Mystery Function | Hacker News Reader

Mystery Function

codeset.ai

52 pointsandre15silva11 comments

More fun than Wordle for me! Got me thinking about the Kolmogorov complexity, it would be interesting to get a set of input/output pairs, and try to create the smallest program that can match each of them.

I'm not able to test f(""), the most fundamental test case. Evidently no text isn't any text.

tip: for suspected permutations, like use a string like "1234567"

A good first input in general probably looks like a bad password, like 123abcXYZ! with a little bit of every type of character (lower, upper, num, symbols)

(The NIST SP 800-63 Standard Password "Fall2026!" also works, but it's less efficient, and changes every quarter!)

I totally expected to have to write the python for it, not just solve a couple more :P

That was the initial idea, actually! But after some thought, we realized that it probably wouldn't work well on mobile and would also be hard for people who just want to do a quick puzzle. So we came up with the idea that it's enough for the person to know the algorithm, and we can check it by asking them for the result of two inputs.

Initially, we also had three inputs, but realized it was too boring, while a single input allowed an incorrect algorithm to be right too often!

Would you be interested in having to write the Python function? It could be an optional feature in the game.

I feel like there's a missed opportunity for "Wason 2–4–6"-style gotchas

I'd love to see functions that are "obvious" when all your tests have the same quality you never tested without

like f.e. testing with all characters distinct ("abcd" or "123456789") seems like an obvious strategy to see where each character goes - but function may be grouping same letters together and you'll never know

Scrolling down to reach the HTML keyboard, and then back up to see what I typed, is obnoxious. I have a keyboard installed, and it doesn't pop up because something on the page tells my browser it doesn't need to. Was this vibecoded?

What is the resolution of your phone? It is supposed to adapt to any phone so that the keyboard and all the rows fit on the screen. You are the first person I’ve heard from with this issue since we fixed it for some weirder resolutions.

Idk - a pretty normal one. Why not just let the keyboard keyboard?

Glad you asked, as the answer is, in my opinion, interesting. Developing a game like this seems pretty simple until you have to make a UI that fits on a phone. If you look at the default keyboard on your phone, you will see the suggestion bar or something similar. When space is limited, that space is crucial, and that extra height is enough for a row in the game.

Another benefit of having our own keyboard is that we can remove language-specific characters that may not be handled well by the game's daily functions.

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