HN Plays 2048

https://hnplays2048.herokuapp.com/

by computer • 12 years ago

280 86 12 years ago

hnplays2048.herokuapp.com

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

There's also an api: http://hnplays2048.herokuapp.com/api

namenotrequired• 12 years ago

I think someone figured out how to unleash its AI on this :)

nacs• 12 years ago

Yeah and whoever is running that AI is being a complete a-hole with the rate they're sending commands.

It's completing the puzzle in less than 5 seconds at the rate that its spamming commands.

cribwi• 12 years ago

Funny to see a new player entering the game to start button bashing and ruining the playing field in a matter of seconds :)

fidz• 12 years ago

Any idea on handling transaction?

coreymgilmore• 12 years ago

It would be nice to know your own user #.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Good idea! I'll make an issue for this on Github.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Your own user inputs are now bolded

Commit: https://github.com/grant/hnplays2048/commit/308f68341b2c54bf...

colept• 12 years ago

This game is no more playable than it was when it was posted hours ago. And here's why:

setInterval(function() { window.manager.inputManager.emit("move", Math.floor(Math.random() * 3) + 1); }, 1000);

Some rate limiting has been put in place, but it's not good enough. If there are 50 users online at once, they all shouldn't be able to spam a command every second.

A better algorithm would be:

seconds_between_commands = 60 - (60 / number_of_players);

With a clock letting you know when you can make your next move.

Otherwise, it's just way too easy to spam.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Good idea. Working on it.

bhaumik• 12 years ago

Is this HN's version of twitch plays Pokemon? http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

saraid216• 12 years ago

Yes. Explicitly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431436

joyeuse6701• 12 years ago

the chaos.

begriffs• 12 years ago

It's currently unplayable. Instead imagine if it would make one move every half a minute. During the time between moves anyone could vote on the next move. Then the winning move would be played. It would be a slow game, but would be the aggregate HN wisdom.

sillysaurus3• 12 years ago

This is awesome. It's anarchic and chaotic and amazing.

I can't wait until it falls off the frontpage and drops to 5 users.

EDIT: We killed it. Nooo.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Should be online now.

alanfalcon• 12 years ago

And we could name that mode democracy, but we could have a meta game where people vote on anarchy (current system) or democracy, as you describe. And there should be fan art.

Cub3• 12 years ago

We really need a democracy mode for this

fblp• 12 years ago

it has been added and is awesome

comrh• 12 years ago

This seems to show what I thought when I originally saw the game, that random spamming would get you pretty far.

grej• 12 years ago

Kind of fun, but I agree with some of the other comments that it would be interesting to see what would happen if the app made a move every 15-20 seconds based on the vote tally in that time window.

cube_yellow• 12 years ago

Right. It needs a Democracy mode. maybe even a Democracy/Anarchy slider controlled by Q and E.

MCompeau• 12 years ago

I feel like this undermines the true spirit of HN Plays 2048

dbieber3• 12 years ago

Ask and you shall receive http://hnplays2048-democracy.herokuapp.com/

Edit: Now integrated into the OP's app

andreyf• 12 years ago

15-20 seconds seems like it might be too much, at least with the number of users online now...

dreaming_void• 12 years ago

Or as an alternative, perhaps it could allow each person 1 vote per 5 seconds, while keeping moves instant, so each time it is a subset of people

zacharycohn• 12 years ago

Counterpoint - In TwitchPlaysPokemon democracy mode was always a lot more boring, and a lot less fun, than anarchy mode.

sequoia• 12 years ago

This point was explored more fully in the Twitch Plays Pokemon community, where anarchy vs. democracy in the game caused a significant cultural crisis: http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y8r6d/i...

tl;dr: anarchy produces all the fun crazy ridiculous happenings, it's what makes TPP fun. If it's "taking too long" and you want to beat the game quickly just play solo; beating the game fast isn't the point.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Hey guys, it's the creator here.

