Show HN: Antimatter – Match the opposites (Mahjong solitaire mechanic)

Show HN: Antimatter – Match the opposites (Mahjong solitaire mechanic)(linguabase.org)

12 points by michaeld123 68 days ago | 5 comments

I love word association games. Here's a playable wordplay game where you match opposite word tiles. After playtesting a lot of mechanics, I think opposites play really nicely with Mahjong solitaire.

The current generation of frontier LLMs can't make puzzles that get much more interesting than hot-vs-big-vs-fast. New inferences keep circling a small pool of concepts unless the prompting has a way to get the LLM into new territories of language. Puzzlemaking needs graph traversals.

I made 20 levels algorithmically because I work with a huge semantic graph with over 100M edges, built from manual lexicography and millions of LLM inferences (various models). I keep exploring what can emerge from this graph. The puzzles are randomly selected; reload to see others.

The front-end was built with Claude Code.

Maybe someday I'll make this into a mobile game, increase the complexity and peril. If you are a gamedev, feel free to dissect it and borrow any parts.

sxp 68 days ago |

Nice game.

But I think you need to work on better "opposites". E.g, "as of now" and "long ago" don't really seem to be opposite. Instead, maybe they're complex conjugates of each other. I.e, they have similarities along one axis (time frame) and differences along another. But I wouldn't consider those two to be opposite one another. Word2vec with a consine similarity closer to -1 might be better than what you're using now.

michaeld123 68 days ago | |

the older generation of vectors, like word2vec, compress to one sense of a word, but even if we ignore polysemy, opposites have a lot in common. So for any antonym pair, they would not be minus-1, they would be actually pretty close.

The big challenge is when we go beyond antonyms with clear scales like heat, speed, size. To me "as of now" is recent, and therefore opposite to "old". I would like a word other than "opposite" or "antonym" or "contrast" that captures a wider range.

thrance 68 days ago |

Interesting idea, but sometimes the associations feel a bit arbitrary. Also, I'm unsure about the "mahjong" presentation: since the game shuffles automatically when you're out of options and never leaves you in a dead end, the player is incentivized to minimize the amount of options they have at any given time, since that makes the game easier.

michaeld123 68 days ago | |

Both your points are solid. I think I'm pretty liberal about opposites, I can see opposites to major political and cultural figures too. You are right that the mahjong presentation loses rigor if there's not enough downside from choosing the wrong sequence. The mobile mahjong games often have a small fill-tray so the player needs to really focus on the sequence.

yellowapple 67 days ago |

On screens that are taller than they're wide, a lot of the longer words get truncated, such that I have zero idea what they are until I've found a match for them (usually after blowing many moves on finding that match).

Also, how are “feuding” and “buddies” not opposites?