Alligator Eggs | Hacker News Reader

Alligator Eggs

worrydream.com

79 pointstumult9 comments

I thought this was great fun when I stumbled on it, so if any discussions pick up, hopefully you will read the linked article first and enjoy the surprise :]

In the interest of what you say I decided not to spoil it with my comment. I will however, say the following things:

1) When I hit the surprise "my mind was blown", to use a phrase popular elsewhere on the internet.

2) I still don't have a snowball's chance in hell of understanding it. :)

I was a bit confused when solving the puzzle. It would have been clearer if he wrote that the game is over when nobody has anything to eat. This is implied. The other clarification he could have made was that if an alligator eats a family but itself has no eggs, the alligator simply dies and disappears.

The color changing rule is also a bit clumsy. If I were a kid I would wonder if the two question marks are the same kind in that puzzle. In fact, they may or may not be the same, but appearance wise they look the same.

Hope that helps with anyone who decided to sit down and figure out the puzzle on paper.

This guy (Bret Victor) also wrote an excellent essay a few years back, Magic Ink http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Every now and then, probably about twice a year, I come across something so good I print it out and keep it. This is one of those essays.

You should submit that

Thanks. It's now here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600799

This was brilliant. Now all we need is an entrepreneurial guy to come along and actually make/market it. I'd be the first customer!

And only :P

It's waaaaaaaay too complicated for mass-market!

Just teach lambda calculus and get it over with. That stuff's awesome without having to bring in scaly beings. Dealing with these inane pictures just adds too much overhead. I remember when we were learning about these in class - I was so confused about the ambiguities in the alligator representation, but everything became clear once we switched to mathematical notation. I'm quite convinced I would have learned it perfectly fine without these images.

This is a big problem with education today, IMO - trying to make everything 'fun' by dumbing it down and giving it pictures. Even college textbooks have started talking to me as if I were an 8-year-old. I prefer the converse - when I was 8, reading high school textbooks from the decade prior. I didn't understand much, but it was still quite interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com