Twilio Contest Entry - PhoneSimon | Hacker News Reader

Twilio Contest Entry - PhoneSimon

jazzychad.com

18 pointsjazzychad12 comments

That's awesome fun.

Tip: Try to hear the intervals -- the lower pitch distinguishes between rows, while the higher pitch distinguishes between columns. If you can learn to differentiate between the two pitches, it's easier to map it to the different numbers.

Yep, that's my strategy. The hardest part is getting the first number. After that distinguishing changes in intervals makes it easier. Congrats on getting two scores of 8 on Insane. Sure you're not cheating? :)

No, not cheating. I play [jazz] piano, so I'm used to hearing intervals and stuff (Useful when comping for solos). So I visualize it like this:

   Lower tone: Eb, F, or G
   Upper tone:  C, D, or E

So as the note's played, I tried to visualize what keys I'd have to hit on the piano to make the same noise. Also, i put the phone on speakerphone so that I can look at the digits while they play back.

The middle combinations are the toughest, because if you don't have a good bearing on where the previous pitch is, it's easy to get disoriented.

Boy, it's really hard when you are using a digital phone system where all the beeps you hear back are identical =\

Fun use of Twilio! I'm trying to keep up with fastest963 on the leaderboard but this is tough

Yes, it really turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. I'll be surprised if anyone can score 5 or more on the insane level. It was really fun learning about DTMF tones, though.

seems like this thing would be pretty easy to automate (aka cheating). Fire up an asterisk box and have it record, decipher, and play back the tones!

Try it! I'd love to see that work. I thought about doing it myself for unit testing.

That seems like an awfully complicated way of doing it, why not use a digital voice recorder (your pc/cellphone) to record each set of beeps and play it back.

Tried it, didn't work. I do have a crappy phone (though the digital recorder is quite good).

I think you could actually build a Twilio app to cheat... if only there were more hours in the day, I'd try it!

I didn't do well. I was trying to speak DTMF back to it :(

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