alt Hacker NewsList animals until failure
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That's weird. I tried Secretariat, which was definitely an animal and definitely has a Wikipedia page, but it wasn't accepted.
I added Jellyfish and then Portuguese Man-o-war.
It took the man o war, but crossed out Jellyfish and said "added a vaguer term", but a jellyfish and a man-o-war are discrete animals.
The man-o-war is a colonial siphonophore composed of zooids, while a jellyfish is a singular marine organism.
They're both in the phylum Cnidaria, and that would have been a more vague term had I entered it.
Presumably inspired by this tweet: https://x.com/Fredward3948576/status/1763363909669388588
For anyone wondering: This is based on basic text parsing and a key-value lookup table, no AI involved whatsoever.
Here's the table: https://rose.systems/animalist/lower_title_to_id.js
Very fun and impressive to do this without LLMs!
My score:
191 animals listed 𓆈𓇼 ⬛鯉𓃱唐𓆉𓃸𓆣𓆉
(update: oh... looks like you can't paste the full emoji string here)
A mere 69, but I wonder if I would do better in my native language. Also, once I discovered it accepts extinct animals I went all in on dinos and other extinct animals, that's like half of my score.
No LLMs is impressive. Also recognizes "drop bear". Well played.
68. The unique title texts are really fun. But I strongly disagree that "chipmunks are squirrels".
Lazy daisy:
(async () => {
for (c of 'red black white brown blue green yellow golden grey arctic mountain forest spotted striped'.split(' '))
for (a of 'bear lion tiger wolf fox eagle shark whale snake frog cat dog horse bat rat mouse owl hawk duck crab ant bee spider deer penguin elephant rabbit'.split(' ')) {
guessbox.value = c + ' ' + a;
uncomment(); attempt();
await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 75));
}
})();This was fun. I definitely could feel the fatigue slowing me down until the timer got me. I also wasted a bunch of time trying to spell specific animals like the wobbegong.
I like the emoji output as well: 203 animals listed:
𓃬𓆊 𓃜𓃘𓅱𓆉𓅃
It might be an interesting LLM benchmark: how many can they list without breaking the rules (repetition or non-animals). Although I bet that big bucks would be then thrown at pointlessly optimizing for that benchmark, so...
Nice! I added this to the HN Arcade https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/list-animal...
267, I was going pretty strong and had about 2 minutes racked up, until I hit a wall, and couldn't think of anything else. Thinking in groups helped the most, e.g. reptiles, flightless birds, african animals, etc.
Extinct animals also work, including the dinosaurs!
79. I feel like i should have done better but got stuck in a local minima of "farm animals, which obvious farm animals haven't I said??", then tried thinking of names of fish which worked until it didn't.
157. Very neat! Started a, b, c then found much more success when thinking about biomes (sea, mountains, forest, jungle, etc).
I got 42. I was very impressed by how it handled more and less specific categories. It also understood rotifers were a microscopic animal, which I half expected not to work. Great project.
Pretty cool but it won't allow "parrot" after "budgie" because budgie is more specific? A budgie isn't a parrot!
(Wikipedia says it actually is a type of parrot, but I definitely refer to different types of bird when I refer to a "parrot" vs a "budgie")
Instead of trying to think of just any animal, I found it easier to add a constraint…
1. Animal that starts with A
2. Animal that starts with B
3. Animal that starts with C
…
(I also appreciated the easter eggs: “Are you Australian?” and “You listed both dingos and dogs, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but there's disagreement on whether the dingo is its own species of canid, a subspecies of grey wolf, or simply a breed of dog.”)
Since this accepts all marine, freshwater and sky animals (birds) also this could take a very long time. For a bit more of a challenge in a shorter time list all animals starting with a particular letter. Time yourself a couple minutes to put some pressure on. Challenge your friends and family!
I'm mildly bothered that I can't input "fox" because I already entered "fennec", and the game decided it should be "fennec fox" :)
High score was 322,740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845068
I created a similar game but where you can enter any category, for example programming languages, car brands or whatever. Of course uses LLMs https://gissallt.eliasf.se/
This game thinks buffalo and bison are the same thing and elk and deer are the same thing. Which is absurd, they even require buying different tags when hunting.
Accepts the word "human" as well.
update: Start with "human" or "homo sapiens" and the website keeps changing as you add new words.
I got to 60s before the lag became too much. I'm not sure "car" should be an accepted answer!
there are so many special cases that this game responds to, i was shocked that it didn’t involve an llm at all at the end. very cool.
Fun :) but mobile text input was the main challenge.
307. I think I could have kept going but I was exhausted. Dinosaurs helped a lot! My favorite easter egg was "sidewinder".
Possum => opossum is erroneous. I was planning to list both species, it wasnt a typo.
110. my strategy is to use pokemon to remember animals. (i can list all 1025 pokemon from memory)
not a great strat, though. (tons repeated animals)
129 here, not bad for the end of the day. I listed a surprising number of dinosaurs, and of course, edible animals, and Lion King stuff.
Fun results: outputted as emoji
30 animals listed 𓃱 𓃸
Edit: weird... emojis don't work here? how have I never known this...
106, I feel like I should have done much better. (I feel like I cheated by naming a lot of dinosaurs and insects.)
The clown emoji is great. :)
African swallow European swallow.
Game over. You didn’t list lion.
140. Good fun. I like how it teaches you things, too. I learned that toads are considered frogs, axolotls are salamanders, and that it's "anemone" not "anenome". If you type in Unicorn it accepts it as "Unicorn spider" with a fun message. Don't forget to think of insects, birds and fish too, all of which it accepts. I love this kind of detailed, handcrafted thing that someone put a lot of time and effort into.
If you wanted to develop this more, some fun features might be telling you the most commonly entered animals you missed and the most unusual ones you thought of. Appreciate you probably want to keep it a static site though.
This is awesome. I made it to 100, but I know jack about animals.
49 as ESL speaker. Fun little game to practice English words :)
Typing human has some nice visual effects and writes "That's me".
I got:
Already said more specific animal: Leopard I assume you mean “panther” in the general sense of any big cat.
At that point I stopped playing because this seems nonsense
this was really delightful. The Easter eggs in particular made it feel like someone was actually on the other side
130
Fun game, but also a fascinating brain-probe. We're not used to reversing our internal classifiers.
where are the high scores?
205! The running commentary was fun. And I love how permissive it is -- it was fun stumbling into a new category that you wouldn't necessarily expect to qualify. I do wish that there was an option to see a list of the most popular ones you missed (based on traffic to the article or similar).
For a similar brain exercise, try to Name Every City:
The background is alternating between cyan and black, which is very distracting. Not sure if that's on purpose.
ARE YOU THINKING OF AN ANIMAL? yes
DOES IT SWIM? no
IS IT A BIRD?
https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4
drop bear => Already said Koala. but if you type it before you say koala the answer drops from the top of the page. so many great easter eggs. got 92 in the end
205 and I very much was scraping the bottom of the barrel at the end. Starting a bit generic and adding specificity helped a lot. The little meta-commentary was great. "you already said dogs. dogs are dogs." when I tried "golden retrievers" after already typing dogs.
One of the few sites with a fun "you have javascript turned off" message.
> This game requires JavaScript. Or, if you've superior taste, take out a pen and paper and start listing animals.