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Standard vs Challenge ...

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Calilasseia:
Just recently, the Standard games have been more challenging than the Challenge games, at least from my standpoint.

Over the past week, I've fired up the game, and the Standard game has left me struggling to find the nine-letter word for up to two hours, as well as providing annoying 'so near yet so far' moments with missing letters that would have doubled or even tripled my word tally. By contrast, I've been able to find the nine-letter solution for the Challenge game in under five minutes, and rattle off a decent word list in 30 minutes. Today the nine-letter was the first word that sprang to mind when seeing the Challenge puzzle, and everything else fell into place from that point on.

Am I unique here, or has anyone else experienced this phenomenon?

Today (2nd February) I've had to struggle to find the Standard 9-letter, and only just scraped past the "better" mark, while the Challenge game has been much less frustrating!

Is this some sort of statistical anomaly I've simply been unfortunate to encounter, or are we going to see a permanent role reversal in place? :)

mkenuk:
To be honest, apart from the difference in the targets - Standard 24/60, Challenge 40/85 - I've never seen much difference between the two.

The 10-letter game, now, that's a horse of a very different colour.
One extra letter seems to make a very big difference.

RL:
Yes I agree, it's been the same for me,the challenge has seemed easier .
lisa

Alan W:
In the beginning, there was just one kind of puzzle. The page looked something like this:



The Challenge puzzle was introduced after only a few months. Its history can be traced on the News Archive page. In Now, a Choice of Two Puzzles (December 2005) we learn that initially there was no difference at all in the puzzle itself. The main thing that made the Challenge more challenging was that there was no way to look at the solution before the puzzle closed. The only other new feature was that the hit rate was shown on the scoreboard.

A few weeks later, in How Different is the Challenge Puzzle? I asked for comments on whether the Challenge puzzle should be tweaked in some way to make it more challenging. I can't recall whether I got any responses. (This was before the forum started, and I can't seem to lay my hands on my 2006 emails.) In any case I soon reported in The Challenge Just Got More Challenging! that I would change the generation of Challenge puzzles so that they would in general have more words to find, and fewer nine-letter words ending in -ING.

As far as I can recall, there's still no other difference between Standard and Challenge puzzles. So, while one might spend on average a little longer on the Challenge, because of the greater word count, it isn't necessarily more difficult. I think the difference on any given day in the perceived difficulty of the two 9-letter puzzles is mainly due to random variations in the letter selection.

So to answer Cal's original question, "Are we going to see a permanent role reversal in place?" - probably not.

Calilasseia:
Interesting also to note that the website was originally written in Perl, before being migrated to PHP.

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