Hi all! Thanks to all developers for this great site!
But I have one idea to improve OGS. I am a chess player also, and OGS misses something compared to chess sites. It’s rated puzzles. I think it should be nice to add them.
How it should work? You find positions with critical moves (the only possible and the strongest) in your many millions game database, and save all such positions in another database. Then you let people pass them as puzzles. The more difficult postion the more rating of it. And players should have ratings too. The more complex positions the player passes, the more rating he gets. I like this feature!
You can also check, how it works in chess.com or lichess!
I think people had tried making go puzzles from games with bots like Katago.
This website doesn’t seem to be working, but also AISensei also had the option to make puzzles from games.
The main problems I would say with those attempts are (a) the solutions are either like 1 move long, so basically guess the AI move which a lot of the time aren’t that helpful or (b) the sequence the AI might play out isn’t even local most of the time, it’s like play this move then play this weird exchange on the other side of the board then do something else.
So one would have to be really picky and probably clever in how one finds such games to make puzzles automatically say with the help from an AI.
This is probably one way, but a tonne of the puzzles will end up being joseki problems I would say, since a lot of them might have a single response or single sequence. Even if the first move is unique, the next few might not or might just be to play away for example.
Maybe you could play “Guess the human players responses” but that’s not guaranteed to be good at all given the board position.
I think there’s just some differences that need to be overcome between chess and Go. There are positions in both with a kind of “only move” scenario, but there’s no real equivalent of checkmate. There might be effective “mates” in the sense of killing a large enough group at the right point of the game etc.
It has been asked for before and it does sound good. And if anyone wants to give it a try, it’s probably a better time to try now than before because there’s a huge database of OGS games available for example
Even if we just took our existing puzzle collection, and allowed them to each have their own glicko rating that interacts with a user’s unique puzzle rating… This would go a long way to OP’s desire I believe, even if the puzzles are not sourced from OGS games.
This concept has been suggested and discussed before
We don’t need to create any new puzzles for this purpose, but rather just give each puzzle and solver a ranking (and associated uncertainties to deal with those solvers that my introduce too much noise) and let Glicko figure out the difficulty of each puzzle (and automatically calibrated against each player’s gameplay rankings).