[quickthrower2]

I think the instructions should be:

Move to the square indicated below the board without moving to a square the queen can capture and without capturing the queen. Once accomplished a new square will be indicated. Repeat until all possible squares are done.

[addandsubtract]

Holy... is that what you're supposed to do?!? No wonder the bar wasn't growing even though I jumped to every possible square -.-

[Kiro]

Judging by this thread every single person did the same thing and became equally frustrated (myself included).

[ryandrake]

Well, it's the one thing the directions didn't actually say: The goal of the game. I'd be shocked if anyone went to that site and could figure out what to do.

[charcircuit]

The game tells you what square to move to.

[Dalewyn]

You need to have /some/ experience playing chess to realize and understand chess notation.

And no, vague and indirect "move to every square in order" located separately from the chess notation is not good information. Also, no, tiny nomenclature for ants on the board is not good information.

[IanCal]

Also on a phone/thin browser window the goal shrinks from "huge text under the header" to "small text at the bottom of the screen" and the instructional text disappears.

[throwbadubadu]

Have to raise my hand then to shock you.. what else should the coordinate that is also indicated on the axes mean?

> to every square in order, right to left, top to bottom

Added to that immediately.

shrug But yeah as the title says, one realizes quickly that knight moves pretty strange so got bored after 5 targets and did something more exciting: wrote a Python script that prints me the moves from and to any coordinate (:

[TuringTest]

Have to raise my hand then to shock you.. what else should the coordinate that is also indicated on the axes mean?

Yeah, but it's not clear that the instructions text is talking about that symbol, *because it doesn't say so* explicitly.

Sometimes a small level of information redundancy is good for communicating with humans, instead of forcing them to make the correct inferences in place.

[antifa]

It wouldn't technically be redundant, the help instructions are ambiguous.

[rkagerer]

How is this #3 on my HN today? Is it supposed to be a lesson on how NOT to write?

[malodyets]

Because everyone on HN was totally sucked in? I sure was.

[danuker]

something something programmer found dead in the shower

[II2II]

Maybe we were pushing the programmer a little too hard for changes if they felt compelled to continue working on their project while showering. (Remember folks: using a computer, or any other electric appliance, in the shower is a bad idea!)

[OJFord]

...unless it's an electric shower?

(Much as I'm tempted to agree they were a bad idea, we're kind of past that point and it's sort of fine... A bad idea well-executed?)

[dylan604]

no, you just have to use your brain implant's wireless connection to make changes. what kind of 21st century lame-os are you that have to worry about electric connections to the computer?

[dylan604]

ohmuhgawd, that's gotta be the darkest thing i read all day and caused me to literally lol (so that device would let me type it) so hard i spilled a bit of my old fashioned.

[dopidopHN]

I was like, ok neat but too bad that bar is broken.

[xiande04]

Wow, I thought it was just cus I was drunk

[abliefern]

I'm confused. What "same thing" did everyone try? The instructions in the help section in the game seemed perfectly clear?

[riffraff]

No, they say to move in every place, while you're expected to to move to a specific place in every step. f8 is the first for me, but I did not understand that was supposed to be the target, since it seems arbitrary.

[abliefern]

But it says "every square in order right to left, top to bottom"?

[TuringTest]

I understood that to mean that 'each single move' should aim to move to the left and below the previous position if possible (presumably to reach the bottom left square as the game goal?); taking 'every square' to imply 'every square you move to'; and being further complicated by having a complex subordinate clause with restrictions to movement.

It's not a clear, unambiguous instruction.

[jbverschoor]

"It's a user error".. "Users are stupid".. "Why can't they just understand something so simple"

[hot_gril]

I was thinking, dude I can just move the knight between the same two squares, this game is easy.

[mort96]

Just curious, what exactly did you think "in order, right to left, top to bottom" was supposed to mean?

[antifa]

I thought it meant "goto the bottom left corner" or "goto the top left corner then goto the bottom left corner." or "mark all legal tiles visited".

