Alternatives
Products that do what Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking does
I always thought it was cool when someone could make a plausible estimate from reasonable guesses. I recently learned that these are sometimes named after Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist, and its the same technique used to create his famous Fermi paradox. You build a rough logic chain using a few sliders and fixed quantities (e.g. weeks per year), and the goal is to get within an order of magnitude of the true answer. The math is simple; the thinking is the game. Would love feedback.
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Some months ago @andrewrn tried to create a Wordle-style site for order-of-magnitude thinking. This was a wonderful idea, but the actual site was somewhat over-engineered and confusing. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632278) 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…
2025 · fermiquestions.org
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2025 · rvlabs.ca
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I built ChipBuilder to make computer architecture more approachable through interactive puzzles. You start with basic logic gates like AND, OR, and NOT, then gradually combine them into adders, multiplexers, memory, an ALU, and eventually a complete CPU. Once you've built the hardware, you can write assembly programs that run on the processor you created. The game is inspired by courses like Nand2Tetris, but everything runs directly in the browser with a visual circuit editor, simulations, and progressively harder challenges.
Jul 2026 · select.supply
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2025 · mattsayar.com
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I’ve been building a few small games to help kids (and curious adults) build reasoning and logic skills. Think Word Ladder, Prime Hunter, Math Maze ,all in the browser, no installs. Would love feedback or suggestions for new types of puzzles
2025 · quizmathgenius.com
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I am a Dutch high school student and last year I had to do a large project of my own choice. Together with two other guys I decided to do a project about digital logic. We had an ambitious plan: building an 8-bits computer. At that time I started learning programming and I already knew some HTML and CSS. So we decided to not build a physical computer, but one running in a self-built simulator. I was going to build the simulator, the other guys took care of the computer. I was hard, our school hadn't taught us anything about computers and programming so we had to learn everything ourselves.…
2017
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I've been playing with this for quite some time and I think it's finally ready for public consumption. All feedback welcome.
2025 · madmonk13.github.io
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Hello HN! We're Rory and Chris, and we've made a game called Dozenal[0], a grid-based number puzzle game where the objective is to use all the tiles on the board to create totals of 12 (hence the name). We think the mechanic is quite unique, although keen to hear if people know of similar games! You essentially drag tiles across the board, and the distance between two numbers decides the arithmetic operation when they connect to each other: zero spaces is addition, one space is subtraction, two spaces is multiplication: e.g. 5 → 4 = 9 5 → _ → 4 = 1 5 → _ → _ → 4 = 20 We've spent the past…
Jul 2026 · dozenal.game
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I’m a game show nerd who wanted to build a game, despite not being a developer. Using ChatGPT, I created Feudle – a blend of Family Feud and Wordle. Each day, there’s a survey question, and players try to guess the most popular responses—but the twist is that today’s answers come from real players who played yesterday. After playing, you can vote on or submit new questions, shaping future Feudles. If I were to start again, I’d explore newer AI-assisted coding tools like Cursor, but overall, this was a great learning experience. Hopefully, this inspires others to experiment with AI tools to…
2025 · feudlegame.com
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A little game I made to show off an old project. The functionality of the CPU is derived entirely from simulated logic gates. All the operations and control flow are based on the underlying properties of the logic gates, and changing their operation leads to corresponding changes in function. The original game code is all python and it runs in the browser using wasm/pyodide. Not very mobile friendly
2024 · loreley.one
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I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk
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We were genuinely impressed by Yann LeCun’s recent announcement about his Sudoku solver based on Energy-Based Models here: https://logicalintelligence.com/yann-lecun So we (a software engineer and prodigy mathematician) worked in the weekend to see if we can beat it and we did! If Kona solves puzzles in 313 milliseconds, we currently solve 270,000 puzzles per second! We do not know the internal mechanics behind Logical Intelligence’s system, but we are happy to share ours in the webpage there is a full description, code and also a paper published. Why people are obsessed with…
Feb 2026 · davisgeometric.com
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I made a strategy game where you play the US or China through the AI race, 2026 to 2030, sixteen quarterly turns in the browser. One run takes about half an hour. At the start, the game seals two dice you never get to see. Inside: how hard alignment really is, and how fast takeoff compounds. You get eval reports, but only as ranges, and they flatter you most exactly when your systems are least aligned. At the end you get a debrief which shows what your evals said each quarter and also what was actually true. I lost every run I played myself so far. Every number in the game is source-backed…
Jul 2026 · criticalwindow.org
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Hi HN, I'm a 19-year-old aerospace student. I spent the last 13 months building a custom Linux distro from scratch because I wanted to see if we could treat the OS kernel as a mathematical engine rather than a deterministic administrator. The Stack: Flux (The Shell): A custom math-native shell where x² and ∑ are valid syntax. It parses mathematical notation directly into optimized SIMD instructions (no Python wrapper). Tenet (The Scheduler): Written in Tenet (my custom DSL for game theory). The scheduler is a Nash Equilibrium solver compiled to native code. In my benchmarks (Ryzen 7 5800HS),…
Feb 2026 · fawazishola.ca
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Hi, I built Equatile, a logic-based puzzle game where you arrange number tiles on a grid to make every row and column equal their target values. It's built using Expo and is available for free on iOS, Android, and the Web. It's a game I've had in mind for almost 10 years now but never got to actually develop, until I came across Expo which made the process incredibly easy. I might open source the code on GitHub. I hope you enjoy playing it!
2025 · equatile.com
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I made a lightweight web game about compute CAPEX tradeoffs: https://darios-dilemma.up.railway.app/ No signup, runs on mobile/desktop. Loop per round: 1. choose compute capacity 2. forecast demand 3. allocate capacity between training and inference 4. random demand shock resolves outcome You can end profitable, cash constrained, or bankrupt depending on allocation + forecast error. Goal was to make the decision surface intuitive in 2–3 minutes per run. It’s a toy model and deliberately omits many real world factors. Note: this is based on what I learned after listening to…
Feb 2026 · darios-dilemma.up.railway.app
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Hello HN! We're the team behind Epistemeland (https://epistemeland.com/), a platform dedicated to making learning fun and accessible. We've just released a prototype of a single player game that uses basic geometry. It is a fist, but an important step in creating our MMO game to revolutionize education. The game mechanics are simple but intriguing and naturally incorporated in the game process. We built it with UE5 and want to continue development. We'd love for you to try it out and give us your feedback, which we'll use to guide our next improvement cycle. Our goal is to…
2023 · epistemeland.com
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I built a daily word association puzzle where you engage in a quiet, collaborative mind meld with AI. I'd love to have folks try it out and tell me what they think! Here's how it works: 1. Enter your first word to reveal the AI's word of the day. 2. Don't think too hard about it. It's just a starting point. 3. Both of you think of a word that connects the two. 4. To win, you need to say the same word. 5. You have 8 guesses to converge. 6. Need a hint? The AI will drop a riddle in your final two guesses. HOW DOES IT WORK? After the user_word + ai_word are submitted, I trigger two separate LLM…
2025 · convergegame.com
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