Play: https://bertblookers.github.io/retractle/ — a work in progress.
A paper has been accidentally retracted! It's on you to repair the damaged document and make sure it's restored into the archive.
Each day one well-known astronomy arXiv paper appears with every word blacked out, except small words like the, of and and. Guess a word and it is restored everywhere it appears, in all its forms (observe, observed, observing; galaxy, galaxies). Restore every word of the title to win. Your score is the number of guesses and the share of them that restored something, beside how much of the paper you have restored. Stuck? A hint reveals one hidden word in one place, never a word of the title, and each hint is counted in your result. Each black bar shows how many characters it hides, and the guess box counts what you type the same way. The arrows beside the puzzle number take you to earlier days' papers, each with its own game.
None of these papers was really retracted: they are well-known, well-loved papers, and the "retraction" is only the game's story.
While it is a work in progress, future papers and the rules may still change; the papers of days already played never do.
Retractle is one of the daily sky puzzles of Urania's Mirror, next to Muldle.
Retractle keeps no paper text. When you play, your browser loads the paper
straight from arXiv's own HTML version of it (arxiv.org/html/<id>), and
the game blacks out the words on your screen. Its figures are blacked out
too; each one loads from the same place once you have restored enough of
its caption. This repository holds only
each paper's arXiv identifier, version, title, authors and year (arXiv
metadata, released under CC0). After a game, Retractle names the paper in
full, links to its arXiv page and shows the license arXiv states for it.
Copyright of every paper stays with its authors.
No accounts and no tracking. Everything Retractle remembers, such as your
games, is kept only in your own browser (localStorage). Retractle's only
outside requests go to arxiv.org: the day's paper, and its figures as you
restore them.
It's a static site: serve the repository root with any web server, e.g.
python -m http.server 8082
then open http://localhost:8082. Retractle needs a network connection to load its paper from arXiv. Locally, the Urania's Mirror mark top left leads back to the game itself; on the live site it leads to the hub.
Retractle is inspired by Redactle, which does the same with Wikipedia articles. Retractle is an independent hobby project with no affiliation to or endorsement by Redactle or arXiv.
See ATTRIBUTION.md: arXiv (the papers and their metadata) and AGID by Kevin Atkinson (the word forms).
The code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0; see
LICENSE. SPDX: AGPL-3.0-only. The word-form table lemmas.js
is under AGID's own permissive license, in LICENSE-AGID.txt. The paper
list papers.js is arXiv metadata under CC0. shared.css (the look
Retractle shares with the hub) is copied from the hub's repository,
bertblookers/bertblookers.github.io.