JosephReidNZ wrote:
...
A balanced approach to creating more puzzles without sacrificing quality could involve improving puzzle generation algorithms to ensure consistent quality while expanding the puzzle pool. This way, the potential for repetition is reduced without compromising the integrity of the puzzles.
...
If I understand correctly, most puzzles come from games played on the site. I'm not sure how they're grabbed - perhaps during engine analysis by the fair play systems?
Most puzzles are not hand-crafted.
Simply lowering thresholds is not a good way to generate more puzzles.
More bad puzzles is not necessarily better than fewer good puzzles. When doing puzzle rush, you will eventually see puzzles start to repeat. But is that really worse than having your puzzle rush cut short because you guessed wrong on a bad puzzle where the "right" answer was only a little better than a "wrong" answer?
Very few people are actually doing survival puzzle rush slowly enough to reach the point where high-level puzzles start to repeat. It's very much a rare edge-case situation. Compromising the quality of the puzzles to try to improve that edge case situation (and I would argue it's not an improvement) would actually make puzzles worse for many people who never do survival puzzle rush in that way.
But if you only let it happen with high-rated puzzles, it shouldn't be an issue. Puzzle rush puzzles increase by 50 elo each turn. This means if you only loosened the requirements for puzzles expected to be 3500+ elo, this would only affect people with a puzzle rush score of above 68 or so. I feel like it would affect the higher number of people who have a normal puzzle rating of 3100 or more, (roughly), but this is still only a small proportion of the people who use the site.
If I'm right and people memorising puzzles is skewing the puzzle ratings of all puzzles, though, that affects everyone on the site.
The thing is, puzzle rush is not the only way to do those high-rated puzzles. Anyone who does tactics puzzles and has a high puzzle rating will encounter those. This will affect IMs and GMs by giving them poor quality puzzles towards the top end of the rating pool.
And a significant percentage of those with an extremely high puzzle rating and therefore only getting the very top-rated puzzles got there through some exploit or something. Which means a lot of those who are affected were taking advantage of an exploit to boost their rating and care more about rating than having lots of good puzzles.
So at the very very top ratings, a lot of people don't care about what puzzles they get so long as they can have a high rating. And a little lower down at genuine high-level master territory, they're getting top-rated puzzles as part of a mix with lower-rated puzzles, and they don't want those top-rated puzzles to be poor quality.
Also, there are few enough people reaching those top levels that they're not skewing ratings for everyone else.