Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudhirj | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely re-kindled my interest in chess. I played as a child, but never took it seriously. Got a chess board for my 4-yo, but unfortunately she isn't a prodigy. Who'd have thought. Still has fun arranging the pieces and make up stories with them, though. And I'm playing on the Chess.com app. The puzzles especially are a neat way to get your brain running, and they're a better attention sink than Twitter / HN.

View on HN

Something we work very hard on at chess.com is the rating of the individual tactics puzzles.

Some of you might enjoy looking at the distribution of our puzzle ratings. Truly hard problems are precious, and we would always like to have more at the high end. The distribution is multimodal because puzzles of different lengths have different modes.

  +----------------+---------+
  | ratings_band   | count   |
  |----------------+---------|
  |   100-199      | 5320    |
  |   200-299      | 2542    |
  |   300-399      | 31542   |
  |   400-499      | 10282   |
  |   500-599      | 4539    |
  |   600-699      | 7644    |
  |   700-799      | 6017    |
  |   800-899      | 5288    |
  |   900-999      | 5109    |
  | 1000-1099      | 5187    |
  | 1100-1199      | 4905    |
  | 1200-1299      | 4369    |
  | 1300-1399      | 8164    |
  | 1400-1499      | 8969    |
  | 1500-1599      | 8430    |
  | 1600-1699      | 8007    |
  | 1700-1799      | 7795    |
  | 1800-1899      | 8143    |
  | 1900-1999      | 9116    |
  | 2000-2099      | 10551   |
  | 2100-2199      | 10261   |
  | 2200-2299      | 7057    |
  | 2300-2399      | 2446    |
  | 2400-2499      | 1225    |
  | 2500-2599      | 1067    |
  | 2600-2699      | 1055    |
  | 2700-2799      | 964     |
  | 2800-2899      | 888     |
  | 2900-2999      | 881     |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     |
  | 3900-3999      | 42      |
  | 4000+          | 5       |
  +----------------+---------+

Really love your chess puzzles, I play Puzzle Rush most days! If you can share, how many puzzles do you add each month? Are they mostly hand-generated or do you have some nifty way of deriving puzzles from real games automagically? Would also be really cool if a puzzle rush spread out puzzle types more it feels like there is heavy clustering of a specific problem type at key rating ranges: early puzzles (1-6) are very commonly back-rank checkmates; 9-12 are discovered check, etc - it would be nicer if the problem meta-tags were not re-used a lot within a single run.

Last month we added 2800, the vast majority automatically derived, though we also prize expert review.

We are thinking of doubling that rate next month.

I'm not sure much can be done about the predominance of certain puzzle types in the very early Rush puzzles. Would you prefer more hung pieces?

But in the later levels, mixing it up by themes/tags is an interesting idea, about which I will make some measurements.

Yeah overall some theme diversity. Would also be interested to know the median Elo rating by tag - since that'd serve a good sort of table-of-contents of order for people to learn chess tactics.

What is also pretty interesting would be a (fuzzed) per-tag Elo rating on the user - so they can see which themes you are good/bad at relatively (for example, if you constantly get problems on Trapped Pieces wrong your rating on those problems would be lower than your average Puzzle Rating).

Yes, the rating differs by theme quite a bit.

  +-------------------+------------+
  | theme/tag         | mdn_rating |
  |-------------------+------------|
  | Opposition        | 1725       |
  | Passed Pawns      | 1494       |
  | Rooks on Seventh  | 1408       |
  | Pawn Endgame      | 1353       |
  | ...               | ...        |
  | Smothered Mate    | 549        |
  | Stalemate         | 533        |
  | Mate in 2         | 436        |
  | Mate in 1         | 399        |
  +-------------------+------------+

I also like the idea of showing the user's +/- for each theme. Though the data for some themes is better than data for others.

Why such a large number? Do players really go through thousands of puzzles a month, and remember them all?

If you produced fewer, would that increase the proportion with expert review?

Casper Schoppen broke all the previous records in puzzle rush (a mode where you get to solve as much puzzles as possible in 5 minutes) by memorizing most of high rated puzzles. After that chess.com decided to add a lot of new ones.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/puzzle-rush-confirmed-rec... https://www.chess.com/news/view/new-puzzle-rush-chess

Although I don't think there were lots of players who tried to use this tactic among all the ones who occasionally train on chess.com.

Ah, thanks. That explains how you manage to have so many available. I like the progressive / adaptive mechanism as well, it keeps the challenge at the right level. Thanks for a great product.

There were some issues (crashes) with the videos on iPad, but I assume you’ve seen that in your logs already.

The iOS team doesn't see any recent crashes that associate to viewing videos.

If you want to follow up, feel free to email me your chess.com username and the approximate date when you had trouble; the team could look up crashes which happened to that username.

Both my personal and chess.com email addresses are in my profile.

This is really interesting! Thanks for sharing. What are the average number of moves per puzzle in the top groups? Do they all end up being 5+ moves or can there be 2800+ puzzles with only 2 or three moves?

There certainly can be short difficult puzzles, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I think the current 4000-rated puzzles look like outliers and may be removed.

  +----------------+---------+-------------------+
  | ratings_band   | count   | avg_move_count    |
  |----------------+---------+-------------------|
  | ...            |         |                   |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     | 3.9400            |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     | 4.1244            |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     | 4.2766            |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     | 4.7500            |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     | 4.9515            |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     | 4.9237            |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     | 5.0481            |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      | 5.3256            |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     | 6.4035            |
  | 3900-3999      | 43      | 5.9302            |
  | 4000+          | 5       | 1.6000            |
  +----------------+---------+-------------------+

Thank you for sharing the information.

