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Show HN: Visualize Graph Theory

treksit.netlify.app

147 pointsmaxraz44 comments

Appears to be a repackaging of Tronix by Danijel Durakovic.[1] Includes his code but this is not mentioned in the credits.[2]

[1] http://pulzed.com/ [2] https://treksit.netlify.app/credits.html

Yup, totally plagiarized.

Changed a few colors, and added a background that makes the page lag. Didn't change the text or even the order of the levels. The small size of the bounding box is because he didn't expand it from the original.

Meanwhile, the post is still at the top of HN and he keeps receiving clicks. Can the mods change the link to the original one?

I did flag it. Maybe more people flagging it would help?

Plagiarism really does get my dander up.

This is inexcusable.

Thanks for the link - this version is -much- better in my opinion! None of the needless junk, just a great game.

Someone with mod power should change the link to the original.

Anyone notify Danijel yet?

I invented this game in 2005, it's called Planarity.

http://planarity.net/

It has a wikipedia page!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarity

Since Flash is dead I rewrote in JavaScript:

http://johntantalo.com/raphael.planarity/

Here's a short doc about how the puzzle generation algorithm works:

http://johntantalo.com/wiki/Planarity/

Wow, you got cloned by Tatham fast

    Author: Simon Tatham <anakin@pobox.com>
    Date:   Sat Jul 16 19:51:53 2005 +0000

    New puzzle: `Untangle', cloned (with the addition of random grid
    generation) from a simple but rather fun Flash game I saw this
    morning.

How much did you make via PayPal donations back then, if you don't mind my asking?

Fun challenge, but the draggable area for the graphs is small, and it's not obvious where the boundaries are. I kept going past that boundary then realizing I can't set a vertex down.

That’s also one of the puzzles in Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/)

Yeah, I was going to say, I've played a lot of this because I ran Kubuntu on my laptop for several years and Simon Tatham’s games are sort of our win-98-minesweeper.

Simon Tatham's puzzles are also available as mobile apps -- ad-free, and highly recommended -- and can also be played via the Web. The Signpost puzzle is my personal favourite. :)

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Very cool. Increase the drag boundary box immediately.

That's neat, but I'm not sure I learned about graph theory. I liked playing with it but the background was a bit too much for my eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarity_testing

Nice game, but the moving background somehow makes me quite nauseous.

I am not sure I learned anything about graph theory from playing this.

Liked it, except the limited boundary and the irritating animated background. Staring at the screen for a minute makes me dizzy

Nobody tell them about hyperspeed (click and hold on the background) ;)

I like this, but I swear there was a Flash version of something very similar that went viral about 15 years ago.

"planarity"

The game is cool, but I think the title is overly general. It contaons a graph visualizer, which doesn't show much in the way of theory; and it's a railroad, not a playground.

No- he outright plagiarized this. Even the code: http://pulzed.com/

Yeah, I saw that in another comment and flagged the posting.

I feel like most of these graphs seem to be the same graph just with a different initial conditions?

Here's a Numberphile video that talks about embedding graphs. I think this happens because the subset of graphs that are able to be embedded in a plane is actually fairly limited.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBkTIp6ajAg

For anyone wanting to play it a bit bigger (albeit a bit blurry) and without the background you can load the iframe directly https://treksit.netlify.app/tron/

It's cool (well, not cool if these accusations of plagiarism are true, but superficially cool at least), but for some reason, the combination of frustration, tiny working area, and horrendous background really raised my anxiety levels.

Feels a bit like untangling rope, which makes sense

I like, but: Boundary, background, no "you've finished" (it just stops advancing). Also, I have not had a productive day.

Spoiler Alert

The gotcha thing about this puzzle is sort of greedy approach; try to disentangle the local sub-graphs - concentrate on any nodes of your choice and their connections - and the global graph starts to fall in its place. It's trivial approaching it like this.

I think I just naturally gravitated to that method after a few levels.

I wonder what an algorithmic approach to this would look like, would it act similarly?

It reminds me my Javascript / WebGL game I made back in 2011 :) http://crazybugs.ivank.net/

The design was ispired by Wold of Goo :)

Very good job, the bonus area made up for the fact that there are only 20 levels :) Opening up the dev console sent the robots for a little jump lol

I enjoy puzzle games like this, but can anyone help me understand what the relationship is to Graph Theory (of which I have little knowledge).

the moving backgrounds are gonna give people issues.

i also had trouble reading the text on the backgrounds; consider changing the font colour to something that has significantly a different value (as in, Hue-Saturation-Value) from the background.

also as somebody has pointed out, the drag box felt tiny.

Click and hold on the background. Now you've got issues!

Also click on bonus area and then perturb the things.

That’s fantastic.

Good but I got the hang of it very quickly and it became boring.

Had good fun

went through the first ten in under 2 minutes. got bored. by the second one, it's easy to see how to find the solution pretty much immediately.

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