Wow a moderate one, which IS actually ranked moderate.
Posted 30th Mar 2022 at 21:10
gareth Administrator Daily subscriber Has not played this puzzle yet
It had migrated to 'mild' a bit later, so I have revised (finally!) the difficulty assignations. Rather than being based on the actual ratings chosen, they're now based on observation as to how the actual assigned ratings from users really apply to the puzzles!
This should give a much more useful indication on the puzzle list as to how hard each puzzle is, beyond looking at the average solve time.
Gareth, puzzlemix
Posted 30th Mar 2022 at 21:23 Last edited by gareth 30th Mar 2022 at 21:23
gareth Administrator Daily subscriber Has not played this puzzle yet
Really the entire rating system could do with rewriting, but I think this is at least better than the mostly misleadingly low ratings that have appeared up until now for most puzzles. I don't know why I didn't change this 15 years ago - better to be pragmatic than mathematically accurate but misleading. :)
To be honest, I do not understand how the new system works, but I've just seen a Tricky summary rating, where the average would be slightly under moderate, so it definitely works.
Posted 31st Mar 2022 at 13:38 Last edited by gareth 31st Mar 2022 at 13:41
gareth Administrator Daily subscriber Has not played this puzzle yet
I just changed the numeric boundaries, so previously (say) an average of 1.5 was needed to rate as 'mild', but now it is an average of 1.1. Most people still mark most puzzles as 'easy', so this seems to have worked out quite nicely overall by compensating for those ratings where the difficulty assessment is essentially not meaningful.
I should also note that the site's internal cached average rating for each puzzle does not always match any of those shown at the top of the comments page. I'd have to check back through code from 2007 to see how it is calculated, but anyway this 'overall' value is not publicly displayed numerically at the moment.
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Key
A yellow/light blue highlight in the time distribution charts highlights your time, where relevant.
Rating scores out of 10.0 show the average difficulty rating chosen by users, where 1.0 is "Easy" and 10.0 is "Hard".
If a puzzle is opened more than once, including by loading from a saved position, then this is potentially a significant aid so it is listed as being completed with 'multiple sessions' for the purpose of the best time/average rating displays above.
Minor aid is defined as no more than one use of 'Check solution' when incomplete and/or no more than one use of 'Check solution' when wrong; and/or using highlighting aids (show repeated digits, show broken inequalities and show valid/invalid placements [slitherlink] only). Major aid is any and all other use of the solving aids except for 'show wrong'.
This should give a much more useful indication on the puzzle list as to how hard each puzzle is, beyond looking at the average solve time.
Gareth, puzzlemix
Last edited by gareth 30th Mar 2022 at 21:23
Last edited by gareth 31st Mar 2022 at 13:41
I should also note that the site's internal cached average rating for each puzzle does not always match any of those shown at the top of the comments page. I'd have to check back through code from 2007 to see how it is calculated, but anyway this 'overall' value is not publicly displayed numerically at the moment.
You can however view other players' statistics and comments in the tables above.