plancien

I was inspired by this and created a version with customizable ball count, accessible code... and a speed slider, to satisfy the less patient among us.

https://explorers.toxicode.fr/?remoteWorkspace=pong-war

I'm very impressed, this made my day (my month ?). Too bad your site lacks some nice video demos on the front page. To other HN readers, look what I found in it's tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkvB4nb8PXw

I agree, this article is well explained but it's not MCTS. To be more accurate, this is Monte Carlo, and here it is applied to search the tree of game turn possibilities and doing stats on it. But Monte-Carlo Tree Search is a "reserved" name of a specific algorithm, involving more than what is done in the article : some kind of caching, and some optimisations. In fact, it would be a great addition to this article to do a part 2, and explaining how to extend the code to do MCTS. I imagine this two way trip would be a better MCTS presentation than the classic ones describing the algorithm step by step in one shot.

I stumbled upon this old post from Iñigo Quilez, and this made my day. Especially because I did not know about the Babylonian multiplication, let alone its proof. The absence of explanation in the post made it into a nice puzzle, I had to figure things out by myself. Maths teaching should more often be like this kickstarted discovery...

No, but there are works in progress and we hope to release some very soon. If you want to take part in beta tests, you can leave your email there on the two "coming soon" projects here : http://www.toxicode.fr/learn

Hi everyone, I'm the guy behind Silent Teacher. I just had the surprise to see my work on HN, in fact a colleague of mine published it without me knowing, I didn't have the chance to really explain the goal.

This is a side project, and the goal is not to teach how to code. I agree with several comments here, it's sometime confusing, it's short and minimalistic. The real goal is far less ambitious. I just wanted people to catch a glimpse of what is coding. It's like stepping into un unknown world for a few minutes. And it's not aimed at everybody. Some people are driven away by written explanations, or can feel patronized very quick, and I wanted to address that. Here, the first questions make you feel confident, then with tries and errors, by yourself (or apparently so) you understand a bit how this works.

The story behind this is : I was never able to explain how code works to my wife. She is math-o-phobic and she never gave me the chance to explain... just the fact of explaining something like this scares her away. But one day, sitting next to her on the train, I opened my JavaScript console and began typing 3 + 4, then without a word I pointed the keyboard and screen to her... 20 minutes later we were doing functions and variables, without even a word. This is how this project was born.

Sorry for those who where mislead by the title of this HN post. We have other tools currently in development to address code teaching (one more focused on code reading, one more focused on creativity, one more focus on JavaScript ...), and only when 3 or 4 of these will be published will we be able to teach properly to a larger audience.

Thanks for all the feedback today, I really appreciate it.

Good job !

The logic used, based on pattern detections is pretty clever. Reminds me of cellular automata algorithms.

Even if you are not interested in puzzle games, reading the "first steps" part of the site is quite interesting and enlightening.

In the "make a game" part, one thing is not clear enough, though : in order to launch the games, you'll have to hit the "x" key.

Nice article ! One comment : on the "Selling Time Over Money" part, it seems to me that some business manage to do the opposite. Take Ikea, for instance. Typically you buy some furniture there, hoping to spend little money in exchange of giving up your sunday afternoon precious time. If you take into account the time spent assembling the furniture, with a reasonable hourly rate, some furnitures there are not so cheap anymore.

The Ikea business implies that sometimes we prefer money over time.

Good news. This will very be useful in my current projets, I like the direction taken with the "legacy config".

Nice initiative. I like the fact that it's well explained, and that the goal isn't to show only stuffs with a huge "wow" effect.