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Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions

Some months ago @andrewrn tried to create a Wordle-style site for order-of-magnitude thinking. This was a wonderful idea, but the actual site was somewhat over-engineered and confusing. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632278)

In the past week, I looked at this idea again and built a very simple site which gives you a new Fermi estimation question every day:

How many new cars were sold in the US in 2024?; How many humans have ever lived (including those currently alive)?; How many chickens are slaughtered for meat every year?

To win, you need a guess within ±20% of the correct answer. For this you have a maximum of 6 tries and after each guess, you can see if your answer was too high or too low.

Fermi questions are, by the way, a wonderful way to build up your own numeracy and sense for order-of-magnitude differences. Douglas Hofstadter proposed using them for exactly this reason in his essay "Number Numbness, or Why Innumeracy May Be Just as Dangerous as Illiteracy" (https://gwern.net/doc/math/1982-hofstadter-2.pdf)

I like the concept but it's basically a bisect / binary search simulator. Guess a reasonable but definitely high number as a high bound, a reasonable but definitely low number as a low bound, guess the average of the two, then the average of that and the high or low bound, etc.

This is especially the case when the question is asking for a bounded number in the first place (eg a percentage). In fact I'm pretty certain you should _always_ succeed within 4 steps given +-10 on a percentage question and nearly always within 3 steps. ChatGPT says it's provably so but I'm not smart enough to verify. Rings true though.

Certainly made easier by knowing whether it's higher or lower, and especially with the yellow arrows if you're not too far off.

One UX change that might be nice is to have a "spoken" version of your guess live-update below the input. I keep having to count zeroes and it would be nicer to see "Eleven billion".

3 days agoby hebejebelus

Hi, I'm the @andrewrn mentioned.

For those interested, I did polish the initial app a lot: https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ (bad news though... I over-engineered it even further I think. It's my first real public project, so I learned my lesson to viciously descope the mvp). Some of the comments here (like scientific notation and sharing) are present in my project. I tried to re-share after polishing but the HN link sharing dynamics have been a bit opaque to me and kept the project buried when posted.

It's clear to me that there is a lane here for a fun brain teaser/exercise. Just getting the answer right on 2 tried on OP's version by guessing ~5% of 330M population buying new car was a nice hit of dopamine. Combining a little math and world-knowledge is pleasing, it would seem.

@danielfetz, any interest in collaborating?

3 days agoby andrewrn

User with Spanish keyboard here: when I enter 99999 it formats it as 99.999 and when I submit it, it shows as 99, because it uses the dot as decimal separator that is the way we do over here.

Otherwise the UI and concept looks pretty interesting. But until that is fixed, it is unplayable for me.

(On an iPhone, using Safari)

3 days agoby plaguna

I found the arrows misleading. Interpreted them as "should my next guess be higher or lower" and not as "current guess as too high/low". I'd prefer it written out "that was too high" or similar.

2 days agoby riidom

This was really fun.

After about ~10 questions though, I started getting the same question every time. Like five times in a row.

3 days agoby estomagordo

An interesting game, if you can come up with enough good questions. (At least it isn't telling me which digits are right, but in the wrong place).

With a target of 20% accuracy, it won't make much difference, but I think that symmetrical error bounds are appropriate in this case - the factor by which the answer is wrong. so 2 times too big, is as good as 2 times too small.

2 days agoby mike-the-mikado

Can't play the game. My local use space ' ' as a hundred separator.

So, I any guess above 1 000 is truncated. 1 000 is 1.

2 days agoby _ache_

The classic question of this type from high school physics/chem class is "How many molecules from Caesar's dying breath are in a persons lungs now?"

2 days agoby dave333

Do you think you could support typing answers in scientific notation? So 8e9 for 8,000,000,000. It would make typing in answers easier considering my guesses always end in a bunch of zeroes!

Does the orange mean your answer is within 25% of the absolute value? Or that your logarithm value is within 25% of the logarithm value of the true answer?

Thanks for making this, this is awesome

3 days agoby gabagool

Would be nice to show users their % off between their first guess and the answer. If I'm close but get unlucky and it still takes me 3+ guesses, at least I can see that my initial guess wasn't too far off.

Then report the average of this metric over time with each game.

3 days agoby lorenzohess

117B people have lived on the planet!?!?!?!

This is a really cool game. I was so off!

3 days agoby ishita159

Very neat! I'd love a feature where I can share my score with a link to the website (although it's possible there already is one and I just missed it).

3 days agoby mondobe

Geez, I seem to be particularly good at this. Made my day!

1 day agoby d--b