Pretty cool, zombie mode morning with addition only and number limit of 30: "You scored 504. You are better than 100 %"
I am sure this will be easily beat by all the caffeinated people pretty soon.
Updated: this is actually easier with all the other options enabled because you get easy things like sqrt([4, 16, 25]), x * [0,1], and x / [1, 2] a lot. I was actually over 30 seconds on timer when I hit 18^2 question. "You scored 576. You are better than 100 %"
Updated 2: I tried raising number limit to max (1000) and suddenly life on hard mode. I got through 272/16 and 930/31, but third question 127 * 49 killed me. "You scored 64. You are better than 27 %"
Score multiplier and number of operators selected directly influence the score. So setting slider to 10 and enabling all operators gives 7 points per question and increasing slider to a 100 raises that to 16 points per question.
What I meant to way was that you're not being ranked amongst your peers. Saying that you're "better than 100%" or any other percentage is just a result of the assumption that a really good score is 200.
At default settings, only boredom makes me run out of time. [Actually, waiting a full minute or so for time to run out was too boring, too. I changed settings before that]
Addition up to 1000 is reasonably fun, but also feels like it would be doable for a really long time with a physical keyboard and at full attention (I got 3328).
That also is a weak point of games like this. IMO, games are good if you can play them without attending to them or when they provide interesting problems. Games with dull problems that require your attention fail. A prime example of the first game type is Tetris; I use to say that your spinal cord can play it. Examples of the second type are Sokoban and (a million times so) DROD (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_of_Death)
With all operations checked and numbers up to 1000, I find I need more time, and scoring seems brutal (only 16 points after 2 or 3 correct amswers?)
I also find it a bug that you get subtractions with negative numbers as answers.
Finally, is it a bug or a feature that starting a game gets you the same problem and partial answer that the last game finished with? It helps in doing a post-mortem, but can make it really hard to get that first answer right.
It's also "the worst" feature in Windows Explorer folder view; when it switched from going up the folder tree to going to the previous folder and throwing an error if that folder doesn't exist anymore.
I crazy love how it auto submits your answers for you, super convenient! My dad made me do similar online mental math exercises when I was younger and I always hated how clicking "next" reduced my time. Does it take into account what your settings were when it reports your score relative to others?
The number limit should be more granular, or even it would be nice to be able to "pin" one number... i'm thinking of studying times tables for my children! other than that, very nice
For me there is a set of calculations I can do without thinking and there is a set where it takes several seconds to figure the solution out. No smooth transition. Is it the same for you? If yes, this would make tuning this game pretty hard because it is either to easy or to hard.
Yeah, I was sent a link to a similar site yesterday (timed mental arithmetic/algebra), and was thinking exactly the same thing: divided by types, half the problems I could do instantly with almost no thought, but the other half, regardless of how easy, took a few seconds.
I noticed that with, for example, multiplication, I have a set of rote-learned answers for calculations that aren't 2, 5 or *10, and if the answer isn't one of those answers, I'll get the closest answer I can remember, and work back/forward from that. It's entirely habit, and I can't stop myself doing it. Algebra as well, I always have a moment where I swap parts of the equation in my head; even if it's utterly simple, there's still a noticeable cognitive step.
When I turned squares on I hit a wall at 23^2 etc. I can do it, but it's 10 seconds just to do that calc. Basically anything bigger than 14.
For the rest it was more about staring at the numpad (which I never use) and typing in my answer. If I typo'd I lost several seconds as I'd not have a finger on backspace :(
This is pretty cool but, is it a game? I can't see how solving math problems under a time limit can be useful for anything besides a math exam or some other academic test.
A long time ago, I read an article concerning mathematical problems and how solving them improves (probably short term) intelligence. It turned out that simple arithmetic was the most useful. Of course, I can't find the source right now.
My experience has been that mental math training, while not directly useful, generally seems to improve the way my brain works and enhances my analytic thinking.
This effect is a lot more tangible with longer, multi-step problems. In college (physics major) I made a point of doing every integral in my head if I could, and over time I found that my mental 'scratch space' seemed to be getting longer - that I could hold more in my short-term memory at once.
