Crossword sizes and difficulty levels.

Hi, The current idea is that there will be 3 crossword sizes: 8x8, 10x10 and 13x13. Since generating 13x13 currently takes too long, we will use 13x10 crosswords. There will be two levels of difficulty for each size: Easy and hard. Maybe there will be 6 versions of the crosswords. And there will also be 6 daily crosswords, starting with 8x8 easy and ending with 13x13 hard. And each organizer can choose for the tournament which crosswords they will put in. For example, the official Vint.ee tournament could have 8x8 easy, 10x10 hard and 13x13 easy, etc. How do you think? I wouldn't want to make these special combinations too many - maybe six variants will be enough?

This idea is starting to come to fruition and the results are beyond expectations: Easy crosswords are within everyone's reach (does not include Spanish football players and Russian birds); The difficult ones are full of fish and letters of the HUN alphabet :) - leave the difficult ones to the specialists. Similar to sudoku, I will make 3 tournament versions (5 crosswords in all tournaments): Easy tournament - 8x8 easy, 10x10 easy, 10x10 easy, 13x10 easy, 8x8 hard Medium tournament - 8x8 easy, 10x10 easy, 13x10 easy, 8x8 hard, 10x10 hard, Hard tournament - 10x10 easy, 13x10 easy, 10x10 hard, 10x10 hard, 13x10 hard If I can make all these changes (different difficulty levels, daily crosswords, different tournaments) within a week, then the crossword space can be officially opened and the "beta" thing can be cleaned up.

I'm also writing down some numbers here for myself to use later. The numbers are obtained by generating 100 crosswords: 8x8 Easy Number of questions: 25 Average question difficulty: 3.5 Average crossword difficulty (sum of question difficulties): 88.2 8x8 Hard Number of questions: 25 Average question difficulty: 8.5 Average crossword difficulty: 224.0 10x10 Easy Number of questions: 38 Average question difficulty: 3.6 Average crossword difficulty: 157.3 10x10 Hard Number of questions: 38 Average question difficulty: 8.3 Average crossword difficulty: 336.6 13x13 Easy Number of questions: 68 Average question difficulty: 3.6 Average crossword difficulty: 276.0 13x13 Hard Number of questions: 68 Average question difficulty: 8.1 Average crossword difficulty: 586.0 I currently use crossword difficulty as a basis for organizing tournaments, but life will tell whether it is proportional to the solving time.

Difficulty levels also need to be addressed. I just stumbled upon the question: Music - raga, difficulty level 1 First of all, the question is an Indian music style and the difficulty level should be 13. I do the difficulty levels in such a way that a left mouse click displays the difficulty level of the question in the chat window. It is up to the solver to decide whether they then indicate with a right click that it needs to be changed. Difficulty levels should only be changed if the difference with reality is at least two levels. For example, 3 => 8 or 5=>13. Whether the difficulty level is 5 or 3, 2 or 1 does not make much difference and perhaps also depends on the previous knowledge of the questioner / solver

Done! I invite everyone to try the daily crosswords! The first official vint.ee easy crossword tournament will take place tonight. Keep an eye on the difficulty levels: left-clicking displays the difficulty level of the question, right-clicking indicates the level of difficulty of the problem. PS! There are 3000 ungraded questions that are no longer used in crosswords - by entering new questions and answers, we can also grade the existing ones!

Here, another thought occurred to me: once we get these 3,000 questions graded, I will make an addition to the generator so that in easy crosswords the maximum question difficulty level is 8.

It seems that difficult crosswords are still too difficult. At the moment, they are trying to put the words in the crossword in order (with degrees of difficulty): 40, 20, 13, etc. For easy ones, the opposite is true: 1, 2,3, etc. For difficult ones, it would probably be better to change this algorithm to something like this: 8, 5, 13, 3, 20, 2, 1, 40?

The order of generation is not known, but of course there is a difference when two words with a difficulty level of 20 intersect, compared to the intersection of the same words with easier ones. Even with the easier ones, sometimes there are so-called blind corners, where there are either more difficult words or all the easier ones with many variants together. The real problem may be the incorrectly set difficulty level... A village with three or four letters in Estonia is usually actually an 8-point question, because the question is poorly presented. Often, you simply cannot get the answer even when two (sometimes three) letters out of 4 or 5 are available.

All crossword questions have difficulty levels attached to them. Thanks to everyone who helped! I will now start manually reviewing questions with a difficulty level > 8. There are 7000 of these questions, and when reviewing the 700 I found 300 questions with a difficulty level that was significantly overstated. What next? Once all the difficulty levels have been checked, I will set the generator so that there are no questions with a difficulty level above 8 in easy crosswords. I do not yet know if a 13x13 crossword will be generated in this way in normal time. I have a wicked plan to try solving crosswords as part of the Mental Sports Olympiad next year. And I also linked the definition of difficulty levels to it - an average high school graduate could know questions with a difficulty level of 8. I will also try to do something with difficult crosswords to make them a little easier. And the third problem is that a 13x13 crossword contains 2 question squares too many. To remove these squares, we may still need 5000 additional questions for the database, but it seems so. In short - we are still dealing with crosswords. This game room will be ready in the next annual issue. But it is exciting. At least for me :)

Yesterday there was a big leap in the development of vint.ee crosswords. First, I made the generation about 10 times faster. Second, I removed a few question squares in the 13x13 crossword so that the generation time did not suffer. Third, I also made medium crosswords. The descriptions of the difficulty levels would then be as follows: Easy Contains questions with difficulty levels 1-8. Answers are entered into the crossword in order 1->8. They should be within reach of a person who does not solve crosswords on a daily basis. Medium Contains questions with difficulty levels 1-13. Answers are entered into the crossword in order 13->1. They should be within reach of an experienced crossword solver without any help or a layman with a few Googlings. Hard Contains questions with difficulty levels 1-40. Answers are entered into the crossword in order 40->1. Only for specialists. Beginner crossword solvers won't be able to solve it even with Google's help. These will be the levels of difficulty of crosswords because we will have to deal with the difficulty of the questions and that will take time. We will officially open the crossword space in the next annual issue. As a reminder, here are some more definitions of the levels of difficulty: 8 - The average person could know the answer / deduce it 13 - An experienced solver knows it by heart but the average person has to Google the answer. Easy to Google. 20 - Few know it by heart, have to Google it. Difficult to Google it. For example. Cities in Germany and Russia. I always try to solve easy and average daily crosswords and correct mistakes, but I need your help with others - when solving crosswords, also check the levels of difficulty and let me know if you have any problems with them. Happy solving!