus_ )
|
| 28 rows are impossible to reach because they need a curly
| apostrophe that the parser replaces with a straight apostrophe
| if you put it in the input box. 23 of the straight version maps
| to a different animal. For example, "budin's tuco tuco" (curly)
| maps to Budin's tuco-tuco, but after normalization it becomes
| "budin's tuco tuco" (straight), which maps to Reddish tuco-
| tuco. 5 of them have keys with curly apostrophes where the
| straight version doesn't exist in the database at all.
|
| One entry in the list of animals is 'zorse' (zebra-horse
| hybrid) but this guess is explicitly rejected because it
| doesn't have its own wikipedia page (the wikipedia page for
| that is a redirect to "Zebroid").
|
| That brings us down to a maximum score of 316,457
|
| but then there are 722 entries in the string mapping table
| which are strings that don't appear in the raw animal table
| which can map to otherwise blocked animals, like _Mongolian
| wolf_. This animal exists and could count to your score, but if
| you type "Mongolian wolf", it maps to _Himalayan wolf_ and you
| get credit for that instead of _Mongolian wolf_. However, it
| also contains a mapping for "woolly wolf" which gives you
| credit for _Mongolian wolf_.
|
| That brings us up to the actual maximum score of 317,179
|
| Then, because of these 10,034 unreachable leaf-nodes (non-
| parent rows in the animal list), sometimes all the children of
| a parent is unreachable, so because we never claimed any points
| for their children, we can go get the points for the parents.
| This adds 5,561 points.
|
| This brings us up to 322,740.
|
| By doing the 'maximum' 30 guesses per second (limited guesses
| to the game tick rate of 30fps), it would take an absolute
| minimum 3 hours to submit every animal. Just a note, the
| countdown timer counts down from 1 minute, but 6 seconds are
| added for every correct guess. So by the time you're done the
| countdown timer would reach 22.6 days, which you'd have to wait
| to elapse before the game is actually "won".
|
| If we remove some visual effects, we can reduce that by
| spamming guesses for 12ms, then pause for 4ms to let the
| browser render which keeps the tab responsive.
|
| But the guesses still slow down over time due to a O(N2)
| algorithm in the game's code: it checks your current guess
| against a List (the array structure in JS), which is an O(N)
| check that runs N times, for an overall O(N2) performance hit.
| We can patch that function so it checks against a Set instead
| of a List to keep it O(1).
|
| On an M2 MBP, this gets the high-score in under 30 seconds
| while keeping the game logic unchanged in function. But the
| visual effects were nice and it's rather soulless without the
| author's artistic vision. Turning them back on and giving it
| the 6ms required to render all of them slows this from 30
| seconds to a boring 5 minutes. We can make it run the game
| logic 98% of the time and then render for 2% of the time, but
| it's still a bit too slow because the browser has to
| recalculate the page layout (DOM) every time a guess it
| submitted via the input box. So we can also skip the actual
| input box.
|
| That reduces it to a lovely 20 seconds to get the highest
| possible score!
|
| Then some memoization, some stupid tweaks to keep the UI
| looking nice, and adding a progress meter, aggressive
| minimization for HN posting, and we get the final script
| running in 16.5 seconds.
|
| You'll still have to wait 22.75 days for the countdown timer to
| run out to win the game. I didn't want to actually change any
| of the game's logic or game the win condition, so editing that
| is left as an exercise to the reader! :)
|
| (async()=>{"undefined"==typeof guessed_ids&&newGame();const
| e=e=>e.trim().toLowerCase().replaceAll("-","
| ").replaceAll("'","'").replaceAll(/ +/g," "),o=LOWER_TITLE_TO_I
| D.human,t=LOWER_TITLE_TO_ID.crow,n={},r={},s={},c={};for(const[
| e,o]of Object.entries(LOWER_TITLE_TO_ID))(n[o]??=[]).push(e);fo
| r(const[e,o]of Object.entries(PARENT))(r[o]??=new
| Set).add(e);for(const[o,t]of Object.entries(ID_TO_TITLE)){if(LO
| WER_TITLE_TO_ID[e(t)]===o){s[o]=t;continue}const r=n[o]?.find((
| t=>LOWER_TITLE_TO_ID[e(t)]===o));r&&(s[o]=r)}const
| i=e=>{if(void 0!==c[e])return c[e];const o=r[e];return
| c[e]=!!o&&[...o].some((e=>s[e]||i(e)))},a=(e,o)=>{for(let t=PAR
| ENT[e];t;t=PARENT[t])if(t===o)return!0;return!1},d=[],l=[],p=[]
| ;for(const e of Object.keys(s)){if(i(e))continue;const
| n=s[e];(e===o||e===t?d:a(e,t)?l:p).push(n)}const f=[...p.splice
| (0,10),...d];for(;l.length||p.length;)f.push(...l.splice(0,6),.
