On exercises where one really struggles (yes, I'm super stupid when it comes to Chess -- I can play Go which is supposed to be harder but for some reason anything beyond the utter basics of Chess eludes me) it's very frustrating to be shown the same hint over and over again when it's irrelevant or unhelpful (e.g. "Think about the name of the tactic - the windmill... it goes around and around!" Yes, I'm thinking about it! Now give me a hint!)
I think the problem here isn't so much that the hint is repeated as that it's needlessly vague. You may have already solved the problem but in case you didn't I'd like to give you what I think would be a good hint because windmills in chess are actually really cool.
A windmill in chess is a tactical scenario where a the king is repeatedly revealed to checks by the same piece. A "revealed" check occurs when a piece moves out of the way allowing another piece behind it to attack the opposing king. This scenario allow you to move the piece freely while your opponent can only move his king. Here's a great example of a game with a windmill (and actually one of the great games of all time) The first check of the windmill occurs on move 19.
I think repetition is definitely part of the problem. A vague hint is fine the first time, but it should get more specific if you keep struggling.
Also, some of the hints only apply to the first move (or first two). If you find that move but get stuck later on, it's irritating to be shown an irrelevant hint. In this case I got the windmill started but for some reason the last move was in a blind spot for me -- though when I went back an hour or two later it was completely obvious (but that doesn't make it less frustrating when I was stuck).
Go is harder for computers. It's computationally more complex, but it doesn't mean that it's supposed to be harder for humans (our brains work differently, some tasks - such as face recognition - are trivial for us, but for a machine are way more difficult than playing chess with Kasparov's strength).
How do you even measure what is harder for a human?
One way to measure it could be the length of a chain that looks like this:
"Person A can beat person B with 90% probability, but Person C can beat Person A with 90% probability."
You'd want to limit the people you count to being, say, tournament players with stable ranks, such that e.g. their rank was not altered by the games against the last ten people they played.
My intuition is that, even if we stick to US players, Go ends up with a chain that's a few multiples of the Chess chain in length. This intuition mostly comes from Go's handicap system, where there are many levels of "I can give 9 handicap stones to a worse player and still win, but a better player can give 9 handicap stones to me and still win."
But I could be totally wrong. I've never heard of anyone try to measure this distance before and it would be awesome to get some pointers to such a study if it already exists.
Perhaps the absolute value difference in Elo rank between large communities of Go players vs. Chess players does the same thing, depending on which Elo parameters you use?
(And, uh, to get back on topic -- nice site! I'm doing some problems now.)
The best NBA team will beat the worst NBA team with extremely high probability. Much higher than the probability that the best MLB team beats the worst MLB team. For example, when the San Antonio Spurs played the New Orleans Pelicans on March 25, the average odds implied a probability of around 96%[1]; when the Texas Rangers played the Minnesota Twins on August 31 2013, the implied win probability was around 75%[2]. I think that your system would probably score basketball much higher than baseball (if I had to make a guess, there are probably 5-6 90% spans between high school basketball and NBA basketball, and 3-4 spans between high school baseball and MLB baseball), implying that basketball is a harder sport.
It would certainly be a very interesting metric, and one I would love to see calculated more formally. That said, I'm not sure it captures the intuition of "hardest game" that effectively. To be the best at a game depends primarily on the number of people who play it at the elite level and the time investment they put in, combined with the importance of natural talent. Suppose there were a game which had even longer chains than go, such as if each player always defeated the next stronger player with 90% probability, and there were 1000 players who played recreationally. We wouldn't think of this as a particularly hard game, because to be an elite player at the game, all you'd have to do is take it on with a professional level of commitment and you'd quickly move up in the ranks. So the difficulty of a game at elite levels must at some point include a hefty weighting of popularity and commercial appeal. As to the importance of natural talent in this idea, you simply can't play in the NBA if you are 5'0", and having such a physical limitation would tend to increase what people perceive of as the difficulty of the game. If there were a board game that required a 150 IQ to even understand the rules, people would definitely call it a very difficult game.
Chess is the best researched game of all time, yet it still progressed tremendously in recent decades (thanks to becoming a professional sport in the West - around the Fischer era - and the appearance of computers, of course). We know how long the "food chain" is, but we can't tell to a certainty how long it can become (how close can a human get to perfect play), even if the pool of motivated players is very wide.
Current world champions are standing on the shoulders of the giants. Alekhine or Capablanca, geniuses as they were, wouldn't have a shot for the title if they didn't catch up with modern developments. And there are PLENTY. Memorization plays a big role these days. In one of the games in the Topalov vs Anand match, Anand slipped because he messed up the order of moves - all home preparation!! - around the 27th move or so. (Does this mean that humanity has already traversed the entire steep part of the learning curve?)
So the chain is still growing. Does it mean that chess is becoming more difficult game? It's a Platonic question, really :) Do we mean chess as such, and the innate difficulty of the game, imprinted in its rules that remain fairly stable - no major rule changes for the last couple of centuries, I believe? The IDEA of chess, so to speak?
Or do we mean chess AS IT IS PLAYED, or the reflection of the perfect idea :)
In the early era of competitive chess we had the so-called Romantic period, in which aesthetics of the game, the style, was valued over cold efficiency and - for example - it was considered ungentlemanly not to accept a gambit.
Was it just a cultural convention hurting the level of the game? Or was it a different flavor of the game, in which a player had to fullfill an additional responsibility they are now relieved from, and thus not quite the same discipline?
Just my two cents, some chaotic food for thought :) Sorry about the language, not a native speaker here.
Unfortunately, there's no option to "give up" just yet on exercises. We're looking to implement a feature where after an incorrect number of answers, you're given the option to read the solution. It's probably less frustrating this way than forcing users to attempt to brute-force the exercise.
Qualitative personalized feedback for content is in the works - optimally, we'd be able to tell you why the move you gave was incorrect and why the solution is best. This is an interesting technical challenge because it requires us to cover a large number of possible solutions.
It was helpful the first time. But obviously once I'd tried "going around and around" and hadn't found the move in ten attempts, it obviously wasn't helping any more.
