Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#191

Post by samplank2 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:06 PM UTC

AlessandroF6587 wrote: post #184

samplank2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you liked it, thanks for playing! Fair point on the scoring, seems like a lot of people feel that way. Right now, half your points come from distance in km, and half come from distance in years. So you probably got 5000 points for location, and lost points on the year. But it's probably a bit too harsh right now. And thanks for pointing out the Vatican City nit.

What about going logarithmic with time? The more it's in the past the more errors are forgiven. Explained in another way use the relative time difference (diff/(now-value)) to compute the score and not the absolute time difference

Good suggestion

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#192

Post by samplank2 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

Miraltar wrote: post #173

samplank2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the scoring can be pretty harsh. You should be able to see your percentile overall and for each round on the results page.

I really think that the scoring is fine, I like to have a big progression margin but I think it would be nice to know how the score is computed.

Good call. I should make the scoring more transparent.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#193

Post by samplank2 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #175

Its a nice idea, and it poses interesting biases in the models generating the videos. I for the chinese question, I think it was way off. It showed the great wall of china, which is the wrong place for the answer. The rise of the mugals was also interesting, I got it right but only because I assumed it was confusing Ottoman architecture with mugal.

Totally. Plan to try some things to reduce how often these kinds of issues happen.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#194

Post by riversflow » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

Gross. History is not for LLMs to generate. I find the praise in this thread disturbing. The amount of completely anachronistic scenes would probably lead to worse historic understanding, making this an anti learning game.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#195

Post by PeterCorless » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

The picture was clearly based on El Castillo [Temple of Kukulcán, in Chichén Itzá], which is on the Yucatan Peninsula. Note the chamber on top.

It looks nothing like the Aztec Pyramid of Teotihuacan, which is flat on top and has no structure.

In other words, this is AI slop that makes something that looks plausible, and is utterly misleading.

As someone who has spent decades of my life on history, this makes me weep for humanity.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#196

Post by williamDafoe » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

I have no idea how to use your app. It just shows 4 pictures and asks me to choose one. No. I refuse to play a challenge that is not explained wtf am i doing.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#197

Post by 0xcb0 » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

Nice game!! Well done I think. And another nice example of how AI and generative art can help learn in an interactive way. Event though some pictures are missleading. I guessed the one was the end of rome while it was istanbul. But the pictures looked nothing like ottoman architecture and only like roman one. But overall very nice idea!!

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#198

Post by gcanyon » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

samplank2 wrote: post #109

gcanyon wrote: post #99

This is awesome, and I'm not very good at it :-)

Thanks so much for the nice words!

On MacOS Safari (for me at least) the date button on the previous games shows for a split second and then disappears, making them unplayable. :-/

Seems to be tied to the videos playing — when they start, the button disappears. I’m seeing it on iOS as well.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#199

Post by wswope » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

PeterCorless wrote: post #195

The picture was clearly based on El Castillo [Temple of Kukulcán, in Chichén Itzá], which is on the Yucatan Peninsula. Note the chamber on top. It looks nothing like the Aztec Pyramid of Teotihuacan, which is flat on top and has no structure. In other words, this is AI slop that makes something that looks plausible, and is utterly misleading. As someone who has spent decades of my life on history, this makes me weep…

TIL the Nika riots took place in the Roman colosseum, and the blues and greens cheered as lone individuals from each deme were sent down for slaughter. Yeah, this is hot garbage in terms of accuracy.

@Samplank2 - this may hurt to hear, but your assertions that better models and pipeline improvements will solve this are pure cope. What you really need to do here is manually curate and tune the prompts, then cherry-pick with a fine eye for detail. There’s no substitute for actual effort and knowledge, but you seem disinterested in that part.

Re: Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

#200

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Mar 13, 2025, 6:25 PM UTC

This is a really good game! I thought I did pretty okay, but I was surprised to find that 91% of people did better than I. I'm guessing most people know when and where King Tut's remains were found, I managed to get 4k points on that one and was still in the bottom 10% of players.

This would make for a fun party game in the style of Jackbox.