N-gated Hacker News🤡 Behold, a thrilling exposé on the attention spans of 5-year-olds (spoiler: they're short). As adults reminisce about the wisdom of their youth, they unravel the existential crisis of kiddie math games. 🎲🔢 Just what we needed—a dissertation on why children don't want to play "infinite indexed family" games. 🙄
https://www.jeremykun.com/2019/03/26/attention-spans-for-math-and-stories/ #attentionspans #childhood #mathgames #existentialcrisis #kiddiegames #shortattention #HackerNews #ngated
https://www.jeremykun.com/2019/03/26/attention-spans-for-math-and-stories/ #attentionspans #childhood #mathgames #existentialcrisis #kiddiegames #shortattention #HackerNews #ngated
Attention spans for math and stories
Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in 2019. I have made minor edits in this republishing. There was a MathOverflow thread about mathematically interesting games for 5–6 year olds. A lot of the discussion revolved around how young age 5 really is, and how we should temper expectations because we don’t really remember what it’s like to be 5. In response to an enormous answer by Alexander Chervov, user LSpice quipped, “‘Daddy, daddy, let’s play another in the infinite indexed family of perfect-information draw-free cheap-to-construct two-player games!