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wow this is an interesting project! 1. what's the coffeescript doing? 2. playing it now - is it normal to think "wow, I'm not nearly smart enough for this lol"? 3. have any interesting discoveries been made through this or something like it?

1. It's there for our userscripting environment. It was originally written as part of our old website frontend (which was coffeescript, before my time). It could be ported at this point but even still there's a lot of backwards-compatibility cruft.

2/1/26, 4:43 am0 reposts1 like

2. Our goal is to make it as accessible as possible, but unfortunately your reaction is not uncommon. We have a lot of room for improvement on lowering the learning curve! (nb: lack of progress here is largely due to ye olde lack of funding to get focused attention on it)

That said your screenshot seems to suggest you're looking at an advanced puzzle - been through the tutorials yet? :)

3. Totally! A couple callouts include work towards a fast, low-cost TB diagnostic and principles for designing mRNA vaccines that are able to be more easily distributed globally (eg in the global south) - co-authoured with folks from Phizer.

eternagame.org/challenges, eternagame.org/publications, and eternagame.org/tech for more. There's definitely other examples from other scientific discovery games (eg Foldit's determination of the HIV monkey virus structure and relation to Alphafold)

MichiganTypeScript

@michigantypescript.com