TLDR: I made a game where you guess quadratic/cubic/quartic equation coefficients.

I have a niche project that I'm sort of working on. To simplify it to some degree, it involves matching one curve to another. The existing code is some fairly shonky Python. I'd like to turn it into something web based, and that's not my forte, , so I asked friend and web developer extraordinaire Stuart Langridge for some pointers on where to start. Happily for me, he went above and beyond and gave me a simple working demo, huzzah.

I then turned this demo into something that more closely suited my needs, showed it to some other people and immediately got nerd sniped: "the people on mathstodon would love this".

To that end, I've spent more time than I perhaps should have done turning it into something better (but not necessarily good).

So I present... Coefficiency, where the aim of the game is to match your quadratic equation curve to the target curve, by changing the equation coefficients in the smallest number of moves. Once you've done that, you can move on to the cubic and quartic equations. Finish them? Well naturally it is a daily puzzle with a button to copy some text to the clipboard so you can annoy your friends on social media.

The quadratic case is pretty straightforward, but once you get to quartic it can be pretty tricky to see the small difference between your curve and the target, so there is a mode to show just the difference between the two. It makes it much easier, and adds a * to your score, but honestly I really quite enjoy this mode for the times when you suddenly see the pure linear, x², x³, or x⁴ curve and know you're just one move away from completing it.

Coincidentally, my score for today is:

Coefficiency 📈 2023-05-19 x²:17 x³:44 x⁴:103 https://atchoo.org/coefficiency