goproblems.com

I usually find go problems very frustrating to practice, because I don't know how to choose the right problems, and I find them either too easy or too hard. GoProblems addresses this issue by automatically evaluating this difficulty.

Still, I am wondering how the difficulty of the problems is evaluated. The info page says :

> goproblems.com measures two types of difficulty. Since it's hard for people to objectively measure the difficulty of a problem, goproblems.com measures two statistics that independently or in small numbers mean little, but over time and in context should provide a means to measure the difficulty of a problem.
>
> When you're playing with a problem, you'll see the difficulty expressed as: x/y. x is the percentage of people who've gotten this problem wrong. y is the average number of seconds it took people to solve the problem correctly.

For instance, when practising www.goproblems.com/prob.php3?id=5867 the difficulty is presented like this :

> Difficulty: (81) 1 kyu / 57 secs

This seems to mean that 81% of people are wrong at first try on this problem, and that people eventually solve it in about one minute. But where does the "1 kyu" indication come from ? Does this mean that this problem is intended for 1k players ? But who decides of this level ?

More generally, I am wondering about how to evaluate automatically the difficulty of go problems, with in mind the objective to present "fair difficulty" problems to the user in order to help him improve.

For instance, I tried yesterday the 20 kyu series, and I found the problems very easy whereas I am pretty sure that my actual level is not higher than 20k...

Any reactions ?


--
http://senseis.xmp.net/?Gyom

{Posted by etk}

ahh i almost wrote you a reply...

briefly - yes % of ppl failed to solve it and time it took those who manged to. %-rank table is available in the "home" page in the form of time-trial links (30k is plevel=0 (0%) 25k is plevel=0.2 (20%) and so on...)...

the matter of __guessing__ problem difficulty isn't a simple one and discussion on the subject can be found in this forum and at http://senseis.xmp.net/?goproblemscom ...

{Posted by santa c}

[quote]
I usually find go problems very frustrating to practice, because I don't know how to choose the right problems, and I find them either too easy or too hard. GoProblems addresses this issue by automatically evaluating this difficulty.

Still, I am wondering how the difficulty of the problems is evaluated. The info page says :

> goproblems.com measures two types of difficulty. Since it's hard for people to objectively measure the difficulty of a problem, goproblems.com measures two statistics that independently or in small numbers mean little, but over time and in context should provide a means to measure the difficulty of a problem.
>
> When you're playing with a problem, you'll see the difficulty expressed as: x/y. x is the percentage of people who've gotten this problem wrong. y is the average number of seconds it took people to solve the problem correctly.

For instance, when practising www.goproblems.com/prob.php3?id=5867 the difficulty is presented like this :

> Difficulty: (81) 1 kyu / 57 secs

This seems to mean that 81% of people are wrong at first try on this problem, and that people eventually solve it in about one minute. But where does the "1 kyu" indication come from ? Does this mean that this problem is intended for 1k players ? But who decides of this level ?

More generally, I am wondering about how to evaluate automatically the difficulty of go problems, with in mind the objective to present "fair difficulty" problems to the user in order to help him improve.

For instance, I tried yesterday the 20 kyu series, and I found the problems very easy whereas I am pretty sure that my actual level is not higher than 20k...

Any reactions ?


--
http://senseis.xmp.net/?Gyom
[/quote]
The best you can do is select problems in a range.
If you're solving 20k problems, try setting the range 18k-20k or 15k-18k or 15k-20k.


{Posted by LCZLAPINSKI}