I've also observed that being a person who is 'good at math' approximately correlates with being a person who does math in your head.
[Related observation: that students strongly segregate into "good at math" vs not, as though many people are completely incapable of a mode of thought that comes naturally to others. I think it's trainable, and people who never do any math, especially in their heads, are specifically not training it.]
These are entirely anecdotal and I'd love to find more concrete data, but, right now I would absolutely vouch for mental math training.
General problem solving and critical thinking is good mental training. Timed arithmetic drills are neither, and I really should hope that arithmetic doesn't count as "critical thinking" for the majority of the audience on HN.
I have to agree - for all the talk of "mental training", is there any actual evidence that arithmetic drills will actually help with problem-solving and critical-thinking?
My point in the parent post was that I have a lot of anecdotal reason to believe this. Enough to be pretty confident I could find actual evidence, but I haven't looked very hard.
No one has claimed that arithmetic trains you at critical thinking. It trains you at a certain kind of abstract thought, and I'm specifically stating that I have found that very valuable.
This is just a slightly-gamified version of mental arithmetic training flashcards. Are you questioning why mental arithmetic is useful? There are lots of places where it can improve your ability to understand the information around you.
If you're reading a graph, you should be asking yourself a ton of questions about it. A lot of those questions can be answered with mental math if you're proficient at it. If you weren't, you'd have to resort to a calculator or other tool, and the switching cost keeps most people from doing this:
examples: what's the ratio between these two values? How did it change? I have this per minute (or, in my case, a per 4 minutes) rate. What is that per day? How much did that drop by (absolute and relative)
The point isn't that people who are bad at math can't compute these things in the real world. They can, and often do, whether with calculator, on paper, slower in their brains, or with a different query or better analysis tool. But people who do these operations quickly mentally do it more, do it more quickly, and can digest and filter more numeric information.
I've played with many of these. And this one is pretty good. One thing that I'd like to see is a "verbal" option in these types of apps. I have trouble "hearing" math and keeping it in my head. I envision an app speaking the problem, then you have to type in the answer. It requires both math and keeping the problem in your head. Lastly, a verbal or speaking option maps to many real world scenarios.
>I have trouble "hearing" math and keeping it in my head.
I have the exact same problem. Interestingly, it's a problem for me both in my native language and in several other languages I learned to fluency. So clearly, the "hears numbers" part of my brain is deficient.
I've actually practiced to try to overcome this, and made no progress.
On the other hand, I'm quite good at visual calculations, and also at remembering numbers when I see them. So if I bother writing down a phone number, I can easily remember it for a long time.
I like how it remembers your worst answer and reminds you what's the correct answer!
The victory animation was a bit terrifying though, like one of those "stare at the screen" pranks :) Cheers
Noticed some fun SEO hacking at the bottom of the page:
<p class="hardly-visible">puzzles calculate formula mathematics maths decimal number calculating mathematician multiply measurement probability equation division measure homework units word problem solve converting resources tessellation anxiety math problem problems convert unit ratio number trigonometry perimeter divide mental multiplication calculus math quadratic triangle teselation problems pi change equations homeschool fraction tesellation converter maths problems fractions conversion math prime mathmagic Theorem calculator percent magic homework fractol volume math math tesselation math math math mathematical statistic unit geometry math polygon square math pre-algebra algebra word statistics games area math Pythagorean fractal history trapezoid maths conversion circle numbers circle </p>
Yeah, and I don't understand why people still do that. It may work. For like a couple of weeks, before you get banned forever.
It's even easier to do stuff the right way, especially in a one page design. Just leave the logic up above. Then put a long, well written text about math, the importance of brain exercise and a description of the game with well divided H1/H2 headings, below it. Here's all the SEO you need. The link from HN and all the sites that scrape it will do the rest.
Could Google theoretically calculate the probability that some text on a webpage is extremely hard or impossible for humans to readily see based on info from the source page about the background and text?
