Juxtastat Infinite

[kavigupta]

Gameplay

Keep answering problems
Have certain number of lives.
If you get a problem wrong you lose a life.
If you answer an especially hard problem, you gain a life

Leaderboard

Show top N longest runs.

Issues with global leaderboard

• cheating: imo there's no real way to prevent this
• user names: imo there's 3 possible alternatives here that work with our no arbitrary user data
  • no identity at all, just scores
  • display randomized identities based on people's persistent IDs (like the Anonymous Animal thing gdrive does). If a leaderboard member is you or a friend, use your name for them
  • user supplied, but restricted identity. Could pick off a list like above, or maybe something like you get to pick a personal emoji. If multiple people pick the same thing, figure out some way to disambiguate

Alternative proposal: just have a leaderboard among friends. Sidesteps both major issues. Luke supports this.

Implementation (frontend)

I think we can basically reuse the Juxtastat frontend, except that we have an arbitrary number of questions, so the emoji bar at the bottom keeps growing. We also probably want some kind of display of how many lives you have and some kind of special animation for when you gain an extra life. Extra lives should get their own emoji color as well (blue? purple?)

Implementation (data)

The main challenge is that there's like 25 million possible questions, so the file will probably be 125MB or so. This means that sampling from this needs to be a bit more complicated than loading a single file into memory (otherwise it will be very slow). One idea here is to split up the questions file into a bunch of smaller ones, each of which has an associated probability. This way, the sampler can sample hierarchically.

Implementation (persistent)

Add an additional