| ..p.splice(0,6));const u=window.guessbox,g=window.comment,m={va
| lue:"",focus(){},disabled:!1},w={innerText:""};Object.definePro
| perty(window,"guessbox",{get:()=>m,configurable:!0}),Object.def
| ineProperty(window,"comment",{get:()=>w,configurable:!0});const
| b=new Set(guessed_ids);guessed_ids.includes=e=>b.has(e),guessed
| _ids.push=e=>{Array.prototype.push.call(guessed_ids,e),b.add(e)
| };const T=.02,x=new Set(["longcat","dropbear","drop bear","side
| winder"]),O=log.prepend.bind(log);log.prepend=e=>{const
| o=x.has(e.innerText.toLowerCase().split(" - ")[0]);(o||Math.ran
| dom()<T)&&(O(e),log.children.length>25&&[...log.children].rever
| se().find((e=>!e.dataset.vip))?.remove(),o&&(e.dataset.vip="tru
| e"))};const _=summonConfetto;summonConfetto=(...e)=>{Math.rando
| m()<T&&_(...e)};const h=Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(HTMLEle
| ment.prototype,"innerText").set;Object.defineProperty(scorespan
| ,"innerText",{set:e=>{(Math.random()<T||"0"===e)&&h.call(scores
| pan,e)}});const L=document.createElement("div");L.style.cssText
| ="position:fixed;top:10px;right:10px;width:180px;background:lin
| ear-gradient(135deg,rgba(180,100,200,.85),rgba(100,180,220,.85)
| );color:#fff;font:12px
| monospace;padding:10px;z-index:999999;border-radius:10px;text-
| shadow:1px 1px 1px#000",document.body.append(L);const
| y=f.length,E=Date.now();let I=0,j=E;for(;I<y;){const e=performa
| nce.now();for(;performance.now()-e<32&&I<y;){m.value=f[I++],unc
| omment();try{attempt()}catch{}}const
| o=Date.now();if(o-j>500){const
| e=(o-E)/1e3;L.innerHTML=`${(I/y*100).toFixed(1)}% | ${I/e|0}/s<
| br><small>${I.toLocaleString()}/${y.toLocaleString()}</small>`,
| j=o}await new Promise((e=>requestAnimationFrame(e)))}h.call(sco
| respan,score),Object.defineProperty(window,"guessbox",{value:u}
| ),Object.defineProperty(window,"comment",{value:g}),L.innerHTML
| =`100% in ${((Date.now()-E)/1e3).toFixed(1)}s<br><small>${y.toL
| ocaleString()}/${y.toLocaleString()}</small><br><b
| style=color:#8f8> ${score.toLocaleString()}</b>`})();
| squibonpig wrote:
| Lmfao black widow turns the title black I think
| locusofself wrote:
| 129 here, not bad for the end of the day. I listed a surprising
| number of dinosaurs, and of course, edible animals, and Lion King
| stuff.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Warthog! Meerkat!
