About Elementary Tools
Elementary Tools is a small collection of AI-powered thinking tools, starting with the Sherlock Deduction Board — an interactive evidence board that turns any mystery story into a visual web of clues, connections, and conclusions.
Why a deduction board?
Great detectives don't just know things — they connect them. The corkboard covered in photographs, notes, and red string is the classic image of reasoning made visible. The Deduction Board brings that image to life: give it a mystery, and Gemini AI extracts the significant clues, pins them to a canvas, draws the logical threads between them, and states its conclusion along with the full chain of reasoning. Then the real fun starts — you can challenge it, add your own observations, and watch the deduction change.
How it works under the hood
The board is a client-side web application. The visual canvas is rendered with p5.js, and the reasoning is done by Google's Gemini models through their public API. When you ask the board to deduce, your browser sends the story directly to the Gemini API and renders the structured result — clues, connections, and a rationale — as an interactive board.
There are two deduction engines. Traditional mode solves the case in a single structured analysis — fast and reliable. Object-Oriented mode, inspired by Alan Kay's vision of software objects that communicate through messages, turns every clue into a small reasoning agent that questions the other clues, shares insights, and validates the conclusion collectively. It is slower, more expensive, and considerably more fun to watch.
Private by design
Your creative work never leaves your device: settings, custom characters, saved maps, and progress live in your browser's local storage. Accounts are optional — signing in with Google raises your daily AI allowance and stores only your name, email, and picture. When you use an AI feature, the text you submit is processed to generate the response and is not stored by the site. Details are in the privacy policy.
AI included, free
Every AI feature on the site — the Deduction Board, the study tools, the character chat and voice calls — is included and free to use. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to configure: open a tool and it works. Fair-use limits keep the service healthy for everyone.