The Unix Game | Hacker News Reader

The Unix Game

unixgame.io

267 pointsMilnerRoute65 comments

Speaking up here as the person that designed the game at Bell Labs: we'll get rid of the signup wall - it really was meant only to get a unique nickname so we can put your score up on the leaderboard. We like the suggestion of generating a unique bookmarkable url instead.

As for why we don't allow you to type commands into a terminal: the game is as much about solving a puzzle with the basic blocks you're given as it is about shell programming. For newcomers the scratch interface a nice way to explore the kinds of things one can do with the unix utilities (in case it wasn't clear: the game is meant to be approachable to people unfamiliar with unix)

And besides, if we'd give you hackers a full-blown shell, you'd solve most of the challenges in no-time - where's the fun in that? :)

cheers, Tom

As someone very unfamiliar with a Unix, it's an interesting learning experience. But I would have prefer to know earlier the existence of the on-hover command documentation: perhaps add a button next to each commands that would show the same documentation; that would help people unfamiliar with Unix to know what they can do.

Also perhaps a canonical/best practice answer for each question could be educational, perhaps with comments explaining why, again to help the newcomers: there's a bunch of valid answers, but I feel like there should be a better (or at least more elegant) solution.

Also, for those of you that already solved most of the challenges - stay tuned. We'll launch more challenges during a big Unix 50th anniversary celebration event taking place next week in Bell Labs HQ in Murray Hill, NJ.

I hope their analytics show how many user engagements their losing by trying to force Sign Up before anyone can evaluate it.

It did show, so we took action. You can now play anonymous.

Alas, most ad-blockers block analytics too, and all they'll see is a bunch of page loads in the access log.

This looks like fun. It'd be really nice if there was an option to just type the commands in instead of using the GUI, though I guess that would defeat the purpose a bit.

this

Ken Thompson and David Richie, Joe Osanna, Bob Morris, Dough McIlroy listed in the first game created UNIX. Ken was motivated by wanting to play games on the Bell Labs PDP.

"As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

Now the web runs on Linux which is similar but is not UNIX. I think its a good honor by Bell Labs creating a game that we can play.

http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html "The summer of 69"

Three great things coming out of 1969, UNIX, the Apollo 11 mission walk on the moon and Woodstock festival!

I'd be interested in a non-gamified CLI-builder GUI in this style; it'd be especially cool to surface flags from man pages. Many CLIs follow conventions or are easy to remember for basic use cases, but as soon as one is juggling a dozen flags and multiple pipes (ffmpeg comes to mind), it can be a tedious workflow to do it all from a terminal.

There's a block based editor for CLI programs in development: https://app.code-it-studio.de/project/303

We made it for educational purposes though, you can only run the programs inside the browser (yet).

I usually resort to making a bash script with a bunch of intermediate files at each step so I can see what’s happening.

Here’s a tool I’ve seen around but never had a big need for: https://github.com/akavel/up

Not a fan of scratch-like UIs but I figured I'd play around a bit. "Solved" the first problem and went to continue, but was met with a signup wall.

Immediately left with no intention to come back. Things like this absolutely destroy your funnel. Prompt me to sign up after I've made some progress, not before I've even gotten a feel for what you're offering.

This is a game made by a research lab for fun, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Unix. I'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond letting people have a little fun (and some advertising that something like the Bell Labs of old might still exist).

The signup annoyed me, too, but it just wants a username and password for the leaderboard. It's not collecting your e-mail address. (There was some kind of bug with the user creation step where it would keep prompting for your country. Reloading the page is a workaround.)

> I'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond letting people have a little fun (and some advertising that something like the Bell Labs of old might still exist).

I picked the word funnel because I'm on HN and that's the quickest way to convey that showing me a signup screen before I've done anything of value is going to lose me. Unless I clicked a button to sign up or went to do something that I have an intuition would result in a signup page, I usually click control-w before I'm conscious of why.

Most users don't care about leaderboards and global leaderboards have been shown to have a demotivating effect. There's a reason why most games that show leaderboards now default to a friends leaderboard, with the global one tucked away behind it.

Forcing a signup to enable something I don't care about doesn't seem like a great bargain to me. Prompt me to sign up in order to save my progress and I might do it. Prompt me as soon as I interact with the page and I'm out.

Next to no one cares about the free signup. Get a second email account for free and sign up and have fun. If you don’t like it, it’s your choice, but seems like it isn’t a big deal to me.

Forced account creation prompts are, in fact, a huge source of traffic bounce on most web apps despite most of them being free of charge. So your statement is plain false. Many people do find them to be a significant source of annoyance.

And it is self selecting. Filter for peeps who just don't care, and the ones who are really interested.

The hard cases are out of the funnel.

Maybe that has merit?

Not that I'm advocating forced signups. Hate em. But, I can see the logic in play here.

The point is: if you do it too early, you eliminate also those who could care, if you didn't break the delicate bonding proces with a brutal sign-up form.

Maybe. They could just as easily be hard cases too.

It is not always seen as delicate.

Ten years ago,maybe. Today my techie friends are guarded (and the way everybody is correlating and analyzing everything, a single “throwaway” email is again a decade past it’s usefulness as a construct), whereas my non techie friends are merely impatient and will go to buzzfeed to get their non-signup fun (rather than any conscious concern). So it’s mostly an attention span thing in my mind .

Always ask yourself what is that signup/gate costing vs what is it gaining you. If you are losing X percentage of users for no identifiable gain, the question should be why is it there, not why should it be removed / why is it a big deal to somebody .

