Making a Game of Hardware Design

no-life-guy writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a web-game to harness the natural human abilities for electronic design automation (EDA). Arguing that people are still much better than computers in games of strategy and visualization, and that we'll do anything as long as it's fun, a group created FunSAT — a game where an average Joe gets to solve a Boolean satisfiability problem. Known as SAT, this problem is an important component in various hardware design tools from formal verification to IC layout to scheduling. The pilot version is a puzzle-like single-player Java app (akin to those addictive web-games), but the researchers envision that it can be extended to a multi-player (and, perhaps, replace WoW as the favorite past-time of the millions), so anybody can be a hardware designer. If anything, this is definitely a great learning tool."

Comments

Not so fun

[pmontra]

I solved the first three levels of the 3SAT game turning all rectangles yellow and deselecting them in turn until all circles turned green. Basically I didn't understand what was going on and I played in a mechanical way, so I quickly lost interest. I think that any computer can do than faster than me (and that made me loose interest too): was I really helping the design of new hardware or slowing it down?

By the way, can anybody estimate how many million people playing this game they need to create ICs faster than a single computer can?

Re:Not so fun

[Pyrion]

Same. Finished the second level without having the slightest clue what I was trying to accomplish. It doesn't help that the instructions are so vague that no thought is given to strategy. It's like putting a chessboard in front of somebody who has never played the game and tell them to "just move shit around until you win."

Re:Not so fun

[wagnerrp]

The puzzles get larger and more complex quickly, but can still be solved in a largely mechanical manner. The bigger issue is that these hardware designers know nothing of software design. Ten minutes in and eight levels passed, I notice the 'game' getting very sluggish. I pull up task manager and find 'java.exe' bouncing between 95-98% CPU usage.

Re:Not so fun

[Jurily]

A simple brute force approach should be able to outperform a human by atleast a factor of millions.

Till level 5, at least, yes. But I imagine that's only the tutorial. As the levels advance, the puzzles get increasingly interconnected, and I imagine it'll take some real intuition to get past the bigger levels.

Brute force definitely won't cut it. The goal here might be to figure out an algorithm that behaves like a skilled human, only millions of times faster.

KOHCTPYKTOP is more fun

[Fry-kun]

Though it doesn't serve a useful purpose (other than entertainment)

http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/pivot/entry.php?id=79

Re:I hear...

[Procasinator]

Girls do like smart men, just not to the exclusion of other characteristics such as social skills and appearance.

This IS awesome.

[BlueKitties]

I opened the game in one tab (Chrome) and the article in another. According to the article, the larger the bubble is the more buttons control its color -- by pressing the button tied to the bubble, the color will change accordingly. The smaller the bubble, the more buttons control it. Once all bubbles become green, you've won the game.

If a bubble only has "one" button tied to it, that we know for a FACT that button must set that bubble to green -- we now don't have to worry about that button! Using similar tactics, this becomes an interesting cat-and-mouse game of whack-the-bubble. If you didn't enjoy the game or felt it's mechanical, give it a second chance and try to figure out how to use strategy -- it's actually really damn fun, and requires a lot of thought and careful reasoning. Don't worry, if it seemed hard at first, you're not a dunce, you're probably just not looking at things the right way.