I never thought this little project would get this big!

If someone wants to help me scale this, or add things like chat, please do! Just send a PR on Github!

https://github.com/grant/hnplays2048

addisonj• 12 years ago

I literally was going to do this this coming weekend, same name even!

I was going to take a much different approach however - I was going to use rabbitmq speaking STOMP over a websocket [0] with two queues, one for client moves, which the server would consume and write to the moves queue, which each client would consume. This would allow the server to do more fancy rate limiting / throttling as not to just lead to a message storm. This, along with storing the game state in a db, allows for scaling out app servers.

0 - https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/05/14/introducing-rabbitm...

ankit84• 12 years ago

A joKE?

theandrewbailey2• 12 years ago

seems like it falls victim to popularity, and crashes often.

azinman2• 12 years ago

I really don't like to hate on other people's work but seriously more 2048 forks? And now ones that aren't even remotely playable?

theandrewbailey2• 12 years ago

Make 2048 forks, not war.

ghiculescu• 12 years ago

This is probably a bit much, but I'd love to see someone whip up a multiplayer 2048 using something like Firebase. It would probably start many an argument.

vinh0811• 12 years ago

Here is my app for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.contraryki...

izzydata• 12 years ago

Nice. I shall try this and never be productive for the rest of my life with all these 2048 forks.

Yetanfou• 12 years ago

According to GP your app contains in-app purchases.

Yuck. How much for that 2048 tile again?

gk1• 12 years ago

A-a-and it's down.

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

Man... scalability sucks.

Oculus4• 12 years ago

Took a look at your code and noticed you're using Socket.io. Don't use Socket.io for anything over double digit concurrent users. It's well known to be horrible at scaling. If you want something that's better at scaling I'd suggest SockJS[1].

1 - https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-node

granttimmerman9• 12 years ago

I'll look into it. Thanks

alecsmart1• 12 years ago

Your app's down :(

bib971• 12 years ago

Anything to backup your claim about Socket.io?

woah• 12 years ago

This epic issue: https://github.com/learnboost/socket.io/issues/438

Oculus4• 12 years ago

Great podcast about using Websockets (including Socket.io) in Node: http://nodeup.com/fortytwo

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

This is a rather inaccurate statement to make. I've used Socket.io with double digit concurrent users before and Socket.io handled things fine.

derefr• 12 years ago

You're not disagreeing with the parent. They said more than double-digit.

ahdinosaur• 12 years ago

i'd suggest https://github.com/primus/primus. it's an abstraction layer for real-time so no lock-in to a single socket implementation. it's simple and extensible by plugins.

gargarplex• 12 years ago

Seconded. I ran a very popular website that used Socket.IO. It broke down whenever we had 200+ concurrent users. Sockets would randomly close.

babuskov3• 12 years ago

The "over double digit" claim is simply not true. I'm running three multiplayer games for about two years now, and it starts to have problems once if goes over 3500 concurrent connections. It could be that I just hit the right combination of node+socketio versions, though, as I had problems with newer ones. My setup is:

node.js 0.6 socket.io 0.9.6

This version of socket.io has a nasty bug in jsonp protocol handling which I patched manually by merging some change from a newer version, but it does work fine.

To make it scale, I run multiple node processes. In the last 300+ days each of those has between 1000 and 2000 concurrent connections all the time and it works fine. Except that there is some memory leak (I'm not sure if it's related to socket.io or some other lib), so I restart each server once a week (it's done automatically each Sunday at 2am).

I had my eye on SockJS since 2012, and it looks like newer versions are really good, but I'd need upgrade to newer nodejs and this is simply not possible for the existing projects as many used modules are not available.

However, if you're starting a new project, it's worth testing and see which performs better.

feronull• 12 years ago

We also do had a memory leak because of socket.io 0.9.6

take a look at this discussion https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/1303#issuecom...