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| 205! The running commentary was fun. And I love how permissive it
| is -- it was fun stumbling into a new category that you wouldn't
| necessarily expect to qualify. I do wish that there was an option
| to see a list of the most popular ones you missed (based on
| traffic to the article or similar).
|
| For a similar brain exercise, try to Name Every City:
|
| https://cityquiz.io/
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| I think they need to restrict their definition of city more. I
| named some tiny villages and it accepted them.
| khazhoux wrote:
| 130
|
| Fun game, but also a fascinating brain-probe. We're not used to
| reversing our internal classifiers.
| monopoliessuck wrote:
| I added Jellyfish and then Portuguese Man-o-war.
|
| It took the man o war, but crossed out Jellyfish and said "added
| a vaguer term", but a jellyfish and a man-o-war are discrete
| animals.
|
| The man-o-war is a colonial siphonophore composed of zooids,
| while a jellyfish is a singular marine organism.
|
| They're both in the phylum Cnidaria, and that would have been a
| more vague term had I entered it.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| yeah there are lots of inaccuracies.
|
| I added bobcat, then lynx, and it would not accept lynx because
| bobcat was there.
|
| Oh, and, 77, just woke up. No coffee.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Likewise, it wouldn't accept "panther" because "tiger" was
| already there:
|
| > I assume you mean "panther" in the general sense of any big
| cat.
|
| Why on Earth would it assume mean _that_ , of all things,
| rather than "black panther"? If it's gonna be pedantic about
| it, it could've complained about "leopard" and "jaguar"
| already being there (which they were) instead of complaining
| about an animal that nobody in their right mind would call a
| "panther".
| Scarblac wrote:
| There is no actual "panther" animal though, the word is
| used for several different animals (leopards, jaguars and
| pumas at least, I think).
|
| They can all have melanistic coats and are then often
| called black panthers. But that's not a species.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I believe the poster you're replying to understands that.
| They're noting that the complaint about panther was
| curiously because they had already listed tiger, which is
| practically never called a panther, and not because they
| already listed leopard, which is a cat that is often
| called a panther. The statement about meaning "any big
| cat" I would guess to be a confusion based on the name
| Pantherinae for the subfamily of Felidae of which all
| these big cats are part. Though the puma, which as you
| note is also called a panther, is in the different
| subfamily, Felinae.
|
| I personally just tend to avoid the word panther, because
| it very often causes confusion as to which cat you're
| talking about.
| Sharlin wrote:
| "Lynx" can refer to either the Eurasian lynx _(Lynx lynx)_
| specifically, or to the genus _Lynx_ and the four extant
| species in it (Eurasian lynx, Canada lynx, Iberian lynx,
| bobcat). And the game recognizes all the four lynx species as
| distinct animals if you use the full names. In general it
| understands imprecise common /genus names as hypernyms of the
| more precise species names, which is the correct way to do it
| IMO.
|
| In general, of course, even distantly related animals may
| share a common name due to superficial similarities - what is
| "robin", for example? The American robin was named after the
| European robin by analogy, simply because both happen to have
| a red breast. The two species aren't even in the same family.
| lelanthran wrote:
| 114, here, because it allows extinct animals (sabre tooth,
| Mammoth, stegasaurus, etc)
|
| Also, things we normally don't consider animals - tapeworm,
| aphid, etc.
|
| Also accepted blue whale, sperm whale and orca :-/
| david-gpu wrote:
| All of those species belong to the animalia kingdom. They
| _are_ animals. So are starfish. "Animal" doesn't mean
| "mammal".
| neogodless wrote:
| Ha I also got exactly 114, though I didn't think of
| literally any that you put in your comment (except a more
| generic "whale" guess.)
| cainxinth wrote:
| It raises the question: can a colony of individual animals
| (zooids in this case) that work cooperatively be called a
| singular animal itself? I think biologists say yes, but it's an
| interesting taxonomic boundary.
| eru wrote:
| We think cows are singular animals, despite being made up of
| lots of different organisms with different DNA. (Much of the
| diversity happening in the gut.)
| rlue wrote:
| I suspect all mammals depend on colonies of gut flora to
| survive. Humans are no exception.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I think the bacteria in your gut outnumber the human cells in
| your body.
| baxtr wrote:
| AFAIK, a "super-organism" composed of individual entities is
| defined as one where the long-term fitness interests of those
| individuals and their groups are completely and permanently
| aligned.
