# You're reading: Posts Tagged: Game

### Watch this bold decision-maker score 100 at the “is this prime?” game

Fan of the site Ravi Fernando has written in to tell us about his high score at the “is this prime?” game: a cool century!

I’ve been a fan of your “Is this prime?” game for a while, and after seeing your blog post from last May, I thought I’d say hi and send you some high scores.  Until recently, my record was 89 numbers (last March 12), which I think may be the dot in the top right of your “human scores” graph.  But I tried playing some more a couple weeks ago, and I found I can go a little faster using my computer’s y/n buttons instead of my phone’s touch screen.  It turns out 100 numbers is possible!

Watch in amazement:

But, to the delight of prime fans everywhere, he didn’t stop there:

Today I even got 107 – good to have a prime record again.

Well done, Ravi!

Now is a good time to point out that the data on every attempt ever made at the game is available to download, in case you want to do your own analysis: at time of writing, there have been over 625,000 attempts, and 51 is still the number that catches people out the most.

### Education bits: new PBS maths series, National Numeracy game, etc.

I’m not normally interested in education stuff, but we’ve had a flurry of emails from various people telling us about their projects, and I’ve got nothing else to do today, so I thought I’d round them up.

### I bought isthisprime.com

Around about exactly this time a year ago, I bought the frivolous domain name three.onefouronefivenine.com, to celebrate π Day and to indulge my curiosity about a marvellous algorithm to compute π’s digits.

This year, I’ve been thinking about prime numbers, and my hosting provider has run another sale on domain names. So, I’ve bought isthisprime.com. You can probably guess what I’ve made it do.

### Review: Pythagoria

Pythagoria is a puzzle game for PCs. It’s the same idea as Naoki Inaba’s Area Maze: you’re shown a geometric construction, not drawn to scale, and you have to work out a missing length or an area.

Each puzzle is constructed so that it can be solved without ever dealing with fractions, though what exactly that means is up for debate. Whatever it means, it keeps you from breaking out pen and paper to solve a problem algebraically, when you know there should be a way of doing it in your head.

### Hypernom

Vi Hart, Andrea Hawksley, Henry Segerman and Marc ten Bosch each independently have long track records of doing crazy, innovative stuff with maths. Together, they’ve made Hypernom.

### I’ve made my own numbers-in-a-grid game

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively playing the game Twenty on my phone. The fact that my wife has consistently been ahead of my high scores has nothing to do with it.

The main source of strife in my marriage.

Twenty is another in the current spate of “numbers-in-a-grid” games that also includes Threes, 10242048 (and its $2^{48}$ clones), Just Get 10, and Quento.

The basic idea is that you have a grid of numbered tiles, and you combine them to build up your score. While there are lots of unimaginative derivatives of the bigger games, there’s a surprisingly large range of different games following this template.

With so many different games being created, I thought that a chap like me should be able to come up with a numbers-in-a-grid game of my own. Yet, for a long time, I just couldn’t come up with anything that was any good.

Yesterday I had a really nice shower, and the accompanying feeling that I’d come up with a really good idea – make a game to do with arithmetic progressions.