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Subject: Re: Evaluating difficulty of a position

Author: Heiner Marxen

Date: 08:38:11 11/20/00

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On November 20, 2000 at 10:36:02, Bob Durrett wrote:

>On November 20, 2000 at 06:19:12, Mark Christiaens wrote:
>
>>I've written a program that generates a "puzzle competition".  The program
>>generates Lout source for 5 rounds of puzzles, together with the solution
>>sheets, score sheets, ...
>>
>>For this, I'm using a database of mate in 1, mate in 2, ... problems from which
>>I select a number of problems.  Although most puzzles are from the mate in 2
>>kind, there is a large difference in subjective difficulty between one puzzle
>>and the next.
>>
>>My question is: is there any way to evaluate how difficult a problem is (using a
>>program) for a human so that I can construct a set of puzzles which are easy,
>>moderate, difficult?
>>
>>
>>Kind regards,
>>
>>Mark Christiaens
>
>Maybe a computer chess programmer would be willing to modify his program to add
>the capability to measure the amount of time the program uses to find the
>solution.  That would not give a direct measurement of how difficult the
>position would be for a human player, but might give some indication at least.

Feed the EPD to "chest -b" and Chest will kindly provide acn=N, the number
of nodes it did generate in the process of solving the problem.

>Incidentally, you could try using a stopwatch.

For mate in 2 the time will usually be much smaller than a second,
so we are out of luck, here.

Heiner Marxen   heiner@drb.insel.de     http://www.drb.insel.de/~heiner/



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