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 Any suggestions? 
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Posted on: Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:25 am




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Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
Post Re: Any suggestions?
sneaklyfox wrote:
For the normal daily puzzles, I'd like to see a timer for it so I know how fast I am even though it doesn't count towards anything. And maybe this option could be turned on and off for people who feel the pressure of being timed at all.

starling wrote:
Also, any chance that the ranking categories in timed puzzles could add average best time per day? Just because I'm interested to know what those figures would look like.

Alright, I'll add those to the list of suggestions..
Patrick


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Posted on: Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:25 am




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Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
Post Re: Any suggestions?
jomapil wrote:
At this moment I solve almost all the puzzles. Maybe 80-90%. But the puzzles 9x9 are rare my solution. As the levels medium and difficult in the 8x8, why there aren't too two levels in the 9x9.?
Here is my sugestion.

I could add another 9x9, but my feeling is that then there may be too many puzzles on a single day.
Patrick


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Posted on: Sat Oct 22, 2011 1:04 pm




Posts: 246
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Joined: Sun Sep 18, 2011 5:40 pm
Post Re: Any suggestions?
It would be pleasant if there is another table for the 7 days with the name of those who completed all the puzzles of a day. It's another way to compare our performance.

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Posted on: Sat Oct 22, 2011 2:29 pm




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Post Re: Any suggestions?
jomapil wrote:
It would be pleasant if there is another table for the 7 days with the name of those who completed all the puzzles of a day. It's another way to compare our performance.

Interesting idea. Maybe a slightly different way of showing the player name
if they've solved all of today's puzzles.

Patrick


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Posted on: Mon Oct 31, 2011 5:54 pm




Posts: 246
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Joined: Sun Sep 18, 2011 5:40 pm
Post Re: Any suggestions?
Many years ago, in Portugal and perhaps in other countries,
some newspapers performed championships of crosswords.
If you write to several newspapers, maybe some accept you
create a championship. Without costs, only for the pleasure to
compete and solve the puzzles. So, this is a way to propagand
the modality and to gain new adherents.
You may also organize in your site, a world championship of
calcudoku, in parallel with the usual puzzles ( but without the
timed puzzles. I never liked any games against the clock :evil: :evil: :evil: ).
Excuse me so many suggestions, but if some people suggest some
things, maybe you profit some idea.

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Posted on: Mon Oct 31, 2011 10:57 pm




Posts: 3296
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
Post Re: Any suggestions?
jomapil wrote:
Many years ago, in Portugal and perhaps in other countries,
some newspapers performed championships of crosswords.
If you write to several newspapers, maybe some accept you
create a championship. Without costs, only for the pleasure to
compete and solve the puzzles. So, this is a way to propagand
the modality and to gain new adherents.

True. I do think it'll be easier for a newspaper simply to publish
some puzzles though (without having to organize a competition)

Patrick


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Posted on: Fri Nov 25, 2011 10:57 pm




Posts: 116
Joined: Sat May 14, 2011 3:18 am
Post Re: Any suggestions?
sneaklyfox wrote:
For the normal daily puzzles, I'd like to see a timer for it so I know how fast I am even though it doesn't count towards anything. And maybe this option could be turned on and off for people who feel the pressure of being timed at all.


Just bringing this up for consideration again, and adding another vote for this as a "nice to have" feature. For the past couple of months I've been keeping track of all my times in the timed puzzles. My times are gradually coming down, but with only 3 per day of each, it's hard to practice. So I've been treating the 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 "regular" puzzles like timed puzzles, doing them as fast as I possibly can (I didn't used to put so much emphasis on speed--just getting them done). The problem is that I have no way of knowing what my actual solving time was. Yes, if one takes me an inordinate amount of time, I know that... but it would be great if we could time ourselves.

Maybe on the larger puzzles there could be a "start/stop" button so when we get interrupted by the phone or kids or spouses or what have you, we could still have an idea of how well we're doing relative to other days.


