It might be an interesting LLM benchmark: how many can they list without breaking the rules (repetition or non-animals). Although I bet that big bucks would be then thrown at pointlessly optimizing for that benchmark, so...

there are so many special cases that this game responds to, i was shocked that it didn’t involve an llm at all at the end. very cool.

For anyone wondering: This is based on basic text parsing and a key-value lookup table, no AI involved whatsoever.

Here's the table: https://rose.systems/animalist/lower_title_to_id.js

  var h = hash(guess);
  if (h==7182294905658010 || h==6344346315172974) { return "Adorable guess, but it's spelled “rosy”."; }

I got 42. I was very impressed by how it handled more and less specific categories. It also understood rotifers were a microscopic animal, which I half expected not to work. Great project.

68. The unique title texts are really fun. But I strongly disagree that "chipmunks are squirrels".

Instead of trying to think of just any animal, I found it easier to add a constraint…

1. Animal that starts with A

2. Animal that starts with B

3. Animal that starts with C

…

(I also appreciated the easter eggs: “Are you Australian?” and “You listed both dingos and dogs, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but there's disagreement on whether the dingo is its own species of canid, a subspecies of grey wolf, or simply a breed of dog.”)

drop bear => Already said Koala. but if you type it before you say koala the answer drops from the top of the page. so many great easter eggs. got 92 in the end

106, I feel like I should have done much better. (I feel like I cheated by naming a lot of dinosaurs and insects.)

The clown emoji is great. :)

49 as ESL speaker. Fun little game to practice English words :)

140. Good fun. I like how it teaches you things, too. I learned that toads are considered frogs, axolotls are salamanders, and that it's "anemone" not "anenome". If you type in Unicorn it accepts it as "Unicorn spider" with a fun message. Don't forget to think of insects, birds and fish too, all of which it accepts. I love this kind of detailed, handcrafted thing that someone put a lot of time and effort into.

If you wanted to develop this more, some fun features might be telling you the most commonly entered animals you missed and the most unusual ones you thought of. Appreciate you probably want to keep it a static site though.

It accepted tardigrade which I thought was interesting.

Presumably inspired by this tweet: https://x.com/Fredward3948576/status/1763363909669388588

ARE YOU THINKING OF AN ANIMAL? yes

DOES IT SWIM? no

IS IT A BIRD?

https://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=4

157. Very neat! Started a, b, c then found much more success when thinking about biomes (sea, mountains, forest, jungle, etc).

No LLMs is impressive. Also recognizes "drop bear". Well played.

Accepts the word "human" as well.

update: Start with "human" or "homo sapiens" and the website keeps changing as you add new words.

this was really delightful. The Easter eggs in particular made it feel like someone was actually on the other side

95. Definitely feel like I should have done better; will try another time with more sleep.

This was fun. I definitely could feel the fatigue slowing me down until the timer got me. I also wasted a bunch of time trying to spell specific animals like the wobbegong.

I like the emoji output as well: 203 animals listed:

𓃬𓆊 𓃜𓃘𓅱𓆉𓅃

Possum => opossum is erroneous. I was planning to list both species, it wasnt a typo.

lots of animals

The background is alternating between cyan and black, which is very distracting. Not sure if that's on purpose.

205 and I very much was scraping the bottom of the barrel at the end. Starting a bit generic and adding specificity helped a lot. The little meta-commentary was great. "you already said dogs. dogs are dogs." when I tried "golden retrievers" after already typing dogs.

267, I was going pretty strong and had about 2 minutes racked up, until I hit a wall, and couldn't think of anything else. Thinking in groups helped the most, e.g. reptiles, flightless birds, african animals, etc.

Extinct animals also work, including the dinosaurs!

One of the few sites with a fun "you have javascript turned off" message.

> This game requires JavaScript. Or, if you've superior taste, take out a pen and paper and start listing animals.

Nice! I added this to the HN Arcade https://andrewgy8.github.io/hnarcade/games/games/list-animal...

This is awesome. I made it to 100, but I know jack about animals.

79. I feel like i should have done better but got stuck in a local minima of "farm animals, which obvious farm animals haven't I said??", then tried thinking of names of fish which worked until it didn't.

Some animals replace vaguer definitions, but say "snake" is there forever, no cobra or viper for you. Strange.

Lazy daisy:

  (async () => {
    for (c of 'red black white brown blue green yellow golden grey arctic mountain forest spotted striped'.split(' '))

      for (a of 'bear lion tiger wolf fox eagle shark whale snake frog cat dog horse bat rat mouse owl hawk duck crab ant bee spider deer penguin elephant rabbit'.split(' ')) {

        guessbox.value = c + ' ' + a;
        uncomment(); attempt();
        await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 75));
      }
  })();