By the way... I really enjoy chess.com. The recent addition of getting to retry your game mistakes is really cool. I'd love to see those kept overtime and be able to retry them all in a random order later.

Definitely on the roadmap.

This is interesting and it makes me really want to see the 5 4000+ puzzles...

I am not sure that the 5 specific puzzles maxed out at the 4000 also represent the very best, most fun, and most insightful. Sometimes the reason a puzzle comes up as an extreme outlier is somewhat obtuse, and we are more inclined to remove the puzzle after we see how users interact with it.

For example https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/568140 is mostly rated 4000 because ...Qe1+ is so compelling that it pulls in even excellent players, while there's an easy material pickup on the board.

But there are exceptional puzzles throughout the 3000s, like 3500-rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/769056 , which absolutely anyone can follow, but few can solve on the first try.

why is Qe1+ compelling? It pushes the king to greater safety and activates the rook. If the correct move is e3, then I think that the problem with a 4000 rated puzzle is that the prior is so strong that players feel like they can ignore the obvious moves. You should try just resetting the rating of that puzzle and see it ends up in a different spot.

We sometimes do that. I'm resetting that puzzle down to 1480.

The vast majority of grandmasters didn't play chess at age 4.

That's incorrect. I did a lot of ending puzzles and knew a lot about openings and variations at age 5, learned mostly because a father of a friend was very enthusiastic about it.

I quit playing around age 7 because some kids there were really out of my league and there wasn't enough government or support for me to continue playing given that I wasn't the best. I still play to this day, but mostly amateurish and very sporadically.

Of course if you just want to do it for fun, it's fine. But if you can to become a GM and make a living playing chess, the bar is pretty high and it's very likely that you suck.

You can start to play a bit later and become a GM, but it's a big gamble with your future.

Most people I know who continued with chess nowadays are in the low 2K range, one made it to IM... all share extremely good memory and logical thinking and could just have been instead a lazy CS student and get top grades, eventually become a software engineer and enjoy a good life. But instead have a shitty life playing the same game all over again and have a hard time leaving it now to do something else, as it's the thing they dedicated their whole life to.

Chess is like Boxing. Pays nothing. The workload is insane, the natural talent is insane, your competition is global.

Only the very top 0.5% get name recognition (money). And like Boxing, these athletes could get paid more had they devoted their life literally ANY other pursuit with their work ethic and talent. With far less punishment involved.

Concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/

Unlikely at the top levels. The top chess masters are taking home a better income than the average college graduate. Sure CEOs take home more, but typically not until later in life. If you can get great chess is a good career.

Of course few get great. Even if you don't get to great, many people make a satisfactory amount of money from chess (mostly teaching), so there are options.

Also, you can switch at any time when you realize how hard the competition is. Your study habits to get good will do you well in other positions so there is no loss failing so long as you get out soon enough. There is a reason many pretty good players quit after high school: they had fun now it is time to settle down. Some play once in a while, but it is no loss. Unlike boxing where a few knockouts and you may be mentally unfit to do anything with your life.

Work ethic ok but talent is domain-specific, isn't it?

Read on Magnus Carlsen[0] and Josh Waitzkin[1] - both have top spots in other fields, (and I'm sure others do too, these are from memory). Either talent is less specific than you'd think, or work ethic is more important than you'd think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Waitzkin#Martial_arts

I don't see this with Carlsen. Fantasy football? Well ... Waitzkin may be successful in martial arts but still that's the exception not the norm.

Also I would claim that talent is domain-specific insofar that very few people have a mental and a physical talent at the same time. For instance there are professional athletes who are very good in some other sport but I know of no one who is also very good at chess.

You may discard Fantasy Football, but it is not easy to be a top player - there are thousands of people who spend a few hours a day practicing, and have been for years. It’s been a while, but when Magnusen rose from “not playing”’to the top spot it was impressive and unusual.

Emanuel Lasker was iirc a very noted mathematician. As I mentioned, this is from memory. I’ve known a person who had both made the national swim team as a 19-year old, and was a national bridge champion in his thirties (not in the US).

I don’t know to separate talent from work ethics, but my layman’s impression is that that these aren’t simple, and definitely not independent, measures across fields.

The Polgar sisters are the counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

In what way are they? I can only see that they are good at chess.

The point is that they didn't come from some "Chess Prodigy" family. There wasn't some "talent" laying there that they picked up. And, even among the sisters, Judit wasn't the one with the most "talent".

Judit's level and achievements were due to training and persistence.

Still they might have a talent for chess and not for ballet for instance. It might be otherwise but that was my claim and the Polgars don't refute it.

Also the Wikipedia page says she was a "chess prodigy". From my personal experience I strongly doubt that you can make every five year old child a chess player who wins blind matches against grown-ups only through hard work.

"Prodigy" simply means you hit your 10,000 hours as a child.

And the "youngest grandmaster" title simply keeps moving downward, so apparently you can convert random 5 year olds into chess experts.

I really don't understand why people still cling to the notion of "talent" in intellectual pursuits. It's pretty clear that "number of hours" is what places you in the top echelons.

When you assume 8 hours a day straight work 10.000 hours means 3.42 years including weekends. I'll claim that's impossible (not to say inhumane) to do with a child.

That's probably a little aggressive, 4 hours a day is more typical.

Go take a look at the history of Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, or Hikaru Nakamura.

> But instead have a shitty life playing the same game all over again and have a hard time leaving it now to do something else, as it's the thing they dedicated their whole life to.

That's called an addiction, or more generously an obsession.

Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, learned the rules of the game at 5 years old. Hikaru Nakamura started playing chess at age 7.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com