You say "next to no one" but I certainly feel the same way, and his comment was the highest voted. So...

You don't even need an email account to sign up, but I certainly understand a reflexive rejection of unnecessary sign-ups.

I care. Forced signup is an instant tab close for me.

Signing up for and keeping track of alternate email addresses is fun?

Unfortunately a new generation of the funnel is gaining popularity in the last years: "sign up with your work e-mail", where Gmail etc. are rejected. So you need to make some effort to find a free e-mail provider that is not on their banned domains list. Unless of course you actually don't mind spam and pseudospam ("Hi it's Mike from MyStartup. Just checking up as you haven't replied to my previous message...") in your work mailbox.

The average HN user might balk on an early sign up wall (and become very upset), but that doesn't preclude it being the optimal placement for most undifferentiated users of your metric is purely the number of sign ups completed.

If it's made for fun, why is sign-up mandatory at all? Why can't I play the game without creating an account?

A bookmarkable private URL, ie some kind of unique token for each user, would have been easier than messing around with emails and annoying users.

There are no e-mails involved if you choose to create an account, just a choice of username and password.

Sure, there are lots of things they could have done better, but I admire outreach projects like this from research labs.

> There are no e-mails involved

That's not obvious from the sign up dialog, and like the top post I closed out of the site as soon as the dialog appeared.

> Not a fan of scratch-like UIs

I glanced at this on my phone earlier and thought "what fun!"

Then I looked at it on my laptop, intending to play. Nah, I only want to think about the text processing tools, I don't want to figure out a UI that has nothing to do with text processing tools.

Nice work, really, but I'm just going to play around in my terminal.

Couldn't have said it better myself

Saved me a click!

    $(".login-popup")[0].remove()

This was my exact experience. They provide a UI that doesn't allow me to type and then immediately after I'm done using it and want to get feedback I need to type? No thanks.

I think sign up is more for keeping tack of your score, which is a good thing. They dont even ask for your email when you dont choose either FB or Google, that's the thing that caught my attention. Scores can really make it fun.

Okay, but instead of the popup asking to immediately log in, say "Congratulations on solving the puzzle. To keep your score, create an account (or log in with Facebook, etc). Otherwise, you can continue to play ... "

Yup. Nowadays if I'm required to provide an email I will just bail. I would rather watch an ad than provide my info.

Let's make a unix game where you can't type commands in a terminal emulator... OK! Plus, facebook login? fuck off!

cool idea. but..

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat

2) speaking of #1, wheres < > &| etc?

3) Question #2:

    Extract only Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie's last names. Hint: look at Thompson and Ritchie's names in the list. What's special about the position of these lines in the file? Can you find a command that lets you get just those lines?

   um:

     egrep '(Thompson|Ritchie)' file


    there is more than one way to skin a cat, and some of these don't require static/fixed field numbers. and even then: `sed -ne 3,4p`. wheres that?

I can type the solutions in blind, the GUI fucks me up.

That send to be fully intentional - it's more challenging to solve the problems with a limited subset of commands and inputs (e.g. you're only allowed to grep for specific patterns)

When I run it:

1. The "c", " belle", and "poems" categories do not turn green when solved. Furthermore, none of them are counted solved on the leaderboard. This is probably why the leaderboard scores are bimodal.

2. Poem 4 is fundamentally misleading. It doesn't want the letters arranged in any sort of cross shape, it just wants a word like the others; producing the cross shape is impossible with the commands available, because the cut command does not accept ranges.

On 1.: you need to solve all questions in the challenge for the challenge to turn green. Try re-submitting your solutions. It should have remembered them. On 2.: the results should not be arranged as a cross; the source is.

I have systematically re-submitted all the solutions several times. All are judged solved.

Look at your leaderboard. Is that a plausible distribution of scores?

Yes it is. We have 3847 registered players out of which 131 have top scores... We don't show the full leaderboard; only the top 30, and then you, you +3, you -3 so you know where you are approximately. Granted, this could be made clearer...

And now we do make it clearer. Hope you like it. Thanks for the feedback!

None of this addresses the problem that it is failing to record successful solutions.

It's great that it works ok for some players, but if this degree of dismissal is typical, I see no reason to communicate further.

Looks like it is fixed now.

But first it erased all of my solutions that it had failed to register.

From the initial screen, I would use gawk (or awk if I had to).

The webpage has too much JavaScript and doesn't completely load under my slow network, so I'm not sure what are allowed to use in the game. But to an first impression, I think the game should encourage the participate to solve the problems in different approaches, although Unix pipe is powerful, sometimes a 5-line awk program or a "for loop" in bash is more effective.

Lost me at "please log in or register."

What's the valid output for question 2 on Unix Evolution?

I tried Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, 07974 & Murray Hill Computer Center, but both weren't accepted

Murray Hill

Thank you.

I've had some fun, (re)learned a little about Unix commands, since I'm only using Windows.

We took a brick out the wall. You can now play anonymously. Thanks for the feedback!

If you enjoy this, you might also enjoy www.vimgolf.com

Not a fan of the idea that I can't move forward until I log into something.

I'm fine with my games not being saved, I just wanted to mess around.

Click the third option, choose a random username and password, then have fun.

This is one of the worst anti-patterns that I've seen in a while.

I tried test/test. Clicking to log in and nothing happens.

Good point! You can now hit the "Just Play!" button.

These would be really easy if I could use my little tool [1]

[1] https://github.com/thisredone/rb

Reply on news.ycombinator.com