Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions
In the past week, I looked at this idea again and built a very simple site which gives you a new Fermi estimation question every day:
How many new cars were sold in the US in 2024?; How many humans have ever lived (including those currently alive)?; How many chickens are slaughtered for meat every year?
To win, you need a guess within ±20% of the correct answer. For this you have a maximum of 6 tries and after each guess, you can see if your answer was too high or too low.
Fermi questions are, by the way, a wonderful way to build up your own numeracy and sense for order-of-magnitude differences. Douglas Hofstadter proposed using them for exactly this reason in his essay "Number Numbness, or Why Innumeracy May Be Just as Dangerous as Illiteracy" (https://gwern.net/doc/math/1982-hofstadter-2.pdf)
For those interested, I did polish the initial app a lot: https://fermi-game.onrender.com/ (bad news though... I over-engineered it even further I think. It's my first real public project, so I learned my lesson to viciously descope the mvp). Some of the comments here (like scientific notation and sharing) are present in my project. I tried to re-share after polishing but the HN link sharing dynamics have been a bit opaque to me and kept the project buried when posted.
It's clear to me that there is a lane here for a fun brain teaser/exercise. Just getting the answer right on 2 tried on OP's version by guessing ~5% of 330M population buying new car was a nice hit of dopamine. Combining a little math and world-knowledge is pleasing, it would seem.
@danielfetz, any interest in collaborating?
A HN moderator actually directed me to this post. I never would have seen it otherwise, so I'm grateful for that.
Otherwise the UI and concept looks pretty interesting. But until that is fixed, it is unplayable for me.
(On an iPhone, using Safari)
This is especially the case when the question is asking for a bounded number in the first place (eg a percentage). In fact I'm pretty certain you should _always_ succeed within 4 steps given +-10 on a percentage question and nearly always within 3 steps. ChatGPT says it's provably so but I'm not smart enough to verify. Rings true though.
Certainly made easier by knowing whether it's higher or lower, and especially with the yellow arrows if you're not too far off.
One UX change that might be nice is to have a "spoken" version of your guess live-update below the input. I keep having to count zeroes and it would be nicer to see "Eleven billion".
Does the orange mean your answer is within 25% of the absolute value? Or that your logarithm value is within 25% of the logarithm value of the true answer?
Thanks for making this, this is awesome
The orange means your answer is within 50% of the absolute value. I might change it at some point away from a linear scale to a logarithmic scale, but I'm not quite sure yet.
After about ~10 questions though, I started getting the same question every time. Like five times in a row.
Then report the average of this metric over time with each game.
This is a really cool game. I was so off!
Source for this: https://ourworldindata.org/the-future-is-vast