I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural. It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.
This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs to a scenario.
A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 * 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different sets of criteria.
The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter"
I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is the one I describe above.
The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting.
It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space.
It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this
Couldn't agree more. Spent the evening reading though some of their work, and it's all so... fun. Just exploring fun and potentially useful ideas not restricted to what tools already exist (which seems to be the case much of the time)
This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space.
Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see plausible distributions of monthly spending.
I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs analytically or through simulation.
There is nothing free and good in this space, last I checked. The alternatives I know of:
- GetGuesstimate[1] is probably the most polished, but development on it is slow and it doesn't lean into the same interaction patterns that I think make actual spreadsheets popular.
- There are various plugins for the proprietary Microsoft Excel that can do this. I don't remember their names off the top of my head, but sometimes "Monte Carlo" is the phrase that unlocks many searches around this. (Crystal Ball is a name of a plugin that pops into my head.)
- One can hypothetically do this in vanilla spreadsheets, by generating arrays of random values and serialising/deserialising to space-separated strings in a cell. This is very, very slow, though.
- I have started working on something I call Precel[2] which is not very polished but I think the basic idea (if not the current implementation) can be a solid foundation for a proper spreadsheet-for-full-distributions.
I remember that as well, so no Mandela effect, and I've been trying to find it too.
It had a graphical interface in which you could specify the probability distribution of an event, and the graph would resolve and show the calculated distributions of all the steps.
"Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario—even in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names like “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of the three amb values."
Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?
As long as the operations you're doing aren't too numerically unstable, you could have it use monte carlo methods for moderate numbers of inputs. Sample, say, 10,000 values across the inputs and output averages, output min, 5th percentile, median, 95th percentile, max. Right now I do this either with Python or some auxiliary column full of random values.
If you were doing it that way, you could also set distributional values for the variables. Rather than x = {500, 1000}, you could set (say) X ~ N(750, 100) and have it pull samples from that distribution. If you really wanted to get fancy you could take advantage of known results on operations on distributions to keep things exact for a lot of common calculations, then turn to numerical methods for uglier operations (at which point you're basically building a wrapper around one of the usual statistical libraries, I suppose).
(EDIT: apparently this already exists, see other comments in this thread.)
We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.
and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development.
I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?
It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space.
1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so maybe I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that.
2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?).
This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown.
It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.
This + sports analytics.
So much of sports is about slightly different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall. But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes.
(What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)
Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.
This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.
How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in this? How could you implement the well known decision support methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to rows, or tables and extra columns?
Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0]
This was my thinking too - data tables can often do this.
The negative of data tables is that it massively slows down your spreadsheet, and cause some weird errors/glitches, but it’s essentially the same thing.
Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting idea.
Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too.
Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g. worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10
I think the best solution to this was Quantrix. The multi dimension, multi scenario modelling just felt right and natural. It still exists but seems to be locked into a different price point and target audience and outdated app UI. Someone should make an airtable like experience for what quantrix was.
This does a clever job of dealing with the multiple varied inputs to a scenario.
A real budgeting scenario might have 2 * 3 * 7 * 4 * 5 * 3 * 9 * 2 * 5 = 226,800 possible outcomes, so the obvious question is what UI do you use to consider/narrow down that beast? You need tools that let you slice and dice that output based on different sets of criteria.
The simplest might be something like, "rule out all solutions that total more than $5000" but you also need things like "I will only pay for a total of 3 streaming services, rule out all scenarios with more than that" and "if I choose not to have a car, then I have to get a transit pass and an e-scooter"
I almost feel like, as clever as this is, the harder problem is the one I describe above.
The ideas and prototypes coming out of inkandswitch are really interesting.
It feels like user interface innovations all stopped/stagnated in the early 2000s and we've just spent the last 20 years adjusting the previous 20 years of desktop UI paradigms to the mobile and tablet space.
It's great to see people still working on interesting problems like this
Couldn't agree more. Spent the evening reading though some of their work, and it's all so... fun. Just exploring fun and potentially useful ideas not restricted to what tools already exist (which seems to be the case much of the time)
This is exactly what I loved about the Causal app (no affiliation). They started as a general purpose spreadsheet with 'Amb' cells built-in, though later on they seem to have converged on the financial modeling space.
[0]: https://causal.app/
Re: computing with continuous distributions: I recall there was a "show HN" a while ago with a graph-style interface to do computations on continuous distributions, so you could very much budget by modelling a plausible distribution of gas prices within the month, of rental prices in your town, etc, and then see plausible distributions of monthly spending.
I'm still trying to find it: anyone remember this, or did I just Mandela Effect myself? I'm not sure whether it computed outputs analytically or through simulation.
(Hell, I might just recreate it on my own...)
There is nothing free and good in this space, last I checked. The alternatives I know of:
- GetGuesstimate[1] is probably the most polished, but development on it is slow and it doesn't lean into the same interaction patterns that I think make actual spreadsheets popular.
- There are various plugins for the proprietary Microsoft Excel that can do this. I don't remember their names off the top of my head, but sometimes "Monte Carlo" is the phrase that unlocks many searches around this. (Crystal Ball is a name of a plugin that pops into my head.)
- One can hypothetically do this in vanilla spreadsheets, by generating arrays of random values and serialising/deserialising to space-separated strings in a cell. This is very, very slow, though.
- I have started working on something I call Precel[2] which is not very polished but I think the basic idea (if not the current implementation) can be a solid foundation for a proper spreadsheet-for-full-distributions.
