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Comment by jrh206 | Hacker News Reader

11 moves felt like too many. I made my first moves without thinking ahead, and before I knew it, I’d accidentally solved the puzzle on my first try. I felt that the puzzle lacked that elegant “idea” at its core that makes a good puzzle great. (Just my personal opinion)

That said, the visual design is beautiful, and it’s inspiring that somebody was able to create this.

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I really appreciate the feedback. This is one of the main things I think about, and relates strongly to the part I mentioned about puzzle generation and difficulty variability. I do want this to feel like a consistently great puzzle.

For comparison, the median number of tries it took people to solve yesterday's puzzle (10 moves) was 7. Figure #35's median was 19 tries! Today's puzzle is definitely one of the easier ones, fwiw.

I've vaguely noticed some patterns of tile arrangements that create interesting sequences that are nontrivial but solvable if given some thought. I would love to develop a more formal system where these patterns are used to build up puzzles with more intent than the random boards I'm currently making. If this sort of thing is in anyone's wheelhouse, I'd love to hear from you.

You might find Jonathan Blow’s talks interesting. This one springs to mind: https://youtu.be/C5FUtrmO7gI

Also this breakdown by Game Maker’s Toolkit: https://youtu.be/2zK8ItePe3Y

Will watch, thanks so much.

https://davidkoloski.me/blog/intelligent-brute-forcing/ might help, if you don't already have some sort of automatic solver to figure out solutions.

This is excellent, thanks for sharing. My solver is designed to find every possible solution so that I can evaluate the ratio of "best" solutions to all solutions. A lot of these optimizations are super interesting, but since I'm intentionally going for comprehensive brute force (rather than finding any winning solution as quickly as possible), they're mostly off the table, at least as long as puzzles are randomly generated and I need to filter them based on solution space characteristics like this.

I did realize while reading this that I could get a little more sophisticated by finding out the number of moves in a best solution using an aggressively optimized fast solver. If that number is within a range that's fun to play, say 8-11 moves, then go ahead and find all the rest of the solutions with the maximum brute force. If not, then just scrub the whole thing since I wouldn't use that puzzle anyway.

This was a great read, thanks for posting. Would like to see similar quality article for solution to similar problems using genetic algorithms.

I dunno how you'd use genetic algorithms, since solutions are paths, and there's usually no way to splice segments of candidate paths together.

This kind of problem is known as planning in old AI, and it's languishing. most techniques are just variations of A*, with things like symmetry detection and heuristics tailored to game benchmark problems. It's the kind of thing (IMO) that deep RL fails at, since unlike Chess or Go where your solution-finding simply needs to beat a competitor, here your solution needs to be exactly correct (and ideally minimal.) It's very sparse.

The “number of tries” metric might be out if anyone else solved it like I did (ie going back to see if there was some smarter solution).

As for your comment about nontrivial puzzles - absolutely! 100% agree - the joy in a lot of puzzle games like bejewelled is unexpectedly clearing half the board with a clever move!

Not sure exactly what you mean. It only logs the number of tries for your first solve, but you can keep playing around with it after that without affecting your stats (or the global stats).

Sorry, I mean that I went like this:

* Solve two pieces

* “Oh, maybe if I did it the other way around I could get that in one” <Reset>

* “ok that worked but I wonder if it’s different if I did this…” <Reset>

* “Ok actually all of those have been exactly the same number of moves, but how about if I just reset and do the first again?” <Reset then complete>

I just mean I’m not sure I would class the above as “4 attempts” to show difficulty as you are just using it to test scenarios (ie the above person found it trivial even though it took four ‘attempts’)

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

Good luck with the site, production value is great and looks amazing! Finding the difficulty balance will be tough to satisfy both repeat and new visitors, but worthwhile!

Either you got really lucky or I'm really dumb :) -- because it took me a solid 6 attempts to solve the game. No matter what I started with, I always had 1 piece left over on all previous 5 attempts.

today's puzzle? I find it hard to fail unless I explicilty try. I can see but two dependencies in there (you need to connect the diamonds on the left and the circles on the right), and both are very easy to spot (one of them you're very likely to resolve even if you just click around).

Edit: ok, there are a few more dependencies, but they really easily resolve on their own.

I think the number of moves isn’t the key stat here, just the number of tries to complete in that many moves.

I do wonder what the minimum required moves to complete a level is, but it seems it would be at least close to 11. How many moves did it take you?

The minimum is 11 today. It varies by puzzle but is always the minimum for that arrangement of tiles. Assuming my solver is any good.

I completed it in 11 moves and assumed that that was the minimum.

Ah, think I misunderstood you originally. Anecdotally, it took me a couple tries and some thought, and I felt quite satisfied when I figured it out!

I also find it takes me a few tries on puzzles like this to see if I really like them, so hopefully if you try some harder ones in the future you’ll enjoy it more.

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