OGS Puzzles Poll

I gave some weird answers because my usage is weird too.

In the last weeks I did puzzles daily thanks to @Atorrante’s thread, but it wasn’t my habit to solve puzzles.

My main issue is that I can’t find a habit that suits me: ideally I would solve a couple puzzles a day, but I can’t do it by myself because I forget about it and also because when I start solving puzzles I can’t stop: if there’s a series of tenths of puzzles I can’t just try two and leave the rest… I continue the series until I am too bored or too tired, and it’s bad!

I enjoyed Atorrante’s thread when it was suggesting few puzzles a day. When they became more than a handful I fell in my bad habit: try to solve them all and get tired of it.

My ideal OGS feature would be one puzzle a day in the notification box. Or maybe a custom setting to choose how frequently to get one (number per day, week or so…)

8 Likes

If OGS would decide to implement such a feature, I am willing to provide the puzzles.

5 Likes

I think there should be some way to give feedback, like goproblems.com has. Too often I see mistakes in the problem design that would need to be addressed by the author, but there is no obvious way to start a conversation.

7 Likes

You can click their username and click message :slight_smile:

Of course there’s no guarantee that the user would still be active on the site anymore, or that they would respond to the message or actively update their puzzles after getting feedback, but still.

Also I suppose the chat isn’t a great place to share variations, demo board might be better. Better still would be to be able to copy and paste variations to and from puzzles ( I don’t think that’s a thing)

2 Likes

I like the puzzles that play out mistakes, instead of just saying “Incorrect”. Sometimes I’m not convinced that my answer was wrong and end up unsatisfied.

Of course it’s extremely hard to plan for all possible mistakes. Are there any good puzzle sites/apps that use AI to demonstrate failure? Seems like for most tsumego it shouldn’t take a very deep search.

2 Likes

puzzles on goproblems.com Problems have automatically generated difficulty number and list of ALL problems can be sorted by it.
sahwal.com/problemset/1?order_by=rate_desc has sort by success rate - good enough too

OGS don’t has list of all problems not separated by collection, and problems don’t have automatically generated difficulty level. (creators place kyu levels too randomly)

I already solved all problems that are not too hard for me on these two sites.
OGS needs sort at least inside collections.
I’m afraid to start solve these lists of puzzles with RANDOM difficulty.

2 Likes

Good points @stone.defender. The issue of puzzle creator assigned difficulty has been discussed recently here: Make Tsumego Great Again! - #36 by dragon-devourer

Alas, I think this is not high on the agenda for OGS developers. I mainly just use goproblems.com now. I think I will also look into getting some books such as those suggested here: Repost of a repost -- an old discussion of the correct way to solve tsumego

2 Likes

The last question is missing an option.

I think the main thing would be be implement a “gamification” of the puzzles, like lichess has.
In lichess, you have a puzzle rating, just like your rating in any other chess variant. And you get that rating up by solving more puzzles, which lichess gives them to you based on your current ranking.
As soon as you solve one, another one pops up, so they’re quite addicting.

Having that sort user experience (instead of a page full of puzzle collections grouped by level), would be a massive improvement. Also, the system keeps track of which ones you solved, so you don’t have to remember/bookmark which puzzles have you done, and which ones are new.

5 Likes

goproblems.com does this too and I agree that it is very addictive. And it forces you to solve properly because if you are lazy and just guess, then you get it wrong and your rating goes down and you get stupid easy puzzles again, which is super annoying!!

1 Like

Another thing that lichess does, is that they have something called puzzle storm. It’s basically where you get three minutes to go through as many problems as you can, within the time limit.

Yes, that one is interesting too.
But I think it’s better to focus on the regular puzzles first (maybe it’s my biased opinion, since I don’t play blitz).

The coolest feature that they have is that the puzzles are automatically generated from games that people played on the site. And you can see the actual game, and how it ended.

2 Likes

The Puzzle feature on Lichess and Chess.com are often one of my favorites.
It’s not always something to improve your gaming skills, but it gives you a certain view of the game, that I like.

The only exception to this I have found in the Go World is https://blacktoplay.com/
a similar feature in OGS, would be a nice addition to this platform

4 Likes

OGS Puzzles contains almost 30.000 puzzles. A lot of them are really worth your time, but they are often hard to find.
Compared to other go puzzle server OGS Puzzles is not very user friendly.

