Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evaluating and ranking the difficulty and enjoyment of puzzles is important in game design. Typically, such rankings are constructed manually for each specific game, which can be time consuming, subject to designer bias, and requires extensive play testing. An approach to ranking that generalizes across multiple puzzle games is even more challenging because of their variation in factors like rules and goals. This paper introduces two general approaches to compute puzzle entropy, and uses them to evaluate puzzles that players enjoy. The resulting uncertainty score is equivalent to the number of bits of data necessary to communicate the solution of a puzzle to a player of a given skill level. We apply our new approaches to puzzles from the 2016 game, The Witness. The computed entropy scores largely reproduce the order of a set of puzzles that introduce a new mechanic in the game. The scores are also positively correlated with the user ratings of user-created Witness puzzles, providing evidence that our approach captures notions of puzzle difficulty and enjoyment. Our approach is designed to exploit game-specific knowledge in a general way and thus can extended to provide automatic rankings or curricula in a variety of applications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".