[1]: https://www.getguesstimate.com/
[2]: https://git.sr.ht/~kqr/precel/tree/master/item/README.md
@Risk is another excel add-in. Found it quite powerful and useful:
https://lumivero.com/products/at-risk/
I remember that as well, so no Mandela effect, and I've been trying to find it too. It had a graphical interface in which you could specify the probability distribution of an event, and the graph would resolve and show the calculated distributions of all the steps.
Pretty sure it was getguesstimate.com
Was it Projection Lab, which has been on HN before?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450913
https://projectionlab.com/
"Excel requires the user to manually enter every scenario—even in the simple example above, exploring 2 cars, 3 apartments, and 2 Netflix plans would require entering 12 scenarios, with names like “Cheap Car / Medium apartment / Premium Netflix”. In contrast, an ambsheet automatically computes all combinations of the three amb values."
Presumably this tool only works for relatively small possibility spaces due to the problem of combinatorial explosion?
As long as the operations you're doing aren't too numerically unstable, you could have it use monte carlo methods for moderate numbers of inputs. Sample, say, 10,000 values across the inputs and output averages, output min, 5th percentile, median, 95th percentile, max. Right now I do this either with Python or some auxiliary column full of random values.
If you were doing it that way, you could also set distributional values for the variables. Rather than x = {500, 1000}, you could set (say) X ~ N(750, 100) and have it pull samples from that distribution. If you really wanted to get fancy you could take advantage of known results on operations on distributions to keep things exact for a lot of common calculations, then turn to numerical methods for uglier operations (at which point you're basically building a wrapper around one of the usual statistical libraries, I suppose).
(EDIT: apparently this already exists, see other comments in this thread.)
This would be a lot more interesting if these folks would release their product/code.
https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/
https://www.inkandswitch.com/inkbase/
are very interesting and promising, but not available for use/experimentation.
We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.
[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling
[2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper
Thank you.
I'm peripherally involved in a similar project:
https://github.com/IndiePython/myappmaker-sdd
and appreciate anything which could be shared which might be helpful or inform development.
I will note that if you would try either Android or a Windows tablet w/ a Wacom EMR stylus you should be able to get the sort of input you want --- or maybe on a Mac w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch or Movink 13 or Cintiq w/ Touch display?
It's interesting, for sure, but I'm not buying that this is much better than just setting up some extra columns. The two arguments presented against extra columns are 1) editing time and 2) space.
1) Editing can be sped up, albeit with a learning curve, so maybe I can see that one. At least at my proficiency, I doubt I'd be saving any material amount of time. I can think of scenarios where this would actually be slower for me. People with less experience in spreadsheets might find some time savings, it's hard for me to gauge that.
2) Space, on the other hand, I'm not really buying. You replace extra columns with a wider column and a bespoke UI piece on the right-hand side. I can see columns A:H in the column example, and columns A:B in the final Ambsheet example (which, funny enough, is displayed as a 2x3 spreadsheet -- why not just have those 6 cells right in the sheet?).
This also seems much more difficult to do visualizations from. Graphs, conditional formatting, etc. But that part isn't discussed, so there may be a solution for that which isn't shown.
It's interesting enough that I would enjoy playing around with it. I very well could just be entrenched in my habits.
This + sports analytics. So much of sports is about slightly different outcomes of related scenarios. There's not much difference between a home run and a flyball caught at the wall. But the data shows something very distinct and ignores the other almost-as-likely outcome. Amb values has the potential to give new ways of analyzing performance and outcomes.
(What I'm saying is get a big sports team to fund you)
Not a surprise that this comes from at least one person involved in dabbledb twenty years ago (later acquired by Twitter). Avi Bryant, now sponsoring very interesting work.
dabbledb was awesome. Simple but powerful. I still miss it and haven’t found anything like it to replace it at a reasonable price.
If you liked this you might also enjoy this little toy project: https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-11-24-probabilistic-spr...
This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)
Would you be open to sharing the code?
Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH
Thank you
I think it’s a neat idea (maybe because I was talking over ow to do something similar in Python, specifically for financial analysis). Definitely feels like an early stage, but I would love to see where it goes.
How could you do linear optimisation over unrelated terms in this? How could you implement the well known decision support methods from Operations Research in this? How does it compare to rows, or tables and extra columns?
Computation model behind this vaguely reminds me of the Epic Games programming model thing for Verse Calculus: https://simon.peytonjones.org/verse-calculus/
"what if a single cell could hold multiple values at once?"
Somebody is rediscovering why slide rules are nice. you get your answer but you simultaneously get nearby answers as well.
I am not sure what the modern ui equivalent would be. a plot?
Excel has "Scenario Manager", "Goal Seek", and "Data Table" for What If Analysis. In particular, "Data Table with Multiple Arguments" seems like a similar/more powerful version of what you are doing, which you don't address.[0]
[0] https://www.xelplus.com/excel-what-if-analysis-data-table/
And "Solver", in case you need something really sturdy.
This was my thinking too - data tables can often do this.
The negative of data tables is that it massively slows down your spreadsheet, and cause some weird errors/glitches, but it’s essentially the same thing.
This is like probabilistic programming but with implicit uniform distributions over the supplied values.
Only from the title I thought of mr Litt. I love work like this.
If I may ask, what spreasheet program is running underneath?
Being able to have multiple scenarios in cells is an interesting idea.
Although the thing is, that it would be nice to have weights too.
Usual answer is to keep various options in separate columns (e.g. worst case, normal case, best case), problem is that often you want more scenarios and some have 3 options while other have 10
At this point I think I'd just resort to throwing together a quick script in Python or Julia to run the scenarios.