Show HN: I made a little math game named Summle(summle.net) I made this game for my children to play, as they are heavily into Wordle, and I thought they'd also like something maths based! Every puzzle is solvable and has at least one solution (usually more). There is a kids mode in the settings, plus a hard mode for extra difficulty. |
Mathematician here. It's fun, but it's quite hard! How old are your children?
[spoiler alert?]
I finally solved it in 4 steps. It needs a lot of backtracking planning. I has to guess which will be the last expression and try to reach the numbers that it used.
I don't play too much Wordle, but my approach was just trying to find a word that is not to stupid (like reusing a lot of letters that are already grey) and just hopping that that the new info will make the next step easier.
I ended up creating a mental factorization table of the target number with only the available numbers as factors. That pretty "quickly" lead to a solution in only three steps.
I put the "quickly" in scare quotes because I essentially brute forced the problem.
But yes, I factored the result in my head. I would have done the same with (result ± any of the other numbers), if necessary.
Also, for the simple one, I immediately recognized 243 as a power of 3, so maybe, I’m not in the target group ;-)
You have +,-, * ,/. But no ^. Why ?
I used to ask a^b * c^d=abcd as an interview question. In most programming languages its a 4-line nested loop to find the unique solution.
Light spoiler: gurer vf n fbyhgvba juvpu qbrf abg hfr bar uhaqerq
I am only recording successful attempts, which for the regular puzzle is around 33% so far today. I might compile stats on solve time too.
2) It does not appear to remember your game if you close the browser and return as wordle does. The solution you entered is then hidden. https://imgur.com/a/IEFRFnT
it would be nice to be able to get back to this screen once you've completed it even if you close the browser https://imgur.com/a/DDkF7On
The reset upon completion is intentional, as there is (usually) more than one solution to be found. For the purposes of stats recording, only the first successful attempt is registered.
a bit of feedback, can you make it so that if you type an operation on the first block of a line it takes the last result as the first item and fills the op as the second item?
the thing that trips me up playing is thinking like:
"50 plus 3 is 53, minus 7 is 46, times 3 is 138"
so I'd type 5 + 3 - 7... i.e I press the operation right away instead of typing the last result before the op... oddly frustrating! and I keep on doing it over and over again!
oh, and I second the request to clear the board, reloading just doesn't cut it: it's a full, slow enough RTT to the server that I type on all inputs to clear them up instead. plus when added to the home screen as a web app on iOS there's no way to reload except killing the app... a bit frustrating also!
You can burn yourself early by doing an incorrect equation, and the only way to finish is to reset by refreshing the page.
So it is more of a learning game then a competitive/iterative game.
You could do it all in your head (or in another program/on paper) to do it the best way on your first try, but you can't fix mistakes once trying something teaches you something.
The difficulty levels seem right for my level at least - kids mode was almost instant, regular took a bit of thinking, advanced still has me stumped:(
Please consider a "clear all" button. I know you want to keep the UI simple and that I can refresh the page, but this seems like an omission considering how much trial and error I'm doing on advanced mode.
Also, maybe an "I give up" button, hidden somewhere in a modal. I suspect I'm not going to have time to solve this before the next puzzle comes along, but I still want to know the solution.
I like it. Some UX tweaks would be nice, maybe an undo, a clear all, and perhaps some helpful focus shifting (of which tile is being intended for a click) depending on context.
a) Can you publish daily solutions to yesterday's problems? I'd really like to see the solution to #8-Hard (1,6,7,7,50,100 Target: 875)
b) Can you add links to archived previous problems?
How does the "app" feature work? Was it easy to make (given a static site)?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
You can't just randomly put in a combination and then use it or get info.. you really need to plan the whole thing out before doing anything.
Edit: And another 6 minutes for the 'hard' version (4 steps).
Pretty cool puzzle, reminds me of this: https://blog.plover.com/math/24-puzzle.html
Is "hard mode" based on difficulty judged by a solver? It feels like something that would more easily differentiate the modes would be adding extra numbers instead of 6 for all modes.
Or that there were multiple solutions.
In the end, I did all the steps in my head, and then refreshed the page to do it in 3 steps.
But it's not really an "iterative" game.
It's a good, educational game that makes you think. It just feels very different from something like Wordle, and that's OK.
Now that I got the hang of it, I tried the easy and hard modes as well, and got them both on the first try without having to undo anything.
But as others said, I looked at the available numbers, figured out what I had to multiply to get close, what I'd have to add/subtract to get the rest of the way, and how I'd use the leftover numbers there to make the addition/subtraction possible.
Basically I brute-forced it in my head. But I think it would be enjoyable if it somehow felt more iterative, and less like I was working from the solution backwards, and then just filling the steps in all at once.
This did not come naturally for me. Spent about 30 mins on it. After a long time, I opened my calc app and worked backwords. From there it only took a few mins..
EDIT: hints might be nice to make it more wordle like
For the hard one, 612 is not an easy number to find, but basic math shows that 6+1+2=9 so the number is divisible by 3 (and I won't go any farther to prevent spoiling it) Finding a system by which you create the situations that allow the operands and factors to be discovered while also flexing your basic math skills is the fun of the game.