Interesting Pattern

[ruchira]

An interesting pattern occurs in the scores of at least one player on the 8x8 1-star puzzles. They often appear on the leaderboards with a time of under 20s, and their average time is in that range. However, their rate of successfully finishing puzzles is very low--they don't complete 1 in 3 puzzles. This is what's interesting. The only times I have not "succeeded" at one of these puzzles is when something went wrong with the connection before Puzzle Baron recorded the score, and I believe the same is true of many other players. What could explain such a low rate of completion?

One plausible explanation is that when they see a puzzle for the first time, they don't finish it or even attempt it. Instead, they take a screenshot of it. Then they solve it (or get it solved) untimed outside of Puzzle Baron. When they see the same puzzle another time, they copy their solution.

Are there other plausible explanations? Please feel free to suggest them.

[bluefox14]

I don't think that's a very plausible explanation. Most players have 100s or 1000s of games played so it would be impractical to recall a specific solution. Their success rate would also be much lower if they were doing this. I think a more plausible explanation is that since they are going for fast times they just start a new game if they reach a point where they know their time won't be fast.

[Martika14]

What bluefox14 said: given the sheer number of different puzzles, the logistics of looking up the solution for a puzzle, especially an 8x8 1-star puzzle, would take easily ten times longer than just solving it from scratch. It's clearly a case of the "it's taking longer than [x] seconds, let's move on" strategy.

[ruchira]

It would be quite straightforward to feed the puzzle into a computer program that looks up the entry. My guess is that lookup would take less than two seconds max. It probably takes much longer just clicking all the squares.

Thanks for the alternate explanation, though.

[Doc Grauzer]

The timer doesn’t start until the player clicks on a square. It would be easy to screenshot the puzzle, solve it elsewhere, and simply input the solution for a record time with any size.

[Martika14]

Uh, no, the timer starts as soon as you hit the button on the previous page, precisely because otherwise it'd be way too easy to cheat.

The timer will begin the moment you click the "Start This Puzzle" button, below.

[Spenglord]

I am sure there are many who play similarly to myself; I go for records only. Not the best way to play lol but it's the way I play. If the record is 20s and I know I have taken more than 30/35, I won't complete and move onto another puzzle.