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Comment by beeftime | Hacker News Reader

Why do I have to pick the factors first? Do I have to use all of them? Why shouldn't I use all of them? If I do, why aren't they already picked?

Why are all of these sliders? Why don't they start at zero? Why do all of them at the default setting result in me winning?

Speaking of, am I winning? Failure and success give me the same feedback. I can play this game over and over until I win? That's not really in the Wordle style.

imo you should be picking from a palette of maybe-relevant factors and increasing/decreasing their order of magnitude and order/operation, then when you submit you're locked into a win/loss state like wordle. This would be much more of a game than what you've got here.

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A better palette of possible factors was something I thought about. It will require rewriting nearly the whole app, but it's likely the direction I'll go when I make v2.

To take it a step further I thought I could use even smaller building blocks via dimensional "toolboxes" like quantity, distance, volume, and conversions and each question files its factors into each tool box (with some dummies like you said). Do you think that'd be more interesting? It's more complex though so mass appeal might go down.

> mass appeal might go down

I don't think Fermi questions have mass appeal anyway. I don't think most people know what "order of magnitude" means, let alone understand dimensional analysis (ie., the conceptual idea of what it means for units to cancel).

I don't think making the game a little more complex would really affect its appeal, because it's already targeted at people with a certain level of scientific understanding.

Good call. It easy to forget that the world isn't as nerdy as me lol. This would definitely let me focus the game a lot better anyway.

OTOH, not so long ago, a colleague and I tried to guess the number of piano tuners in large cities, e.g. New York. I find your idea nice, but the execution could be more flexible, more puzzle-like. E.g., you could have units (like #passengers, #planes, #flights, time), and the user can create factors out of those.

But I'm afraid that it'll lose its appeal after a while. These problems seem same-y to me, more so than Wordle.

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