Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

mathstick.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 36 posts

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#21

Post by cwackerfuss »

trangram wrote: post #20
eager_learner wrote: post #19

nice game! may i know what amount of js/css knowledge should i possess to be able to write sth like this? Eloquent JavaScript + any generic CSS book enough? thanks for making my evening.

thank you and glad you love it, those books are more than enough. As for the css part, I would suggest you start by building the layout for the desktop first. Once the desktop version looks good, use media queries to adjust the design for mobile and tablet sizes. As for js and html part, think in Components: Instead of one giant file, break your code into "modules" or "components". In my matchstick game, I built the…

I appreciate the good faith effort here to learn (and advise on) programming skills! It’s rare nowadays.

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#22

Post by trangram »

cwackerfuss wrote: post #21
trangram wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thank you and glad you love it, those books are more than enough. As for the css part, I would suggest you start by building the layout for the desktop first. Once the desktop version looks good, use media queries to adjust the design for mobile and tablet sizes. As for js and html part, think in Components: Instead of one giant file, break your code into "modules" or "components". In my matchstick game, I built the…

I appreciate the good faith effort here to learn (and advise on) programming skills! It’s rare nowadays.

Exactly. We only find real fulfillment when we work on what we’re passionate about. We need to value the process more than the outcome.

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#23

Post by vunderba »

Nice job. I'd seen similar things in the past but I had no idea this was an actual type of puzzle.

Your game has a bug which is relatively common in drag-and-drop games. If the viewport is smaller and I drag a match off-screen by accident, it can get stuck to the edge. Then it can become detached in such a way that makes it impossible to recover the match.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_puzzle

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#26

Post by trangram »

vunderba wrote: post #23

Nice job. I'd seen similar things in the past but I had no idea this was an actual type of puzzle. Your game has a bug which is relatively common in drag-and-drop games. If the viewport is smaller and I drag a match off-screen by accident, it can get stuck to the edge. Then it can become detached in such a way that makes it impossible to recover the match. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_puzzle

Thanks for trying this out. I'll fix the off-screen issue later.

I created this game because of an old news my wife shared with me, it was about The New York Times bought the Wordle game. I was then surprised that such a simple, old-style game caught the attention of a big company. I said "I'd rather play a matchstick puzzle", and it was that moment that inspired me to create a free online version with all the puzzles procedurally generated by my own hand-made solver (I like the sound of this :D). Personally, I like moving one and only one matchstick to solve a puzzle rather than 2 or 3 sticks, also I don't like those tricky solutions like negative number, rotation trick and etc. although they could be a very creative solution and let you think outside the box sometimes, IMO, it is just not elegant and sometime distracting to encourage people to think in a systematic way.

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#27

Post by vunderba »

trangram wrote: post #26
vunderba wrote: post #23

Nice job. I'd seen similar things in the past but I had no idea this was an actual type of puzzle. Your game has a bug which is relatively common in drag-and-drop games. If the viewport is smaller and I drag a match off-screen by accident, it can get stuck to the edge. Then it can become detached in such a way that makes it impossible to recover the match. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchstick_puzzle

Thanks for trying this out. I'll fix the off-screen issue later. I created this game because of an old news my wife shared with me, it was about The New York Times bought the Wordle game. I was then surprised that such a simple, old-style game caught the attention of a big company. I said "I'd rather play a matchstick puzzle", and it was that moment that inspired me to create a free online version with all the puzzle…

You made me chuckle a bit with the whole “hand-made solver” thing with discrete puzzles like this, since 99% of the time to create a new puzzle, you just start with a solved problem (arithmetic equality) and introduce a sequence of random valid moves to put it in a unsolved state.

I remember one of my freshman computer science assignments was to make a Rubik’s Cube game. That was when a lot of undergrads were first introduced to the idea of using a stack and then "unwinding" it to simultaneously build the problem + solution.

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#28

Post by trangram »

vunderba wrote: post #27
trangram wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for trying this out. I'll fix the off-screen issue later. I created this game because of an old news my wife shared with me, it was about The New York Times bought the Wordle game. I was then surprised that such a simple, old-style game caught the attention of a big company. I said "I'd rather play a matchstick puzzle", and it was that moment that inspired me to create a free online version with all the puzzle…

You made me chuckle a bit with the whole “hand-made solver” thing with discrete puzzles like this, since 99% of the time to create a new puzzle, you just start with a solved problem (arithmetic equality) and introduce a sequence of random valid moves to put it in a unsolved state. I remember one of my freshman computer science assignments was to make a Rubik’s Cube game. That was when a lot of undergrads were first i…

yeah, the solver behind Mathstick is pretty much like what you described: building the problem + solution simultaneously, besides you also need to collect the multiple solutions for the same question and information for further classifying the difficulty of a puzzle.

Just like "hand-made" pizza used as a response to the rise of frozen, factory-produced pizza and to establish authenticity against fast-food chains. Maybe "hand-made" will be used to emphasize a app/software is made by human rather than being vibecoded or completely AI generated in the future. Also, if you use the Puzzle Maker to create your own puzzle, it becomes a "hand-made" puzzle :)

Re: Show HN: Stop playing my matchstick puzzles, start building your own in seconds

#30

Post by eager_learner »

trangram wrote: post #20
eager_learner wrote: post #19

nice game! may i know what amount of js/css knowledge should i possess to be able to write sth like this? Eloquent JavaScript + any generic CSS book enough? thanks for making my evening.

thank you and glad you love it, those books are more than enough. As for the css part, I would suggest you start by building the layout for the desktop first. Once the desktop version looks good, use media queries to adjust the design for mobile and tablet sizes. As for js and html part, think in Components: Instead of one giant file, break your code into "modules" or "components". In my matchstick game, I built the…

Thank you so much for the wonderful advice! It's so refreshing to see humans act and be human-- helping each other despite not knowing each other.

For context, I've been stuck in tutorial hell for years! Part of it can be blamed on my ADHD, which is a serious disability if you want to finish any task. Still, I've been trying to make inroads at it... I've been reading several books at the same time, but stuck on chapter 3 or 4 in each. Then I begin looking for other books until I hit a block in it--then process restarts again.

You're right that LLMs do help a lot. I think I made more progress in the last six months than the past pre-LLM two years.

Thanks and kinds regards.

EL

Post reply on HN