Feedback | SoME

The Mathematics of Banana Farms (Bloons TD 6)

We will be applying techniques of mathematical discovery to a video game, Bloons Tower Defense 6. Our goal is to find metrics to evaluate how good a banana farm is. We’ll find that the banana efficiency is a good metric for most banana farms, but if you want to reinvest some income towards buying more farms, we’ll need to use the banana compound efficiency instead. On the way, we’ll discover the Fundamental Theorem of Bananas and the Monkey Bank Theorem. Audiences with backgrounds from middle school to college and beyond may find value in this video.

Analytics

5.85 Overall score*

50 Rank

30 Votes

10 Comments

Comments

6.9

Notably hard work, good sense of humor, wonder how many times this guy said “banana” on the video.

5.7

The topic didn't catch my attention, but it is a well made video, indeed.

I liked this one! It took a bit of a while to get to the meat and bones of the math but I did enjoy it throughout it all.

3.1

I think this video had a lot of potential. The overall approach was very creative but it seemed a bit scattered and disjointed at times. It was really hard for me to follow the steps in reasoning that you used. Some constructive feedback to make this video better: 1) the work you showed writing with your hand was hard to read at times and it was also very fast paced. Going more slowly and using clearer handwriting, and better yet having it typed out, would have made it easier to follow. 2) another thing that contributed to the disjoint feeling was how often you switched from showing the game, to showing your handwriting, to showing your face, to showing the excel sheet, ... I think it would have felt less disjoint if you switch less or perhaps just kept your face on the whole time in a small square while you were showing the other stuff. 3) Lastly, I think that was a lot of info you were trying to squeeze into 1 video. Perhaps breaking up into 2-3 videos would have made it more reasonable (especially if you went at a slower pace).

6.1

Cool and fun video!

5.6

Nice analysis. I wish he had stated the attributes of the various kinds of banana farms and the overall play of the game before he started the analysis.

4.6

good analysis of a game, missing the issue of the surface used by a type of banana farms, and boring at the end if you don't know teh game

5.7

fantastic

7.1

love that you have the ornithopter in the background 🤣

I don't play Bloons TD games, but what you describe matches the evaluation heuristics I would tend to apply. Anything with 'valuable' in its name usually isn't. What is interesting for me is how looking at things more carefully can sometimes completely change which you class as the 'best' item/tower/monkey or whatever you're evaluating. Some extra points for novelty I feel, and it's good to showcase that maths really can have everyday implications. I always wonder whether the programmers analyse their own games as carefully as players do. I suspect they often don't check things as closely as they should, which is why some games have poor balance or blatant exploits.