difficulty feature?

Anonymous

How about a new feature where I can select games of varying difficulty?

You could use average completion time or get a number from your breadth first solver...

jim

Robb wrote:

How about a new feature where I can select games of varying difficulty?

You could use average completion time or get a number from your breadth first solver...

We've started working on measuring difficulty. Right now, you can add difficulty=1 to the URL to see our measure which is simply the win percentage. We've been thinking splitting the "new game" button in to a + and - half such that you would get a harder or easier game when you clicked the corresponding half.

-Jim

Anonymous

http://greenfelt.net/sht?difficulty=1

Like this? I'm not seeing anything different...

Not sure if win percentage will be a good metric or not. For me a difficult game is one where there are deep bottlenecks in the order of play. I can still beat this type of game but it takes me a lot longer. On the other hand, those that are rehearsing play to show up higher on the scoreboard will tend to push this measure in the right direction... I still can't help thinking an algorithmic approach might be better.

jim

robb wrote:

Like this? I'm not seeing anything different...

Yes and you are! Look again. It's better to try a game of the day rather than a random game no one has ever played.

robb wrote:

Not sure if win percentage will be a good metric or not. For me a difficult game is one where there are deep bottlenecks in the order of play. I can still beat this type of game but it takes me a lot longer. On the other hand, those that are rehearsing play to show up higher on the scoreboard will tend to push this measure in the right direction... I still can't help thinking an algorithmic approach might be better.

You are echoing our sentiments. David just did that one because it was easy. I've been meaning to graph the win / time distributions to see if there is an obvious shape to the harder ones.

-Jim