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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Mining for puzzles
        
(Message started by: omar on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 4:45pm)

Title: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 4:45pm

I ran Bomb on the last 10 moves of all the games up to id=14908 and if Bomb reported that it saw a forced win, I saved the game number, move number and various other info about the game to a file.

I made this page to try and find good win in two puzzles:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/list2.cgi

at the bottom of the page is some options for searching through the puzzles.

Many of these are not very interesting or hard to solve, but I'm sure some puzzles in there are gems.

Trying to find good puzzles from this is still pretty tedious. I was wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to automate finding puzzles that would be interesting for humans. Maybe knowing what makes a puzzle/position interesting/difficult for humans might even be helpful to bot developers.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 5:39pm

For example this is very easy to figure out:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/showPuz.cgi?g=13454&m=40w&w=2&s=rf7n+Ef6n+Rg5e+Rh5n

While this one looks like it should be easy is much harder:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/showPuz.cgi?g=13492&m=44w&w=2&s=dg7w+Mg6n+Rg4n+Ed6e

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by 99of9 on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 7:37pm

One thing that makes a puzzle good is if there is only one solution.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by Fritzlein on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 7:42pm

I haven't thought about it much, but maybe goal puzzles are harder when the winning move isn't mostly rabbit steps. I would be bored with a "goal in two" if the first move was just to push a rabbit forward.

Is there are particular reason you are mining for puzzles at the moment?

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by Hirocon on Mar 3^rd, 2010, 9:05pm

I think puzzles will probably be harder if there are multiple goal threats, but only one forced goal move. Look for puzzles with unique solutions with most of the pieces still on the board and with multiple advanced rabbits for the player to move.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by Hippo on Mar 4^th, 2010, 12:23pm

I looked at several ones and I like these
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/showPuz.cgi?g=154&m=29b&w=2&s=eb5s+mf2w+me2w+ra3e
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/showPuz.cgi?g=154&m=31b&w=2&s=me2w+md2w+eb3e+ra3e

... on several others it seemed to me there is a lot of solutions.
It would be nice to notice how many first moves solve the puzzle or choose only puzzles with only one solution as was already suggested by 99of9.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by RonWeasley on Mar 5^th, 2010, 5:43am

on 03/04/10 at 12:23:26, Hippo wrote:

For the first one, is ra3e eb5s mf2w rg2w another solution?

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by Hippo on Mar 5^th, 2010, 4:47pm

on 03/05/10 at 05:43:07, RonWeasley wrote:

For the first one, is ra3e eb5s mf2w rg2w another solution?

Seems it is ... this is why knowing number of solutions would help :)

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 5^th, 2010, 5:18pm

on 03/03/10 at 19:37:05, 99of9 wrote:

One thing that makes a puzzle good is if there is only one solution.

Yes, that's a good point. Only problem is that Bomb won't look any further after it finds one forced goal. Probably most bots are that way. So it will be hard to tell how many different solutions there are.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 5^th, 2010, 5:41pm

on 03/03/10 at 19:42:56, Fritzlein wrote:

Is there are particular reason you are mining for puzzles at the moment?

Well while watching the WCC and seeing how the bots are spotting these forced wins in the end games and making fast moves got me thinking about it again. The idea of mining the games archive for puzzles started in summer of 2007 after some conversation we had. My initial attempt was to just save the game number, move number and solution and look through them later. Here is the first list:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/puzzles/auto/list.cgi

Then last year around this time I made list2 which was searchable and that helped a bit in finding better puzzles; for example looking in games where the players are higher rated; but still it is tedious to find good puzzles. So I was thinking if there might be a way to automate it.

It would be really good to find these. I'm sure the players would love to try and solve them.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 11^th, 2010, 9:15am

on 03/05/10 at 17:18:46, omar wrote:

Aaaa, does your bot have an option to continue searching even after finding a forced goal? I think you posted in other threads where we were wondering if a particular position had multiple solutions and you were able to use your bot to give a definite number of solutions.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by aaaa on Mar 11^th, 2010, 9:47am

My usual approach of finding more than one solution has been to actually hard code the bot to discard a given move on a case-by-case basis. Very tedious. One game (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/gameroom/comments.cgi?gid=123853) I had the bot simply discard every win, but this had the (normally quite fortuitous) effect of finding wins that are actually longer than the reached search depth would imply.

Title: Re: Mining for puzzles
Post by omar on Mar 11^th, 2010, 11:36am

on 03/11/10 at 09:47:03, aaaa wrote:

Wow, I would have never guessed you were hard coding out the moves. That actually makes manually searching for the puzzles sound easier :-)