|
| For example an ant colony is a super-organism. That's why it
| makes sense for a soldier ant to die for her queen.
| billynomates wrote:
| Then why isn't a human a super-organism? We are composed of
| many different types of bacteria after all.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Some of the "entities" aren't aligned always, like when a
| person is pregnant for example. I think also our (human)
| cells doesn't operate as semi-autonomous agents with
| independent nervous systems and agency, unlike a ant
| colony.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| that's like saying tomato is a fruit
|
| in biological journal, sure - for practical purposes straight
| up no
|
| if it looks like a jellyfish, stings like a jellyfish and
| behaves like a jellyfish - then it doesn't matter what it looks
| like under a microscope, it is jellyfish
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| Many people now know that a tomato is a fruit, and will
| distinguish it with exactly the 'did you know a tomato is not
| a vegetable?' fun fact, so I'm not sure this is a great
| point. If someone asked me to list vegetables and they were
| being rigorous about it I wouldn't list a tomato. If they're
| not being rigorous about it then anything goes really -
| sometimes you can put things like apples in a salad so that
| must be a vegetable as well.
| moron4hire wrote:
| A tomato is definitely a vegetable.
|
| Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The
| classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a
| culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges,
| they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are
| culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as
| fruits.
|
| Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the
| chopping of ingredients and the application of a sauce to
| make a semi homogeneous dish. It is not strictly a dish of
| chopped vegetables, so putting apples "in a salad" doesn't
| mean the apple is being used as a vegetable. You can put
| meat in a salad and it doesn't make the meat a vegetable.
| Tuna salad can be made with no vegetables at all.
| eru wrote:
| Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense.
|
| > Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes
| termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits
| because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from
| the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the
| ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the
| seeds, making it a pome.
| moron4hire wrote:
| My point still stands
| keanebean86 wrote:
| These discussions are really fun to me. The opportunities
| to be absurdly pedantic are almost endless. Common words
| for things gloss over so many details. Most of the time
| those details aren't important but they still exist and
| there's someone on the internet that cares deeply about
| them.
| adrian_b wrote:
| We must accept that most people are careless in their
| choice of words, so they frequently do not use the words
| in their strict sense but they use them in a broad sense,
| instead of using the most appropriate word.
|
| However this is annoying, because especially with the
| modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive
| and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have
| become more and more ambiguous.
|
| For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and
| more frequent, especially when using a medium like an
| Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you
| want to be certain that you will be understood correctly,
| more and more often you are forced to first define
| exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because
| the same words may be used by others with different
| meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used
| only the meaning that you want.
| almosthere wrote:
| TIL tomatoes ARE vegetables and apples ARE NOT fruit!
| adrian_b wrote:
| In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its
| current culinary meaning.
|
| In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its
| original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia",
| as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum",
| referred to any living beings capable of growth, but
| incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial
| plants.
|
| Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots,
| bulbs, leaves, stems, etc. are all parts of vegetables.
|
| What in English is now called "vegetables" corresponds to
| the Latin word "holera", whose original meaning was
| "greens", and not at all with the Latin word
| "vegetabilia". Also English "fruits" does not correspond
| with Latin "fructa", but with Latin "poma". Latin
| "fructa" referred to the useful results of some activity,
| a sense still encountered more rarely in English.
| moron4hire wrote:
| > a sense still encountered more rarely in English.
|
| I don't know what you mean by that. People do talk about
| "the fruits of" their labors.
| adrian_b wrote:
| That it what I mean.
|
| This old sense is encountered, like in your example, but
| much more often "fruits" is used in the culinary sense.
|
| Many people perceive your example as a metaphor, the
| results of the labor being compared with the fruits of a
| tree, but in reality the direction of the metaphor has
| historically been opposite, the fruits of the tree being
| called thus because they were considered the useful
| results of its cultivation.
| tolciho wrote:
| According to Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) a tomato is
| a vegetable, so the riourous may need to account for that
| in the appropriate jurisdictions, especially if tarrifs are
| on the line, or at least to rember to have bigger lawyers
| than the competition. Also a carrot is a fruit (in EU, for
| purposes of jam classification), "I can't believe that
| superhero doll is not a doll", etc.
