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Comment by dextersgenius | Hacker News Reader

You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks.

I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.

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Wilmot's Warehouse is basically this.

It's top-down 2D. You are alone in a large, empty warehouse. At regular intervals, a truck drops off a load of assorted objects at the back, and a few people ask you for some specific objects at the counter in front. Your role is to arrange the objects in the warehouse such that you can fill the requests in the least amount of time, and you can do this in any way that works for you (by color, function, name, etc).

As the game goes on, the truck drops off more and more different kinds of objects (usually ones that fit into more than one category), and the requests get more and more complicated.

At the end you get a time-lapse of the whole warehouse over the whole game and you can see your strategy evolving over time.

Pretty well executed and simple. Heard about it from one of its devs in a HN comment actually.

https://defrag.lolalabs.com/

Cool proof of concept... not a fun game

I can’t scroll down to see the rest of the lines

I like the idea, but I noticed that there seems to be some kind of issue with it registering clicks. I don't know if I'm just sometimes clicking slightly outside of the hitboxes or what, but I find myself "dragging" stuff by accident when the game doesn't register that I "dropped" whatever object I had selected.

https://classic.csunplugged.org/activities/community-activit... (see also: https://www.itgsnews.com/the-defragmentation-game-lesson-pla... )

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376284/defrag

https://www.defraggame.com

There used to be a few old ones in the day that I recall trying which were a bit more direct simulacrums than these. Not sure if anyone else might find them!

I felt that way about PCB routing and layout when I was building electronics.

Might make a good career then.

> Might make a good career then.

Is it, though? As much as the autorouters "known" to not work, I expect that a working one is less than 10 years away. Even for PCIe-level complexity.

The "career" in question could be autorouter developing.

That said, I'd suspect it's similar to CS: autoprogrammers are "known" to not work. If you can understand and articulate the business logic in a concise way, understand and articulate all the components of the system and how they may interfere with each other, understand and articulate the system's nominal and practical input ranges, etc., then sure something might autoprogram the code for you, but it's not the autoprogrammer doing the real work.

But will the autorouted pcb pass EMC?

Highly doubt that, and routing is only part of the puzzle.

somehow I ended up in Neuroscience, where I get to use the electronics skills occasionally, but even that is mostly focused on ASIC design now.

Well now ASIC design is an even more niche EE application. How does someone in neuroscience end up needing those skills? Did you Major in EE in undergrad?

Yep, undergrad in EE. I don’t do our semiconductor design but interface with teams of engineers to make tools for biology.

You're talking about Shenzen.io by Zachtronics, aren't you

https://www.zachtronics.com/shenzhen-io/

I just bought this off your recommendation and I hate you now.

There's also a minigame in Electrician Simulator that has you repair various broken objects by replacing components. It's strangely satisfying.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/electrician_simulator

Lets up the stakes and use a real drive as part of the sacrifice to the game.

Let's up the stakes and use a real production storage in the game

An even more specific version of DOOM for sysadmins, then?

psDooM is what you need: a FPS to frag system processes

https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

it's not really related in concept, but I feel like playing various puzzles with pentominoes would feel a bit similar to this, as it's spatial reasoning puzzles. I adore pentominoes and spent a large portion of my childhood playing with them, recently rediscovered them as an adult.

For me it was Tangrams, which I've only seen one somewhat odd (in a "feels outsourced" kind of way) computer game (not that you can really improve on the physical version). I first thought you said pantomimes, which could also be interesting :).

Definitely played with tangrams too, and funnily enough, I had a bunch of animal-shaped puzzles that I guess you could call pantomimes haha. If you enjoyed tangrams enough, I can't recommend enough picking up a set of pentominoes - definitely agree that a physical set is the right call. There's 12 total so you have 60 individual squares, (pentominoes are 5-square tiles), so popular figures are 6x10, 5x12 (a bit harder than 6x10), and 3x20 (very challenging). You can also get cubes and do 2x5x6 (really hard) or 3x4x5 (even harder).

Recently though, I've been doing 8x8 - 4, which means picking 4 squares to remove from an 8x8 square and then filling in the rest (I have some wooden boards i picked up from an etsy seller but you can just as easily trace the outline on paper and color in the forbidden cells, which I've also done). Which has been delightful!

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give them a try :).

It is still fun to run the real thing[0].

0. https://www.nongnu.org/free-defrag/

windows 98 SE had the coolest disk defragmentation animation. it felt wrong when it just never reappeared.

It looked exactly the same as 98 and 95, there was nothing changed.

i mean, onwards from XP

I found jkdefrag, and it was dot based instead of block based. Now that became the coolest - until it was discontinued... Now hard to find... But, mydefrag has become the best defragmenter.

Sort of the opposite of Breakout.

Or the opposite of a particular type of block-tapping mobile game, like these on Android/iOS:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geom... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543

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