An important factor for this low user friendly score is the search function.

I think there are several ways of revamping the OGS Puzzles section.

  1. make it puzzle based instead of collection based
  2. create a good categorisation system
  3. make a separate place for non puzzles collections: tutorials, joseki explorers, etc.
  4. see to it that the puzzle ranking is adequate
  5. delete the idiot puzzles
2 Likes

Would you have it that users submit/create puzzles for a main puzzles section that they can maintain/withdraw, or possibly say that certain ‘trusted’ users (mods+others like Joseki explorer) could edit the puzzles?

Hopefully a request that’s a step toward that, but probably way down the priority list :slight_smile:

I guess if there’s one centralised collection like in 1. this is more doable, with a puzzle Elo or other idea.

Maybe some people like their idiot ones :slight_smile: But yes, if one wants to remove clutter having users that can maintain the collection of puzzles could be good :slight_smile:

Suggestions for OGS puzzles

Don’t do the same and do better as goproblems.
How? by using the specific of OGS.

Introducing a challenge between players.
Ideally we could have a tsumego rating (aside your go ratings) The problem is it would be an incredible effort to rate all the problems with some consistency.

So I was thinking we could have tsumego ladder based on how many problems you solve and pondered by their difficulty.

We could consider an autoestimation of each problem given by the success in solving and linked with the level of the player.

Each player has 3 groups of problems
The not touched yet. The not solved. The solved.
Solving not solved should give less points
Solving solved even less.

If a 11k solve it it becomes a 11k tsumego, unless a weaker player did solve it too (13k for ex).

Problems points are pondered by level for example 30-26 25-21 20-15k…

Then we determine the condition to stay in the ladder (12 problems/month min for ex)

What do you think? Can we make this even better?

3 Likes

As far as I am concerned people can still enter their puzzles in their own collections.
But what I would like is that (apart from all these collections) there is also a pool where all those puzzles from all collections are put together.
That pool should be well categorised according to - I think - level and type puzzles

level of puzzles:

  • beginner
  • intermediate
  • advanced
  • dan

type of puzzles:

  • local problems (corner) versus whole board problems
  • begin / middle / endgame
  • subjects: connecting groups / killing groups / life and death / tesuji, etc.

Note that this grey area is just a suggestion, nothing more. See it as a starting point for a discussion.

If puzzles are grouped together like this, you can practice puzzles roughly corresponding with your play strength on subjects you are interested in. Advantage is that you don’t have to search periodically for an interesting collection.

Adequate puzzle ranking is an important factor. A lot of the collections don’t bother to rank at all anymore (and get automatically 12 kyu, which might be correct, but most of the time will be misleading).
There is a tsumego server (can’t remember which one) which employs an algorithm for ranking puzzles. Would be great to use that.

Enough for now.

1 Like

I skipped what could be the most important.

About the 3 categories: as soon as you try to propose a solution, ogs check it. Then record a win (or a miss).

These results are stored backend, so you can’t delete them or you do a full reset

Like this there is encouragement to effectively read and some competition vs the ladder.

1 Like

A pool like that would have to be maintained. (Add and remove puzzles, check solutions…)

Besides a copy is not needed we can just use a tag system.

1 Like

Agreed. Is OGS Puzzles maintained?
Could be wrong, but have the impression that it is not maintained.

If I compare OGS Puzzles with other tsumego servers, two aspects are remarkable:

  • quantity: OGS has a lot of puzzle, more than the other ones, I think.
  • quality: the user friendliness of other servers is much better than OGS Puzzles.

If the OGS community wants to compete with other tsumego severs, a serious revamping is unavoidable.

This is only my opinion. Don’t know if others agree with it.

But should it be decided that the puzzle section can and should be maintained (add and remove puzzles, check solutions, writing captions, assign difficulty levels, etc.), then I am willing to spend time and energy on this.

2 Likes

Agreed about revamping being required if making OGS a place to go for puzzles is an important goal. (Which it well may not be.) If that ever happens, I too would be willing to help with quality control, adding meta data and so on.

1 Like