| the_af wrote:
| Portuguese Man o' Wars look distinct enough from jellyfish.
| Their sails make parts of their bodies float above water,
| something no jellyfish can do to my knowledge. I can confuse
| species of jellyfish but there's no confusing the man o'
| wars...
| nitnelave wrote:
| I added "kudu", a type of antilope, and it replaced it with
| "turtle". I don't know the relationship between the 2, but it
| doesn't pass a toddler's sniff test!
| yorwba wrote:
| It's a bug with the way this disambiguation page is
| interpreted:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudu_(disambiguation)
| hyperno wrote:
| 110. my strategy is to use pokemon to remember animals. (i can
| list all 1025 pokemon from memory)
|
| not a great strat, though. (tons repeated animals)
| samename wrote:
| Fun results: outputted as emoji
|
| 30 animals listed
|
| Edit: weird... emojis don't work here? how have I never known
| this...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| We can at least practice egyptology.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Countdown timer seemed stuck at 1:16 and then was suddenly big
| red and almost out of time?
|
| 66 animals listed
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Fun :) but mobile text input was the main challenge.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm mildly bothered that I can't input "fox" because I already
| entered "fennec", and the game decided it should be "fennec fox"
| :)
| whtrbt wrote:
| You would need to say "red fox". I think that feature, managing
| specificity, is actually quite well implemented.
| pmcarlton wrote:
| 307. I think I could have kept going but I was exhausted.
| Dinosaurs helped a lot! My favorite easter egg was "sidewinder".
| elias1233 wrote:
| I created a similar game but where you can enter any category,
| for example programming languages, car brands or whatever. Of
| course uses LLMs https://gissallt.eliasf.se/
| grimgrin wrote:
| Not of course. You could have compiled datasets. Matter of fact
| I think that would be cooler for something with definitive
| lists
|
| LLMs could compile it for you, by sourcing X Y and Z
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| > great tit
|
| > Thanks!
|
| Amazing.
| lostlogin wrote:
| African swallow European swallow.
|
| Game over. You didn't list lion.
| bokkies wrote:
| Since this accepts all marine, freshwater and sky animals (birds)
| also this could take a very long time. For a bit more of a
| challenge in a shorter time list all animals starting with a
| particular letter. Time yourself a couple minutes to put some
| pressure on. Challenge your friends and family!
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I got to 60s before the lag became too much. I'm not sure "car"
| should be an accepted answer!
| guytv wrote:
| where are the high scores?
| jstanley wrote:
| Pretty cool but it won't allow "parrot" after "budgie" because
| budgie is more specific? A budgie isn't a parrot!
|
| (Wikipedia says it actually is a type of parrot, but I definitely
| refer to different types of bird when I refer to a "parrot" vs a
| "budgie")
| mcny wrote:
| It allowed me dingo after dog though.
| johtso wrote:
| This is the trouble with common names, the way to avoid
| ambiguity is to use the binomial name.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Also claims parakeets are parrots.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| High score was 322,740
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845068
| csomar wrote:
| Typing human has some nice visual effects and writes "That's me".
| Angostura wrote:
| I got:
|
| Already said more specific animal: Leopard I assume you mean
| "panther" in the general sense of any big cat.
|
| At that point I stopped playing because this seems nonsense
| vanderZwan wrote:
| A mere 69, but I wonder if I would do better in my native
| language. Also, once I discovered it accepts extinct animals I
| went all in on dinos and other extinct animals, that's like half
| of my score.
| patrick451 wrote:
| This game thinks buffalo and bison are the same thing and elk and
| deer are the same thing. Which is absurd, they even require
| buying different tags when hunting.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Elk are a species of deer and the American buffalo is also
| known as a bison.
| refrigerator wrote:
| Very fun and impressive to do this without LLMs!