Oculus4• 12 years ago

There's a memory leak that only got fixed in 0.10.22 I believe. Erin Hammer and the whole Node Black Friday team really publicized it when it was biting them[1]. I'm not sure if the leak was present in 0.6 and given that you rely on older modules the cost/benefit of switching is probably too high.

You're the first person I've heard that was able to run vanilla Socket.io at such scale. I know Trello and some other shops use Socket.io, but they've forked & changed it to something that looks nothing like the original[2].

1 - http://www.joyent.com/blog/walmart-node-js-memory-leak

2 - http://nodeup.com/fortytwo

ttty• 12 years ago

"Under the hood SockJS tries to use native WebSockets first. If that fails it can use a variety of browser-specific transport protocols and presents them through WebSocket-like abstractions." - SockJS

How this is helping?

"Flash is absolutely not required for Socket.IO to function. If Flash is available, it'll be leveraged, as it provides almost the same capabilities as WebSocket. If it's not, the next best transport will be chosen." - Socket.io

Oculus4• 12 years ago

My understanding is the issue is not in the protocols, but in the implementation of the libraries themselves.

joeblau• 12 years ago

Can someone index all of these versions :)

mkoryak• 12 years ago

you guys really suck at this game.

dwd• 12 years ago

I'd love to give people the benefit of the doubt and attribute it to spoilers who intentionally move it against the flow, but I have my doubts.

Dobbs• 12 years ago

This needs a delay. That way you can follow the chaos instead of just staring at a moving screen.

mcescalante• 12 years ago

Another case of "HN crashes the heroku app"

evidencepi2• 12 years ago

LOL

dbieber3• 12 years ago

I added democracy mode...

The pull request is here: https://github.com/grant/hnplays2048/pull/10

You can play it here: http://hnplays2048-democracy.herokuapp.com/

aturek• 12 years ago

Democracy mode is great! But a couple of players (and I) figured out that multiple key presses by a user are counted, so we have more of an oligarchy determined by whoever can spam keystrokes...

richard_cubano3• 12 years ago

I like this one a bit better because it shows vote totals and has a visible countdown:

http://voting-2048.herokuapp.com/

richard_cubano3• 12 years ago

Pull Request if anyone wants to see the code. Sorry this is in 2 places.

https://github.com/grant/hnplays2048/pull/13

PeterisP• 12 years ago

Democracy mode needs a chat to scream about the occasional horribly stupid moves voted (merge a mid-value pair that prevents a win because it blocks in a low value cell between the 256's)

evidencepi2• 12 years ago

Crashed!!

kregasaurusrex• 12 years ago

Start9

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

Anarchy lasted minutes before the democracy babies came running in.

munimkazia• 12 years ago

Utter chaos going on in the game over there. But it's a fun experiment.

tomaskazemekas• 12 years ago

It is a good demonstration that in cases like this user democracy is a loosing strategy.

Smirnoff• 12 years ago

Damn, this version seems so unplayable-- so much chaos. When I play on my own, I already do so many random moves until I reach 512. After that every move that I make is evaluated. I have no problems reaching 2048 (or 29,000 points) within 10-15 minutes.

Here, I just get frustrated with the slowness of the moves (not to mention the strategy of the "democratic group" is way off)

yaddayadda• 12 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1344/

maaarghk• 12 years ago

holy hell this makes me hate you all! =P

martinthenext• 12 years ago

It's pretty interesting how the strategy derived by averaging over multiple intelligent users can be that sub-optimal.

lerg• 12 years ago

I've made a version of 2048 on Hexagonal Board - check it out https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spiralcode...

spajus• 12 years ago

This makes a perfect illustration why startups are shit. Instead of working on something useful, people either produce crappy javascript games, or play them. Now massively downvote this comment, write 100 replies explaining why I'm wrong and how retarded I am for trying to say something like this, then go read something by Paul Graham and play more clones of 1024. And then write a long essay why your startup failed.

HN Plays 2048

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