RoboZZle Forums

Thanks for this tool, very useful!

Nice tool, thanks. (Up!)

Bump.

The tagging idea actually might work if the tags are only displayed after you've completed the puzzle. Unless of course you hack it and the tags tell you the real solution.

I have it all saved as a bunch of data files, Approximately the newest 100 puzzles are recrawled daily since rating information is more likely to change significantly for these, the rest is recrawled monthly. A full crawl takes more than 20 minutes, so it really wouldn't be possible any other way.

List of puzzles that a player have solved are fetched ad hoc, but cached for 1 hour, so you can't see the change right after you have solved a puzzle.

This is a very useful tool.
Does it crawl the website for this information each time a request is made? Or do you have it stored in a database? If you have your own database, how often is it updated?

Ouch, I tried the application in IE7. That has got to be the most catastrophic failure I have seen so far. I'll try to make some hacks, but it will take time.

If you are still using IE 6 or 7 either upgrade or get another browser, trust me, it's worth it.

"What is estimated difficulty?"
- An attempt at alleviating the rating skew caused by beginners giving higher ratings that old timers and people giving low ratings to hard puzzles that they were lucky to solve.
- A weighted average between voted difficulty and -log([Number of people who solved the puzzle]).

It is definitely not a perfect rating, but I think it is better than the raw vote rating.

As for your suggestions, the comments are too much data, so I won't include those in the data stack. The rest is doable.

I don't miss categories, but a way of distinguishing between 'guessing' and 'thinking' puzzles would be nice.

Nice work. What is estimated difficulty?

Would you like some feature requests? :)
- Filter by text search of titles. Maybe search comments too.
- Filter by number of allowed paint operations.
- Sort by minimum solution length (maybe, not sure if this is useful)

Kind of related... I've occasionally thought that giving tags to categorize puzzles might be useful for browsing them. My main concern is that some of the categories I would like to use would give away the solution for some puzzles.

I have made a new tool for navigating the RoboZZle puzzles.

It should prove useful for finding out if similar puzzles exist. But I hope that you will also enjoy it for general browsing.

Check it out: http://ebusiness.hopto.org/robozzle/