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Posted on: Sun Nov 27, 2011 12:47 am




Posts: 54
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2011 8:52 am
Post Re: Any suggestions?
Something easy to do would be to display the solution of the 1-cell cages, so that the solver doesn't need to bother with them.

I would also be interested in some information about how you estimate the difficulty of the puzzles. There is no widely (let alone universally) accepted way to estimate how difficult a puzzle is, and we could try to push adption of your method (or what remains of it after we discuss it here [wink] ).


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Posted on: Sun Nov 27, 2011 2:14 am




Posts: 212
Joined: Fri May 13, 2011 2:11 am
Post Re: Any suggestions?
giulio wrote:
Something easy to do would be to display the solution of the 1-cell cages, so that the solver doesn't need to bother with them.

I would also be interested in some information about how you estimate the difficulty of the puzzles. There is no widely (let alone universally) accepted way to estimate how difficult a puzzle is, and we could try to push adption of your method (or what remains of it after we discuss it here [wink] ).

I feel like both of these have been discussed before, though I don't personally remember what exactly he said about the second.

With the first one, I actually get a sense of how the puzzle's setting up from filling in the 1/free 2/free L cell cages. Other than that rare scenario in which it hurts my brain, which was weird to start with, it also isn't really worth that much... You spend maybe 20 seconds filling in the single digit ones. Meanwhile, the fastest I've ever done, say, a 9x9, was probably around 2 and a half minutes. And that's me -- Obviously the average time is going to be a good deal slower. If you really are troubled by the single digits on a large puzzle, you're also probably going to be troubled by the puzzle itself.

As for the second, I feel like there was some discussion of how the puzzle creates nodes, the last time, where basically the puzzle, at any given point in solving, has a finite number of things that can be done with the information, and thus the hardest puzzles have smaller choke points -- that is, that finite number is minimized at the some point in the puzzle.

The other way you could evaluate it is via a progression of methods used, but that's going to vary so heavily between puzzlers that it isn't really worth it.

e.g. When solving a KenKen, every puzzler has a specific set of techniques that they cycle through. For me, it goes through something like this:

1. Fill in cages with unique solutions. This refers to things like a 4+ L shaped cage, a single number cage, a binary solution with one of the two possibilities eliminated, etc.

2. Work an individual row or column for cages overlapping into it, whether by sum of row, product of row, numbers yet to be placed in row, etc.

3. Work individual numbers to see if I can get one place on a row where that's the only place an individual number can go.

And cycle through. Those 3 get me probably 90% of the stuff I solve, and the only ones of Patrick's that they don't work for is the 6x6 Difficult.

Anyhow, basically the more frequently a step has to be taken from lower down the chart, the more difficult the puzzle. But, oncemore, that's implausible to implement.


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Posted on: Sun Nov 27, 2011 2:52 am




Posts: 54
Joined: Thu Nov 03, 2011 8:52 am
Post Re: Any suggestions?
starling said:
Quote:
If you really are troubled by the single digits on a large puzzle, you're also probably going to be troubled by the puzzle itself

The two things have nothing to do with each other. Filling up the singles is a chore that everybody has to do...

Concerning the grading of puzzle difficulty, it would interest me to know how Patrick arrives to his "solver ratings". I grade Sudokus by classifying 14 strategies in four levels of difficulty and then seeing what strategies are needed to solve a particular puzzle. It is not perfect, because also the number of different strategies that have to be applied plays a role, which I ignore in my classification. As you said, ratings based on progression of methods are very subjective. They depend on how you classify the methods. The problem I have with CalcuDoku is that, I confess, I am having difficulties in listing CalcuDoku strategies and then classifying them in neat groups.

You mentioned difficult 6x6 puzzles. I only do 9x9s and, sometimes, larger CalcuDokus. I usually have no problems in finding the solutions. I like finding the alternatives and weed them out, but I don't like to repeat the process for the same puzzle. Sometimes, a silly mistake creeps in. In those cases, I don't always have fun to start again from scratch and drop solving the puzzle. I have no "checkpoints" to backtrack to because I solve the puzzles on paper.


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