Cheaters

[admin]

Let's keep the discussion civil, everyone.

I've deleted all posts except the first one in this thread as things have gotten a bit testy and it is NOT appropriate to use this forum to "name and shame" users you think are cheating. If you feel a user is cheating, you can email me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com and I will investigate it.

Regarding potentially unrealistic record times, I've done a deep dive on the data and here's my conclusions.

Two record times (2 seconds) were either absolutely solved programmatically, or they were the result of some sort of glitch in the system. I've deleted both of these from the database.

Concerning the rest, I've run some stats. Out of approximately 50,000 puzzles:

- 140 have record times under 30 seconds (all are from our original 2013 library of puzzles, all have 14 or fewer clues but most have <10)
- 639 have record times under 40 seconds (99% are from our original 2013 library of puzzles, all have 17 or fewer clues but most have <12)
- 1562 have record times under 50 seconds (98% are from our original 2013 library of puzzles, all have 17 or fewer clues but most have <13)

Our earliest (2013) puzzles tended to be much shorter and contained a much smaller pool of clue answers, so this data makes sense to me as we have several "power users" who have been here for many, many years and solved tens of thousands of puzzles. Over time they are going to recognize certain clues and be able to pop the answers in with lightning speed. If a critical mass of clues in any given puzzle (generally, around 30-40%) can be instantly recognized, the rest of the puzzle becomes fairly easy to solve, and if the user has (a) excellent memory, (b) excellent pattern recognition skills and (c) excellent typing skills, there's no reason not to believe they can legitimately solve an 8-clue puzzle in 25 seconds. Especially if they've solved tens of thousands puzzles over several years here and have likely gotten several repeat puzzles and many repeat clues over that time.

On our cryptogram site we have similar complaints from time to time, when people see record times of 4, 5 or 6 seconds on a puzzle. But I can guarantee you that such incredible solve times are legitimately possible - I've seen it with my own eyes. Never underestimate what a person can achieve given enough practice and enough innate skill at pattern recognition. Just because you can't do it doesn't mean there aren't a couple of super talented people out there who can!

My conclusion: the vast majority of players who have sub-40 record times (35 different players) appear to have set those times legitimately, likely through a combination of sheer pattern recognition, excellent memory from having solved many thousands of previous puzzles and lightning-fast typing ability. Only one player appears to have possibly employed "shady" tactics in at least a couple of puzzles, and all those records have now been reset.

In the end, cheating is always a concern. We do have measures in place to detect programmatic solves, but I'm sure they're not foolproof - no system is. I'll keep doing what I can to keep the site as fair as possible.

I may also end up discarding (or reformulating, with our new much largest dataset of clues/answers) the original batch of 2013 puzzles. Will think some more on that.

[SGreenNYC]

There are too many people here who have ridiculously fast times. They are obviously completing the puzzle under one name and then quickly filling it in under another name. Even filling in the blank spaces in the time some of them post seems amazing. They certainly can’t actually be solving in the times they are recording. These people suck.