RoboZZle Forums

I remember for some time I didn't know about non-campaign puzzles at all:) I've solved almost anything easy-moderate puzzles and couldn't understand how is it possible to solve much more when Campaign doesn't contain enough:) But it seems it was rare case, usually people sit on the "easy to hard" tab from the very beginning. I agree to sticky about Campaign modifications.

Also I have one more idea. Let there would be "main storage" with puzzles that would be taken into account in all scoreboards and would be shown on the "easy to hard" and "new to old" tabs. And there would be one more tab for new puzzles. New puzzles would not be placed into the "main storage" and once per week 3–5 best* new puzzles would be added to the "main storage" and all others would be forgotten. I don't know what puzzles should be initially placed into this "main storage", probably we can just use all existing for back testing of this idea:), but IMO some initial set should be formed by manual selection from first 128 puzzles.

* How to choose best puzzles? I propose weighted mean of likes (dislike == -1 like) with weights c^{(place in main scoreboard) \times (place in shortest solutions scoreboard)} for some constant c close to 1.
c = 0.99 or c = 0.995 should be good enough, I think.

I think the Campaign would be sufficient with a little revamping. I've called for an expansion of the campaign before and I think if it was more carefully constructed to teach users concepts and build their knowledge, it would be more successful. I'm not sure how the Campaign is currently sorted, but it must be sorted very carefully to build knowledge and subsequent puzzles should use prior concepts. This "leveled" system would be the most effective to get users to keep solving and not be bogged down by the enormous number of puzzles and the ones they find unsolvable. To aide with learning and make some concepts more intuitive, links can be provided with some of the more crucial Campaign puzzles to point the user in the right direction to solve it (i.e. stacking).
Also, more emphasis should be placed on Campaign for it to achieve its goal. Users should be encouraged to solve Campaign puzzles more actively so that they don't visit the other tabs until later. I think even just having the Silverlight client open with the Campaign tab active would be sufficient (maybe even with "hide solved" selected by default) so that new users will instantly be presented with high quality puzzles, each of which will teach them a useful concept.
I might be extrapolating a bit, but this might also have the effect of new users submitting fewer puzzles since the "new to old" tab won't be visited as often if users are presented with unsolved puzzles immediately and they won't be exposed to as many bad puzzles for them to copy (i.e. left on green, right on red).
Summarily, if the Campaign were carefully crafted and was the first thing to show up when a user opens RoboZZle, then fewer users would be frustrated with learning the game (or bored with the copious boring puzzles) and more would be able to advance to a higher level of solving. These changes would also probably be the easiest to implement.

I agree with Smylic. The main issue with getting people to play Robozzle is the huge amount of (not-so-good) puzzles. In my opinion, it would be much more appealing if Robozzle consisted of a set of carefully chosen puzzles, maximum 1000 (why not fix it at for example 1000?).

A criteria for being chosen is that the puzzle should be solvable with (mainly) logic, and not to much guesswork. I.e puzzles solved by more than 2 or so persons apart from the creator (which do not use brute-force!) would be OK. Not too many puzzles should be selected, and not too many of the same sort.

The puzzle difficulty rating should be based solely on the number of persons who solved it. Popularity votes could be as is, very few care about that anyway. Also, I believe the 1000 puzzles has to be selected by hand, perhaps once a year or so the list is updated (puzzles gets replaced by better ones).

I know there is already the "campain"-puzzles, but I am thinking more radically. Submitted puzzles go into the pool of unselected puzzles (as today they are different from campain), but the game itself is presented in a way that makes the selected puzzles (campain) the main game (i.e if you do this change, campain mode will be the new Robozzle). Scoreboard, lists etc are by default only calculated from the selected puzzles.

You need to actively switch to the unselected puzzles if you are interested in that statistics (which only really devoted Robozzlers typically do). The unselected puzzles exist mainly for allowing new ideas to emergy (but I believa a reasonable expectancy would be that probably (much) less then 100 get promoted to "real" puzzles every year).

What do you think?

I showed RoboZZle to several friends which are far from programming, they didn't have any trouble to understand basic idea, but it is hard to interest someone (including programmers) in the RoboZZle because of many one-on-one puzzles which are boring to solve and because of huge number of puzzles at all. This game thrills many people, but looking at the number of puzzles and estimating time they can waste they become frightened:)

Anyway visualisation of stack is anyway good idea. I think it can help even expirienced players in complicated situations.

By the way, one downside of showing the stack animation is that it requires a "choppy" movement of the robot. I.e., even commands that don't move the robot because the condition failed still need to be animated in the stack.

But, I'm starting to think that perhaps this visualization would be the right one for beginners (but of course, would have to be easy to turn off).

One thing that bothers me about Robozzle is that if you show it to a person without programming/math background, they probably won't get it. It would be really cool if it was possible to somehow make Robozzle more intuitive.

The stack visualization idea implemented in the iPhone client helps, but I think that most people won't have the patience to figure out how it works. (This video shows off the stack, among other things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnWJ29eNCbY)

I was thinking about how to make it more intuitive, and I sketched out this idea: http://www.doink.com/clips/igoro/2031204/robozzle-stack-idea

What do you guys think? Any ideas?