I’m looking for a little feedback here about puzzles like this one. Usually it’s 2 captures, here it’s 3 to choose between. It can be tough to choose the right one and people often guess, here twenty have gotten it right, 19 have gotten it wrong.
Are these fun? I’m hesitant to limit the problem generator to only those puzzles that start with non-capturing moves, but maybe there is a middle ground? That’s why I’m looking for feedback, are these fun?
If you jump the other ways, the other side gets a king and your advantage is lost. So the choice is really a strategic one and so the puzzle is a good one.
I agree and this may come up in a game and these are the choices you have to make and make the wrong one and you lose your advantage I got this wrong twice and right So hopefully learning out of it.
Leave them please is my opinion We want every sort of puzzle
Thank you both for your feedback, I think I’ll leave these alone for now.
But I should do a better job of explaining my worry and a possible solution. My worry is that against puzzles like this, players have a very high chance of guessing correctly. Once you’ve made the first move, every subsequent move is forced. That means more lower rated players get it right and the puzzle’s rating is low for its difficulty. This in turn means getting it wrong is more punishing, loses more points, than most puzzles of the same difficulty.
I know the usual advice is to care about your play and not about your rating, the rating will follow. But the fact of the matter is that people do care about ratings and losing a bunch to a puzzle that is tricky but guessable may be frustrating. And I really don’t want this site to be frustrating. Hence my question.
As for the solution, I’m definitely not going to prevent all puzzles that start with captures, that’s way too large a class of puzzles and variety is clearly important. But there are all kinds of things that make puzzles bad, like too many good moves, or ending too soon, or not ending soon enough, and maybe being too guessable. The generator has gotten better at avoiding the other errors. I could, during puzzle creation, look at the number of legal player moves over the puzzle’s tree and skip creation if that number is less than or equal to 4.
This could be a refinement. But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. From the sounds of things I would be doing more harm than good. Thank you both for the feedback. If you or anyone else have any other thoughts, please share them.
Brooks
I’m a bit late to the party but will chime in anyway.
I have no issue with beginning a puzzle with a choice of captures. The argument that luck is involved doesn’t warrant removing these puzzles. If so we would have to remove a ton more since many of your great puzzles involve eliminating the howler losing moves and being left we a few plausible options - and usually 2 or 3 contenders and decidng between them. So luck is involved if you can’t differentiate between the moves. I’ve gained and lost many points by having to guess. Another similar type is you crown on square 31 or 30? They look about the same so you guess.
Finally since you a priori chance of solving a puzzle at your level is 2/3 whereas a guess among 2 jumps is 1/2, you’re at a disadvantage to guess - but I see that you’re concerned about the problem rating.
Your dilemma of having guessers skew the rating of a problem has a much bigger enemy.
IE problem that have an obvious looking 1st move, that low rated players make but that higher rated players are wary of becasue of perceived danger that turns out to have a really brilliant escape. Then low rated players really outperform higher rated players. When you look at the mistakes you see they’re really high rated players who make them. Such problems are much trickier for you because it’s not that low rated players are guessing and getting it right 1/2 times. They’re gettin it everytime. The problem is low rated and so getting it right or wrong is not moving the needle much but it’s killing the high rated players.
You can probably find such problems quickly - look for low rate problems where delta to the average rating of failed players is big.
But there’s nothing you can do about it.
Thanks for your great program
A bit late but welcome anyway! I’m glad to have you here. And thank you for the feedback. Yep, there are some puzzles that get guessed by players who don’t see the reason and missed by players who do. But it’s a relatively small number of them and as you said, there’s not much to do about it.