Well I said probability because depending on how complex the background is such as photographs, video, or some weird scrolling behavior, there could be some hindrances to having a computer accurately or computationally-efficiently determine this.
Google uses filters, which run in different intervals apart from the main algorithm and have different effects for a page or the whole website. This is why spammy SEO tactics often "work for a while" - until said computationally intensive filter catches them and often punishes the whole website. Prominent examples for these filters are Panda [0] and Penguin [1].
It'd be pretty cool if this actually had leaderboards, perhaps one leaderboard per set of options, limited to clusters so as to minimize the amount of leaderboards.
Such as "arithmetic, multiplication+division, arithmetic and mutliplication+division, free for all"
Was pretty upset to see that the result for scoring 5xx was the same as my next run of 7920
A leaderboard wouldn't be meaningful -- Client-side code isn't secure, and people could set scores to whatever they like. Or, just for fun, I played with the page a bit via dev tools, added in a script to automatically calculate the answer, put it in the input, and trigger the keyup event to run their submit function... worked great.
There is nothing wrong with client-side tools. I have a few on my site that get decent usage. But unless you put some security and validation on the server-side, any data coming back is not trustworthy.
It's boring at some point. You should make a countdown instead: you have, say, 1 minute to answer as much questions as you can (with an possible skip button).
At first I actually thought that's what the game would be. I was pleasantly surprised that it was more like juggling, by the end when I had 1-2 seconds per problem, I was far more interested. Something about keeping up the "combo" but testing my arithmetic was quite pleasurable.
I got redirected to the Google Play store. If I'm on Android why can't I use the website like everyone else? Please don't assume I want to install an app.
In addition to a leader board, it needs to:
- Have a time limit and see who can get the most calculations done on that fixed time
- or, have a fixed number of calculations and see how fast people can answer them
- or, it could get faster as you progress
The calculation of the "you are better than X%" needs to be fixed because everybody in my office was better than 100%
I was thinking
maybe instead of a leaderboard, graphs/analysis of raw data would be very cool, such as accuracy and answers per second and total score, and how those stats match up with the rest of the people who have played
122 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadI am sure this will be easily beat by all the caffeinated people pretty soon.
Updated: this is actually easier with all the other options enabled because you get easy things like sqrt([4, 16, 25]), x * [0,1], and x / [1, 2] a lot. I was actually over 30 seconds on timer when I hit 18^2 question. "You scored 576. You are better than 100 %"
Updated 2: I tried raising number limit to max (1000) and suddenly life on hard mode. I got through 272/16 and 930/31, but third question 127 * 49 killed me. "You scored 64. You are better than 27 %"
No real ranking data is being used in this calculation
Score multiplier and number of operators selected directly influence the score. So setting slider to 10 and enabling all operators gives 7 points per question and increasing slider to a 100 raises that to 16 points per question.
You scored 666 You are better than 100 %
Addition up to 1000 is reasonably fun, but also feels like it would be doable for a really long time with a physical keyboard and at full attention (I got 3328).
That also is a weak point of games like this. IMO, games are good if you can play them without attending to them or when they provide interesting problems. Games with dull problems that require your attention fail. A prime example of the first game type is Tetris; I use to say that your spinal cord can play it. Examples of the second type are Sokoban and (a million times so) DROD (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_of_Death)
With all operations checked and numbers up to 1000, I find I need more time, and scoring seems brutal (only 16 points after 2 or 3 correct amswers?)
I also find it a bug that you get subtractions with negative numbers as answers.
Finally, is it a bug or a feature that starting a game gets you the same problem and partial answer that the last game finished with? It helps in doing a post-mortem, but can make it really hard to get that first answer right.
(I hate backspace-to-go-back. It's the worst feature in a browser. Is there a way to turn it off?)
This mental math exercise is a cool and fun concept! Good execution.
I love this feature. Makes browser navigation keyboard friendly.
Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I noticed that with, for example, multiplication, I have a set of rote-learned answers for calculations that aren't 2, 5 or *10, and if the answer isn't one of those answers, I'll get the closest answer I can remember, and work back/forward from that. It's entirely habit, and I can't stop myself doing it. Algebra as well, I always have a moment where I swap parts of the equation in my head; even if it's utterly simple, there's still a noticeable cognitive step.
For the rest it was more about staring at the numpad (which I never use) and typing in my answer. If I typo'd I lost several seconds as I'd not have a finger on backspace :(
n^x = (n-m)(n+m) + m^2
so for 23:
23^2 = 20*26 + 9 = 529
window.setInterval(function(){$('#question-answer').val(eval($('#question').html().replace("×","").replace("÷","/").replace(/(.)²/,"Math.pow($1,2)").replace(/√(.*)/,"Math.sqrt($1)"))).trigger("keyup")},10)
This effect is a lot more tangible with longer, multi-step problems. In college (physics major) I made a point of doing every integral in my head if I could, and over time I found that my mental 'scratch space' seemed to be getting longer - that I could hold more in my short-term memory at once.
I've also observed that being a person who is 'good at math' approximately correlates with being a person who does math in your head.
[Related observation: that students strongly segregate into "good at math" vs not, as though many people are completely incapable of a mode of thought that comes naturally to others. I think it's trainable, and people who never do any math, especially in their heads, are specifically not training it.]
These are entirely anecdotal and I'd love to find more concrete data, but, right now I would absolutely vouch for mental math training.
If you're reading a graph, you should be asking yourself a ton of questions about it. A lot of those questions can be answered with mental math if you're proficient at it. If you weren't, you'd have to resort to a calculator or other tool, and the switching cost keeps most people from doing this:
examples: what's the ratio between these two values? How did it change? I have this per minute (or, in my case, a per 4 minutes) rate. What is that per day? How much did that drop by (absolute and relative)
The point isn't that people who are bad at math can't compute these things in the real world. They can, and often do, whether with calculator, on paper, slower in their brains, or with a different query or better analysis tool. But people who do these operations quickly mentally do it more, do it more quickly, and can digest and filter more numeric information.
I have the exact same problem. Interestingly, it's a problem for me both in my native language and in several other languages I learned to fluency. So clearly, the "hears numbers" part of my brain is deficient.
I've actually practiced to try to overcome this, and made no progress.
On the other hand, I'm quite good at visual calculations, and also at remembering numbers when I see them. So if I bother writing down a phone number, I can easily remember it for a long time.
But hearing it? Nothing.
If you don't care about the setting: 1. Click "Play game" 2. Press 2, Enter, Star once it loads.
Make 24. Enter the two intermediate results. Numpad plus repeats the question.
I don't know if this is a good place to start if you have trouble hearing but might be fun for practice anyway.
<p class="hardly-visible">puzzles calculate formula mathematics maths decimal number calculating mathematician multiply measurement probability equation division measure homework units word problem solve converting resources tessellation anxiety math problem problems convert unit ratio number trigonometry perimeter divide mental multiplication calculus math quadratic triangle teselation problems pi change equations homeschool fraction tesellation converter maths problems fractions conversion math prime mathmagic Theorem calculator percent magic homework fractol volume math math tesselation math math math mathematical statistic unit geometry math polygon square math pre-algebra algebra word statistics games area math Pythagorean fractal history trapezoid maths conversion circle numbers circle </p>
It's even easier to do stuff the right way, especially in a one page design. Just leave the logic up above. Then put a long, well written text about math, the importance of brain exercise and a description of the game with well divided H1/H2 headings, below it. Here's all the SEO you need. The link from HN and all the sites that scrape it will do the rest.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin
There is nothing wrong with client-side tools. I have a few on my site that get decent usage. But unless you put some security and validation on the server-side, any data coming back is not trustworthy.
In addition to a leader board, it needs to: - Have a time limit and see who can get the most calculations done on that fixed time - or, have a fixed number of calculations and see how fast people can answer them - or, it could get faster as you progress
The calculation of the "you are better than X%" needs to be fixed because everybody in my office was better than 100%