Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle

(geneguessr.brinedew.bio)

62 points | by brinedew 3 days ago

7 comments

  • boldlybold 22 minutes ago
    Great work! I really like the interface here, I think you put a lot of taste into the way this all came together. It's quite hard (appropriately so!) I would love to see a experienced structural biologist go at this.
    • brinedew 1 minute ago
      Thank you. I started the development with the interface first, basically making a mockup of how the finished game should look like, and then prodding LLMs with a stick to make a backend that would support this interface without crashing.

      Making a nice-looking web GUI without knowing relevant vocabulary was a very clunky process in comparison to code pipelines, basically just pasting screenshots into the chat window and asking LLMs to "line up stuff properly", which they still couldn't manage to do in places.

  • RestartKernel 1 hour ago
    This seems super well-done, albeit completely impossible for laymen. Great work, I'd love to see someone with the necessary knowledge play this.
  • noduerme 7 hours ago
    Huh. Is this kind of manifold something that a group of humans can now identify on sight and associate with a part of a DNA sequence? That's pretty spectacular. I have a friend who worked for years on AlphaFold, but wasn't aware that people had gotten to this level of confidence in visually identifying proteins.
    • brinedew 7 hours ago
      My dream is forming a team of Tetlock-style superbiologists who can identify gene names on sight like Rainbolt, beat prediction markets on shorting biotech stocks, and smell out pre-cancerous cells like it's the final round of amongus.
      • noduerme 7 hours ago
        Hahahaa ... I kinda love this, along with humans who can sit at a piano and play a song they've only heard once, or cook a complicated dish they only tasted once. That seems like the great Turing test... zero-shot humans.

        But seriously, there probably are a few people who can see genes from proteins like that, faster than a whole datacenter of GPUs. Putting together such a brain trust could be invaluable.

    • wigglewoggle 7 hours ago
      I went straight to cd-4 and was crushed to find out I didn't get it in one guess
  • oreilles 3 hours ago
    Clicking the leftmost menu icon raise the following error:

        Geneguessr encountered a problem:
        runtime-error
        SyntaxError: redeclaration of const NAVIGATION_START
    • brinedew 3 hours ago
      That's the frontpage link, fixed it, thank you.
  • miladyincontrol 8 hours ago
    For a moment thought this was gonna be some ethnoguessr clone
  • lovegrenoble 7 hours ago
    Dayly, that means one puzzle per day? And how many of them in total?
    • brinedew 7 hours ago
      You can play more than once in the practice mode. It turns on after you complete the daily puzzle.

      There's almost 20k entries in my human gene database. You can choose any of them as your guess, but the "gene of the day" is chosen from a subset that has decent 3D structure coverage (meaning, not falling back to alphafold2 for visualization).

  • maximgeorge 7 hours ago
    [dead]