There's no hint in the help that you're suppose to goto the tile coordinate specified by the little box in the bottom left corner. I'm not even technically sure that's what the "f8" at the beginning is for since the help doesn't mention it.

[jayknight]

Like move the Knight to every square on the board, in a certain order, but skipping some. I didn't notice the "f8" at the bottom until I read the comments.

[froh]

so they only now added a help button? that's what it says there.

[pmontra]

Thanks.

They wouldn't have to write any instruction nor add letters and numbers around the board (they are missing) if they marked the goal square. Even after I read your instructions I equivocated where f8 is. I actually moved to f1, then realized that's a long time since I looked at a chess diagram.

A demonstration of how a little detail can ruin a project.

[alexb_]

Honestly I read this the first time and thought you were making a suggestion as to how the game should be changed. I love the idea but the design and explanation is just awful.

[raldi]

Or just put a target on each goal square in turn.

[bigdict]

Yeah I don't think text instructions are even necessary here if you make enough visual suggestions.

[II2II]

I think the text is useful for describing the ultimate goal, but agree that visual suggestions would make it easier to figure out what the problem is about.

For example, I read this as a variation of the knight's tour but was confused as to why they didn't highlight the visited squares. (Answer: it isn't a knight's tour since each square will be visited more than once.)

Another example, the description itself didn't quite make sense since it mentioned a sequence but didn't really say that certain squares must be skipped. (In retrospect, the answer is obvious. The queen makes certain squares invalid destinations, along with being invalid intermediate steps to that destination. But it won't be obvious to some people upon initially reading the instructions.)

Finally, the purpose of the square shown in the completion gauge isn't explained at all. Since it is not explained, I did not link it to the description of the goal.

[lelanthran]

> I think the text is useful for describing the ultimate goal

No, text is not needed if the next target block is marked - after the first three acquisitions of the first three target blocks, the game is very clear.

[dylan604]

so says every primary math student learning word problems

[ineptech]

Thank you! Once I saw this comment, very satisfying puzzle. At first I was fumbling my way through randomly, but around halfway I started to visualize the board as two "sets" of connected paths and grokked how to switch between them using the lower-right quadrant.

[lelanthran]

> Thank you! Once I saw this comment, very satisfying puzzle. At first I was fumbling my way through randomly, but around halfway I started to visualize the board as two "sets" of connected paths and grokked how to switch between them using the lower-right quadrant.

Exactly this - I used the upper right quadrant to switch lanes, but the idea is the same: if you cannot reach the target in the current lane, switch lanes and try again.

[chasil]

In any case, this is a variant of the "knight's tour."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour

[seanwessmith]

here's a script that will highlight previously visited squares as red. as a nice bonus it replaces the instructions with more accurate ones

  // Get all square elements
  squareElements = [...document.querySelectorAll("[data-testid='white-square']"), ...document.querySelectorAll("[data-testid='black-square']")];
  
  // create array of elements that have been landed on
  // these need to be set to red every time because the board resets every move
  let modifiedElements = [];
  observer = new MutationObserver(function (mutations) {
    mutations.forEach(function (mutation) {
      if (mutation.addedNodes.length > 0) {
        mutation.addedNodes.forEach(function(addedNode) {
          key = addedNode.getAttribute('data-testid').split('-')[1];
          if (!modifiedElements.includes(key)) {
            modifiedElements.push(key);
          }
          for (let i = 0; i < modifiedElements.length; i++) {
            el = squareElements.find(e => {
              return e.getAttribute('data-squareid') === modifiedElements[i]
            })
            el.style.backgroundColor = 'red';
          }
        });
      }
    });
  });
  
  // observe all square elements
  for (let i = 0; i < squareElements.length; i++) {
    observer.observe(squareElements[i], { childList: true, subtree: true });
  }
  
  // replace instructions with more accurate instructions
  instructions = document.querySelector('section p')
  instructions.innerHTML = 'Move to the square indicated below the board without moving to a square the queen can capture and without capturing the queen. Once accomplished a new square will be indicated. Repeat until all possible squares are done.';

[wglass]

very clever little hack -- had to fix the first couple of lines to remove extra newlines and "...."

