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

2-Year-Olds Convert Binary To Hexadecimals In Game Experiment

flippybitandtheattackofthehexadecimalsfrombase16.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: 2-Year-Olds Convert Binary To Hexadecimals In Game Experiment

#23

Post by dllthomas »

gus_massa wrote: post #18
fredley wrote: post #15

Their update says it was removed from the Apple App Store. I can't find out why, does anyone know (or might be able to hazard an educated guess) why it was taken down?

I guess they baned the word “flappy” in all their forms, to prevent an avalanche of “flappy bird” clones, and that includes “flippy”. The game mechanics is totally unrelated, but the name is “too” similar, for a very low value of similarity.

They've got a Levenshtein distance of 3 (replace 'a' with 'i', delete 'd', replace 'r' with 't').

Re: 2-Year-Olds Convert Binary To Hexadecimals In Game Experiment

#24

Post by X4 »

jerf wrote: post #13
heeton wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting it isn't actually.

The best are a bit in between. The thing is, this isn't that difficult of a task. The disadvantage adults have in a task like this is, I believe without scientific evidence, the learned helplessness that so many adults have, probably induced from years of "education". A three year old flips through an iPad interface because nobody even thought to tell them it was hard; an adult that can't pick that up probably can't…

Fully agree with jerf on that, adults not only have the mental barrier, but also their mental adaptivity ratio is lower than that of kids. I am not sure, if it's just the neural plasticity that's reason for this or the amount of neural circuitry's rewiring that is necessary at a higher age, due to more synaptic connections.

I mean chinese parents who teach their kids to learn many languages, maths etc. at age 1 and up may be cruel, but if they actually don't force the kids, but let them have fun and let them do those tasks voluntarily, then I fully support the early education method.

Re: 2-Year-Olds Convert Binary To Hexadecimals In Game Experiment

#29

Post by Workaphobia »

SimeVidas wrote: post #27

Can anyone explain how to win at this game? How to you determine the binary representation of a two-character hex number in your head?

I didn't look at the game, but converting from hex to binary is easy since one of those bases is a power of the other. It's a 16-entry lookup table, but just like memorizing the multiplication table, there are easy-to-remember patterns. The fact that there are two digits just means to do it twice and concatenate the results (padding to 4 bits first).
Post reply on HN