Hack the Proton. A data-crunching game from the Beta and Bit series

I’ve prepared a short console-based data-driven R game named ,,The Proton Game’’. The goal of a player is to infiltrate Slawomir Pietraszko’s account on a Proton server. To do this, you have to solve four data-based puzzles.

The game can be played by beginners as well as heavy users of R. Survey completed by people who completed the beta version of this game shows that the game gives around 15 minutes of fun to people experienced in R and up to around 60 minutes to people that just start programming and using R. More details about the results from beta-version are presented on the plot on the bottom.

In order to install the game it is enough to install the package proton from CRAN.

install.packages("proton")

To start the game just load this package.

library("proton")

Additional instructions will appear on your screen.

The game is prepared as an educational project of SmarterPoland.pl Foundation. To solve the first problem you need to prove that you can find a single row in a dataset. You can do that either through sorting the whole dataset or by filtering rows that fit given condition. The second problem was designed as practice loops (feel free to use for, sapply, while or any other type of loop). The third problem is intended as practice in combinations of more complex operations like grouping and summarizing. The last puzzle was designed as practice in basic operations on text like substitutions, aggregation and sorting.

The game is a part of the Incredible Adventures of Beta and Bit series that popularizes mathematics, statistics and computer science. Read more about it on http://www.biecek.pl/BetaBit/Warsaw (we have just started so this is the first game in the series).