[seanwessmith]

thanks! not used to the HN code comments. fixed it

[layer8]

A short note about how the coordinates work would also be helpful, or just highlight the target square, because not everyone knows chess notation by heart. I tried two different interpretations (both wrong) before finally resolving to google for it.

[II2II]

> not everyone knows chess notation by heart.

I am going to agree, and hopefully clarify the point with a slightly different example. While I know how the notation works, I cannot figure out where a particular square is at a glance. This meant a lot of time squinting at the tiny, low contrast labels at the edges of the board. It made the problem a lot harder to solve since my concentration was constantly being disrupted by figuring out where the next destination is, rather than focusing upon the pattern of the knight's moves.

[andai]

They are written on the board..?

[layer8]

Wow, I totally didn’t see those. Much too small and low-contrast, they are basically invisible on a smartphone.

[msrenee]

I'm not seeing the letters. I see the numbers and vaguely knew enough about chess to know which way the numbers go. Honestly, I really only know about the board location designations because of the puzzle under the word scramble in the paper that asked you to accomplish something on the example chess board. The answers to the previous challenge were written (upside down to prevent accidental spoilers) in the standard(?) chess notation.

[marssaxman]

I did not see those markings at all - nor did I see the label indicating the square to jump to, until quickthrower2's explanation cued me to look for it!

(I see now that the target-square notation is much more prominent if you stretch the window horizontally, but I habitually use portrait-mode windows, where it's very small.)

[wyclif]

It asked me to move to e8...but that's a move where the Queen takes Knight. I don't get it.

[aleksandrm]

Look again. The queen doesn't take the knight at E8.

[wyclif]

You're right, but I naturally hesitated to move there because I play chess a lot.

[DrewADesign]

Kind of makes you appreciate the amount of work most games put into UI design. This game mechanic is very simple and it still needed documentation... And the documentation wasn't enough! Immensely complex games these days are so good at providing hints and player feedback that many often don't need their tutorial levels.

[antifa]

IMO the documentation says to do something completely different than what the apparent goal actually is.

[DrewADesign]

Sure. It's a different facet of the same problem. There's a damn good reason that professional software development organizations hire designers and technical writers, and while many developers like to think so, it's not merely to save them time. Developers often suck at making docs for other developers; reasoning about communicating to people one step removed from that gets even dicier. As a developer before I learned good design principles, I often fell into the trap of assuming my being able to assemble something in code gave me sufficient understanding of why it was designed that way. Ah, the hubris of inexperience.

[idopmstuff]

Wow. Thanks. Totally missed that.

Maybe throw a little highlight on the square on the board as well.

[muthuh]

Perhaps it's me but had absolutely no trouble interpreting the 'help' meassage. Before I did though, for at least some time, was trying to capture the queen :)

[Terretta]

Better instruction from alt implementation of game linked below:

"Objective: Get to every square of the board that is not attacked by the queen (without capturing it either), right to left, top to bottom."

Clarifies the square indicator tip isn't necessary for the instructions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34462855

[cush]

And move the bar to the top with a bit of text - "Next square: F8"

Yeah I spent a lot of time trying to hit every square.

[balaji1]

another hidden UX: clicking a square will move the knight there (if valid move). do not have to drag and drop.

[iforgotpassword]

Man, I was losing it on mobile since a) I didn't get that it tells you the next field below the board, then b) the labels in the squares are too low contrast to be visible on my phone, and c) 9 out of 10 times the browser would start scrolling instead of starting to drag the knight.

[quickthrower2]

Thank rook for that

[arc-in-space]

I suppose you win the 10000 IQ award for being the only person on the website to realize?

[lelanthran]

Probably a regular entry in /r/IAMVeryIntelligent

[hluska]

Thank you! This was a really fun puzzle once I read your comment. It’s much appreciated!

[6c696e7578]

Target square in middle of circle, don't get captured or capture.

[nvdrx]

Where was this comment 5 minutes in?