Over the past week, I spent a little time each day building something I think some people will think is pretty cool. It’s a game in which you set toggles (on/off switches and numerical dials) to a value. At the end of the day, a calculator runs and determines everyone’s score (1 point for getting the right value). The calculator can only utilize information that would never change for that day (hint: it’s mostly date based). The “winner” of the game is the person who can get a perfect score for 30 days straight.
Toggles – A Pattern Matching Game
Matt
I'm a curious person interested in everything about life and working in technology.
The Toggles game is great – its been so much fun riddling out what each value could mean. Is there any chance you’d expose an API so that players could submit their predictions or check their scores programmatically?
Joey, first of all congrats on your great success so far in the game! Exposing an API is an interesting idea. For this round of the game, probably not. I built this to judge if people had an interest in these types of games. I’m considering what a v2 of this would look like an will consider an API for that. Would love any suggestions and ideas you have for v2!
Thanks for the game, I had a lot of fun.
I found it a little confusing / misleading that some toggles have very explicit ranges which allows you to figure them out even before the first day (good), but other toggles have ranges whose endpoints cannot possibly ever be reached (toggle #7, toggle #15).
Toggle #15 in particular I think is incredibly unfair, I only caught it by total coincidence while desperately trying silly things like “days since the game started” at the exact right time to catch the actual value. There could have been a LOT of alternate explanations (for example, you can do #15 = #14*(#13+#12+#11+#10) and the ranges reach exactly 0-366 = (0-6)*61).
I liked figuring out values that evolved over a sequence of days, not so much the ones that only have one bit change every month. Those ended up being mostly gambling for me. I like even less so the ones that *never* change and keep hanging over your head like an unpredictable “last/first day of the year toggle” guillotine right as you’re nearing 30 days.
It’s a really interesting concept for sure. Many people underestimate how much you can understand/predict when you have lot of time to do so, even with extremely limited input data. This is the kind of stuff that makes AGI scary as hell…