Tactics Trainer Problem Difficulty

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Amplepawn

ill let you know.

solskytz

I remember, <CM Ilmago>, that several years ago we were in communication on this subject. 

Back in the day, it used to be that a TT problem should have had only one solution move with an evaluation over +1 - each and every move of the solution. Also, when the winning move was no better than +4 or so - the second best move couldn't have been better than +0.3. 

Since then - and also quite recently - I remember seeing many many many problems that don't answer up on this. 

I generally comment about them - only to have the crowd answer me that I'm a bad sport, that the purpose is to find "the very best move", that it's my fault that I didn't get it (in some of these cases I did get it, of course) - etc.

The question is - what to do. Should I write to you personally every time I ran into a defective problem?

 

ilmago

Yes, benkku, as Martin0 has mentioned above, if the effect is largely due to some recent changes, then resetting the TT history will of course not be first option to consider.

 

solskytz, thanks for mentioning your observations! My guess is that just commenting about such defective problems will not get them resolved, I think there is noone who would be able to go through all TT comments manually to look for those comments that may refer to a tactics being defective (of course there are many, many comments in tactics trainer about completely different things, often maybe simply just comments like "first!" or "nice one!"). I would think that reporting these defective problems will be necessary for getting them fixed quickly --- isn't this even a one click operation now in V3?

And especially if you think that you have observed a larger number of new defective tactics, it may be a good idea to not only report them individually, but also report your observations in a collective way to chess.com --- so that if there is some kind of new source ot defective tactics pouring in, they will get to know it soon and can do something about it.

solskytz

I'm not sure that a collective observation would fit the bill here - as one would still find the problems individually. 

It shouldn't be a new source of defective tactics, as the issue is far from new.

If there's a one-button report-bad-problem resource in V3, please let me know what it is - I didn't find it. 

 

ilmago

on the bottom right, below the tags:

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click on "report", then this will pop up

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I would be a bit surprised if any new problems really had the problem of having more than one correct solution these days ... most of this aspect seems to be currently checked quite successfully in an automated way already, making it quite unlikely that new problems with more than one solution are suggested for insertion into tactics trainer.

 

solskytz

Excellent, <CM Ilmago> - I have now learned something and will surely use this feature. Thank you so much!! :-)