Puzzle
A map of human knowledge. Domains are continents, fields are countries, and papers sit in the neighborhoods they built.
Research is usually a pile of papers. You can search a title or follow a citation, but it is hard to see the larger picture: what areas people are working in, how much is happening there, and how that has changed.
Puzzle is a map for that. Start from a whole field, walk into a topic, then open the papers. Slide the year to see the same picture as of 1953, or 2012, or now.
The map
The live map sits below. Click a region to fly in, pinch or scroll to move, and use Home when you want the whole picture again.
Why it exists
I wanted a top-down way to understand a lot of research at once. What is being explored, how much of it there is, and how that picture moves over time. Lists hide that. A map lets you start wide and walk inward.
That context matters more as we look for new questions. If you can see which areas are crowded, which are young, and which barely exist yet, you have a better chance of asking something that has not been asked, especially now, in the intelligence age.
Through time
Drag the year, or hit play. In the live map this is the academic world as of that date: pieces that have not formed yet shrink away. Try 1953: computer science is not a named field yet.
PUZZLE
4 fields as of 1953
- Biology
- Mathematics
- Medicine
- Physics
Search and fly
Same search box as the live app. Focus opens it, arrows move, enter opens Puzzle.
How it's built
It is a Next.js site. The map is drawn as SVG in the browser. I tried a globe first and dropped it. Child pieces fill their parent. The year slider uses counts we already loaded, so dragging stays smooth.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- SVG
The map above is the live product. GitHub has the source.