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by palosanto 4333 days ago
Great work, Andrew and team!

I played with the Tactics interface for a few minutes. I love the clean design; the interface is delightful; "well done, tactic solved in XX seconds" animation is fun and totally addicting.

One gripe I have is that the quality of the tactics seems to vary widely. I'm not talking about difficulty level; some of them just don't make sense to me.

I'm not sure how this one, for example, qualifies as a tactic: chscd.me/tactics/16685. It's just a pawn capture. The fact that I have "solved" it after recapturing my rook seems arbitrary.

Out of the half dozen tactics I played through in my first visit, I had a couple other questionable ones like this. It made the site lose credibility for me. (note: I am a chess master. But my problem isn't that the tactics are too easy, it's that they are kind of random)

I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?

I understand you probably have a massive database of these. But it might be a good idea to have Andrew or another strong player moderate the tactics to make sure they all meet a certain standard of quality.

Looking forward to following your progress!

2 comments

  I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?
My guess is that it's software generated because there's a report button, and its function is probably to learn about bad tactic examples.
Where do you see the report button?
In the left sidebar where it has a graph of your recent ratings and tactic #, there should be a small icon on the top right corner of the sidebar. That is the report button. I submitted one on a Tactic and Andrew got back with in a few hours saying the particular tactic had been fixed.
We pulled them from a database of puzzles, so there probably are a few bugged ones here and there. We've pruned the majority of tactics that are simply broken, but I'm sure that a few questionable ones remain.

I'm in the process right now of going through all of the tactics and adding motif tags along with explanations for the solutions. While I'm doing this, I'll be sure to make sure that all the tactics make sense. Thank you for your feedback!

regarding tactics, please also add some info about what was the expected move when you fail a tactic.
Currently, you can play through the solutions using the left and right arrow buttons underneath the board.
hmm, didn't notice that. perhaps some text to indicate that you can use the arrows to see the moves ?