How many puzzles are there?

[tenderlion]

I’ve noticed from watching the top ten rankings shown at the end of game (which I don’t score on too frequently) that I have repeated boards from the ‘randomly’ generated algorithm. I’ve played about 620 games and noticed a repeat approx 5 times, and that’s just from games I ranked on. I’d say I rank 5% of the time. Given there is a finite set of boards, does anyone have a guess as to how many there are?

[tenderlion]

Really, I have no idea how often I rank!

[uigrad]

If you look in the right-hand column, there's a place where you can click that says "Records". It shows you the last 5 times that someone has broken a record, and it always says something like "User xxxx has set a record of yyyy seconds on puzzle #zzzz".


It's the only place on the site that I've seen a numbering system for the puzzles. But, then I looked at the source code after finishing a puzzle. In there, you can see a hidden field that says the "qid" is ____, and those number line up with the zzzz that I see in the records area. (You can confirm this by getting a record on the puzzle, checking the qid, and then later watching for your name to come up in the records).

Long story short, I made a quick userscript (usable with Greasemonkey) that prints out the qid for each puzzle after you finish playing it:

// ==UserScript==
// @name     Save Puzzle ID
// @version  1
// @include https://campsites.puzzlebaron.com/gameover.php
// @grant    none
// ==/UserScript==

var qid =  document.getElementsByName("qid")[0].value;
alert(qid);

So, using that, I played one puzzle of each size. For the smaller puzzles, I played 3 each.

Assuming that the numbers are contiguous and assuming that all the puzzles for a given size and difficulty are together in the numbering system, it looks like the numbering system goes from 2500 to 16000. I'm kind of guessing here, because I haven't really played enough to know for sure. So, that would be a total of 11500 puzzles. Here's my data:

15x15 -- Challenging
3713

15x15 -- Easy
4915

15x10 -- Challenging
5570
5582
6040
6060

15x10 -- Easy
6932
7097
7304

10x10 -- Challenging
7502
7704
8010

10x10 -- Easy
8468
9077
9335

10x5  -- Challenging
9713
9988
10055

10x5  -- Easy
11043
11039
10411

20x15 -- Easy
12186

20x15 -- Challenging
12683

20x20 -- Challenging
14079

20x20 -- Easy
15096

Feel free to use my userscript yourself, and add to the data.

[tenderlion]

What a terrific answer. Thank you so much for elucidating.