|
| My score:
|
| 191 animals listed Li Tang
|
| (update: oh... looks like you can't paste the full emoji string
| here)
| eru wrote:
| That's weird. I tried Secretariat, which was definitely an animal
| and definitely has a Wikipedia page, but it wasn't accepted.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Token/type dichotomy irl. I was reading about it yesterday ^^.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Kicking myself because I ran out of time yet forgot to mention
| any vultures, elephants, or large cats. I guess that's for trying
| this first thing on a Sunday.
| jasona123 wrote:
| Did anyone else have the thought of "should I just list off all
| the Ubuntu version names that I know and start with that"?
| etothepii wrote:
| This was a lot of fun.
|
| The game mechanic of a count down timer made for much better
| play.
|
| I was most surprised for bluebottle to be replaced with man o'
| war. We know the man o' war here in bermud by that name whereas a
| bluebottle is what I would call house fly.
| jasinjames wrote:
| This is actually one of many techniques used to identify dementia
| symptoms. Hopefully 85 is enough to pass.
| grantseltzer wrote:
| https://rose.systems/animalist%0A%0A180%20animals%20listed%0...
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| TIL toads are frogs.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Proud I got 131 :)
| jonah wrote:
| At some point my wife recommended listing animals, flowers, etc.
| alphabetically as a way to distract the mind to help get to
| sleep. It's a great exercise.
| bonyt wrote:
| I just made a variant of this that uses the browser speech
| recognition API. It's simplified, with none of the flair of the
| original, but should be fun to play in person. It's fun to shout
| animal names at computer with friends.
|
| https://t.moveything.com/animalscream/
|
| (works best on desktop chrome. it's too slow on safari in my
| testing.)
| mastermedo wrote:
| Super fun, I'd love to get a little bit more time like in the
| OPs website for each animal that I guess right. Instead of 1
| second, it should be something like 6 because I can speak much
| much faster than the speech recognition is able to separate out
| my guesses.
| newzino wrote:
| This thread taking a hard left into "what even counts as X"
| (apples! jellyfish! definitions!) is peak HN energy. The game is
| fun; the accidental live demo of ontology pain is even better.
| piinbinary wrote:
| It didn't know about the Woodboring beetle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodboring_beetle
|
| Doing this felt odd, it was like it wore out something in my
| brain. After a while I could picture the animals I wanted to
| enter but I struggled to remember the word for them. Only now, a
| minute or so after stopping, could I remember 'Dragonfly'
|
| I was also amused by the reaction to "crab":
|
| > (Carcinization makes it hard to define "crab", so I'm going to
| pretend you said "brown crab".)
| zahrevsky wrote:
| Too bad it doesn't show some scoreboard or stats of other
| players.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| WTF? That is the most ominous count down to ten sequence I've
| seen on the internet. I felt like I was choosing between the blue
| wire and the red wire.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Funny how various colors are "animals."
| pcurve wrote:
| The result was rather depressing. I'm pushing 50 and I wasn't
| able to reach 50. I'm going to have to work on my recall skill.
| cbeach wrote:
| 57.
|
| Suggestion: show a distribution of scores at the end, so you can
| see how you did compared to others
| strstr wrote:
| This is more of a typing game than anything else. It rejected
| "blackcapped chickadee" (wanted black-capped chickadee). Frankly
| that felt a bit tedious on a phone. Had to scrub through to
| correct and lost.
| pests wrote:
| 70
|
| and it made fun of me for forgetting "dog" :(
| mooreds wrote:
| 103. Fun! Interesting it took werewolf but not jabberwocky.
| dluan wrote:
| i'm not typing out all of humuhumunukunukuapua'a, just accept
| humuhumu
| languagehacker wrote:
| Chipmunks are not squirrels
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > Chipmunks are small, striped squirrels of subtribe Tamiina.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipmunk>
|
| But I know what you mean.
| AdminAdmim wrote:
| I created a german version of it just because i know more animals
| in german
|
| https://animalist-de.marianzeis.de/
|
| https://github.com/marianfoo/animalist_de
| ssenssei wrote:
| This was actually really nice. I loved the concept and I was
| hopping for 100 but couldn't get to it.
|
| 60 animals listed
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Slugs and snails are not the same. I quickly Google'd the latin
| for a snail to work around it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-01 23:00 UTC)