Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations

whiteboard.lasky.io

126 pointsIlasky50 comments

Nice tool! I like the human like handwriting, but I'd prefer a more adult one.

Writing the denominator first looks weird to me, same as writing the square root symbol after what's under it.

Agreed the ordering is a bit weird. Working on figuring out a way to adjust that. Thanks for the feedback!

Also I would expect that the letters are consistent. Not necessarily legible, but always quite the same.

agreed. I'm not sure what the constraints are regarding the font and its animation, but generally it's possible to look "human", and be elegant and legible at the same time.

Writing the radical sign last is a sign of sophistication of maturity.

Yeah https://i.imgur.com/DvcFRe7.jpeg

Looks like my 5 year old's handwriting. Sometimes I actually have no idea what it was writing. Plus the text was overlapping at times

It looks like the handwriting of a 5 year old or a software engineer

The handwriting really goes out of the window with a query like

> what is the derivative of e^-x?

It does a good job, but man is it hard to read

it's still better than my handwriting :)

It just makes everything more realistic :D

Very cool. Could do with training on some decent handwriting

Agree, at times it is so sloppy that it’s not clear what’s being written.

Yes - it's fun that its a bit messy, but it also seems to write the same letter in very different ways in the same session. It should at least use consistent patterns for writing each letter even if their are minor variations to make it look more real.

I asked it to "provide a summary of Beetlejuice using purely numbers and addition" (nonsense) and it provided an answer that led to infinity. Now I'm wondering if I missed an interpretation in my many viewings of the film.

I asked “what is the circumference of a square?” and it started tripping and then I asked again and it gave me something less trippy “P=4s”. In between it answer correctly for the circumference of a circle.

Here is the raw answer from the endpoint

./solve "what is the circumference of a square?"

Solution: I'm sorry, but there seems to be a misunderstanding in the question. Squares don't have a circumference; they have a perimeter. Circumference is a term used for circular shapes. Let me explain the difference:

1. For a square, we use the term 'perimeter' to describe the distance around its outer edge.

2. The perimeter of a square is calculated by adding up the lengths of all four sides.

\text{Perimeter of a square} = 4s

3. Where 's' is the length of one side of the square.

4. Circumference, on the other hand, is used for circular shapes like circles or ellipses.

5. The circumference of a circle is calculated using the formula:

\text{Circumference of a circle} = 2\pi r

Where 'r' is the radius of the circle.

I hope this clarifies the difference between perimeter (for squares) and circumference (for circles)!

./solve "How tall is a giraffe in ants"

Solution: I'm sorry, but this isn't a typical math problem. The height of a giraffe can't be accurately measured in ants, as ant sizes vary greatly between species. Instead, I can provide you with some interesting facts:

1. An average adult giraffe is about 16-18 feet (4.8-5.5 meters) tall.

2. The average size of an ant ranges from 0.08 to 1 inch (2-25 mm).

3. If we were to use the largest ant size for a very rough estimate, a giraffe could be about 192-216 ant lengths tall. However, this is not a standard or accurate measurement.

This is really fun. Multiple questions seem to yield a blank page, does this mean it's hugged to death, or are my questions too difficult? :)

I'm enjoying probing the bounds of understanding by giving progressively harder problems. It found the roots of a cubic, and proved sqrt(2) and pi were irrational.

Too difficult to read the handwriting, and I'm curious about "how it works". All in all, a fantastic demo.

I asked it to prove Fermats Last Theorem and it started writing (some nonsense) into the margin. Which was funnny.

Cool project tho

Unlike Fermat, the whiteboard has enough room in the margin :)

I was inspired by https://calligrapher.ai to see if I can make something that looks similar to it, but for math.

I ended up hooking up an LLM on the backend to solve math problems as well.

This ended up being more of an exploration in trying to make alternative outputs for LLMs that are a little more dynamic than just text and/or LaTeX.

It looks almost like my handwriting :).

It's interesting that each time it shows a different variant.

Anyway, when I press "get the derivative of f(x)=x^2" I get

              2-1
  f'(x) = 2 x

but the 1 is too big. (Do you need a screenshot?)

Using a variety of hand-written inputs, so font variation would be present. If you could give a screenshot, that’d be helpful!

I run it again and got this: https://imgur.com/a/3t1Xvtg

I added labels to show the problem (but they are too small) and I used Paint to create a fake version where the 1 has the size I'd like.

Why does it write like it's having a stroke?

For anyone trying this on desktop if you make the window tiny the boldness, spacing, and overall readability becomes waaay better than when you have a large window.

Made a lil script to compare the endpoint response vs the whiteboard. https://gist.github.com/samschooler/2b2831f232339a9d747934b7...

Just run: #./solve.js "What is the answer to life, the universe, everything?"

It solved `(x^2-1)/(x-1)` to `x+1` but it is not equal. It should be specified that `x` must not be equal 1 in this case.

Fun project, although it does seem to struggle with writing the longer it goes https://imgur.com/TntAViO

HNug of Death atm, but cool idea. Could benefit from a tutorial mode, where you click on a symbol, it explains its function via whiteboard tutorial from youtube - in the whiteboard..

Should be back up!

It looks like it was trained on someone's years of teaching math to kids and a collection of all of the handwriting they've done. Looks like, but not sure if it is.

What are you using to make handwritten text? Is it a model?

I asked for the number of ways to get a royal flush given an ace and King in your hand. It told me 4

Its really cool how (talking about learning) we go from hand to technology, to again hand

Tried "what is (x-2-1)/(x-1)?" and got absolute gibberish in return

Do you have a screenshot of what you got? Or can you describe it?

I just tried it and it gave the correct answer.

Now that I'm looking more carefully at the answer, it is probably correct but just formatted badly with overlapping text - https://imgur.com/a/F7awsTY

Ah — I see! Thanks for taking a screenshot.

Will work on making the spacing better on desktop!

I wrote: Write the gamma function and explain it's relationship to erfi

I got: Nothing

A bit too sloppy and a bit too slow for my taste, but otherwise great!

Actively working on making the font more legible and adding a “speed slider”!

You should label the top end of the slider "TA"

IMHO the writing animation should run about 4x that speed.

This sounds very interesting! I will check it out.

Wow, it can do ODEs. Pretty awesome.

this is extremely cool and useful.

Very cool project!

math prof handwriting checks out ;)

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