Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#31

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #8

netsec_burn wrote: post #2

Sorry, this will be a negative review. This is easily the most frustrating game I've ever played. I can't test parenthesis because it tells me my time 'ran out' with 45 seconds on the clock. I could barely type 4 or 5 characters. Edit: There are also XSS issues with the player name, you can execute Javascript in the other player's window. That's not good. I confirmed this since an image I scripted to load via HTML (…

I gave up after 2-3 games as well. Time kept running out in three seconds. The semantics are also murky, what do I need to match? The regex doesn't assume ^$, but then do I need to match all intermediate characters? Or just some of them? Or what? Also, the UI is bad, there's a "match" column with a tick and an x, and you get the tick when you match good regexes and the x when you match bad ones. However, why is the c…

You need to write a regex which matches the ones that say "match" by them and excludes the others.

The column with the tick and cross are whether your regex puts this entry in the correct group or not.

"match" and your regex matches it -> tick. exclude and your regex excludes it -> also tick. Successful test.

"match" and you don't match it, exclude and you do match it -> cross, failing test.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#32

Post by nothrabannosir » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

Nice idea! Unfortunately, here's how to solve pretty much any game in you can usually stop typing every word after ~3 chars (no other ones will match).

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#33

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #31

StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up after 2-3 games as well. Time kept running out in three seconds. The semantics are also murky, what do I need to match? The regex doesn't assume ^$, but then do I need to match all intermediate characters? Or just some of them? Or what? Also, the UI is bad, there's a "match" column with a tick and an x, and you get the tick when you match good regexes and the x when you match bad ones. However, why is the c…

You need to write a regex which matches the ones that say "match" by them and excludes the others. The column with the tick and cross are whether your regex puts this entry in the correct group or not. "match" and your regex matches it -> tick. exclude and your regex excludes it -> also tick. Successful test. "match" and you don't match it, exclude and you do match it -> cross, failing test.

It looks like you just need to match anything in the line, not the whole line. Basically, re.search(your_regex, line) should not return None.

The ticks are just bad UX, because "tick" means pass, "x" means fail and blank also means fail. I know which ones I shouldn't match, just give me a tick on ones that match, good or bad, and I'll figure out the rest.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#34

Post by ufmace » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

netsec_burn wrote: post #2

Sorry, this will be a negative review. This is easily the most frustrating game I've ever played. I can't test parenthesis because it tells me my time 'ran out' with 45 seconds on the clock. I could barely type 4 or 5 characters. Edit: There are also XSS issues with the player name, you can execute Javascript in the other player's window. That's not good. I confirmed this since an image I scripted to load via HTML (…

I got the 5 second timeouts too. Not sure about the viability of the whole game concept. I kinda like the other idea in this thread of giving both players a fixed amount of time, minute or 2, and whoever comes up with the shortest regex that solves it wins. Then you could probably populate it with random words, and let people skip ones they didn't think they could solve. You'd probably get some interesting solutions that way.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#35

Post by wildmusings » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

Is the game about regexes or finding letter patterns in words? The rounds I played aren't realistic or particularly interesting uses of regexes.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#36

Post by wildmusings » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

impostervt wrote: post #12

This is a little side project I made to learn about Web sockets. Each question consists of a "match" pattern and a "skip" pattern, and then looks up words on wordsapi.com to match those patterns when the question is generated. It was hard thinking up patterns, so if you have ideas, please let me know.

Cool concept, but I think it'd be infinitely better if the challenges were more realistic/interesting. E.g. matching dates in a particular format, but not another similar format.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#37

Post by bharatkhatri14 » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

Been ORing the first three characters of every to-match string. No one has beaten me in 15 games.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#38

Post by natch » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 7:42 PM UTC

I know people have said this already, but just to update it, the site is still giving 5 second timeouts.

Also when you are playing as anonymous against anonymous, when it says: "anonymous wins" you don't know which of the two anonymous players won. Even if the game says "you won" in the case where it was you, a new player doesn't know that, so it still seems unclear. The anonymous players should be differentiated in some way.. a number tacked on, for example.

Also when the round finishes, it shouldn't just show the regular expression for two seconds and then clear. It should show it for long enough to let me read it and think about it, with the data still displaying, and with a continue button I can click when ready.

Also sadly I think long term this site will have trouble attracting matching players. I expect it to only work during the peak of this exposure on HN. Great idea though.

Finally you should scale down the data so there is less of it to read. You can still make the challenges interesting with well chosen data. And you could add capture and substitution requirements. Again, great idea.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#39

Post by natch » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

impostervt wrote: post #12

This is a little side project I made to learn about Web sockets. Each question consists of a "match" pattern and a "skip" pattern, and then looks up words on wordsapi.com to match those patterns when the question is generated. It was hard thinking up patterns, so if you have ideas, please let me know.

pattern idea: provide a UI for users to suggest sets of data to match.

Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions

#40

Post by ElijahLynn » Sat, Dec 31, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

netsec_burn wrote: post #2

Sorry, this will be a negative review. This is easily the most frustrating game I've ever played. I can't test parenthesis because it tells me my time 'ran out' with 45 seconds on the clock. I could barely type 4 or 5 characters. Edit: There are also XSS issues with the player name, you can execute Javascript in the other player's window. That's not good. I confirmed this since an image I scripted to load via HTML (…

Yeah, the "time ran out" prematurely bug killed it for me.