awake and starting now

Done

Done

finished, took my time.

start

ding

Difficulty score 23. No green.

TallMike: I don't know the specifics of the programming here, but it might not be as simple as you think. To keep track of all the puzzles you have finished in the last 2 weeks requires keeping track of when you complete each puzzle. I'm pretty sure that is not being done. To keep the current Who's Hot list only requires checking how many of the puzzles published in the last 2 weeks you have completed.

To be fair, it's still not a very difficult change.

done

Done.

TallMike: wouldn't your proposal penalize those of us (call us the turtles) that have spent years (in my case, 8 years) keeping up with the puzzles on a nearly-daily basis, in favor of newcomers (let's call them the hares) who have discovered this wonderful place? That being said, at the end of the day, I don't really care one way or the other. Turtle or hare, all are welcome.

Diane: Thank you for your comments. I believe my posts of 11:41 am and 1:13 pm yesterday go a long way toward answering your question. Personally I think the current method used for the Who's Hot rankings does a poor job of identifying who is really hot, which in my mind means players who deserve recognition for putting a ton of energy into IronSudoku right now. I do understand that there are some players like you who are motivated by and get satisfaction from maintaining a perfect or near-perfect record, but consistent long-term performance is being recognized elsewhere through the Elite, Experts, Pros, Regulars and Newbies lists. If we make Who's Hot focus on unusually high current activity instead of consistent long-term performance, we will be addressing the needs of an entirely different group.

Pretty funny discussion read from the ether...the rankings are meaningless unless there is some personal worth attached to them which creates two opportunities; 1) start coding and create the most intensely accurate ranking system to determine not only who's hot but how hot that hotness really is based on error rates, restarts, checkpoints used, time on puzzle, time from post to completion and I would recommend as highly accurate as possible, maybe going so far as to attach the result to the official "World Atomic Clock" such that the actual time calculation can be based on the distance between the Big Bang and the quadrillasecond instant the mouse touches the final square...

or...

2) let it go.

There are those rare moments in life when it is appropriate to live by 'should'...my sense is with regard to the inability to determine with precise hotness or coldness or lukewarmness of puzzle solvers worldwide to engage with this site somewhere between their morning coffee and their commute or vice versa, qualifies as an opportunity to employ 'should"...as in "should let it go"...

and if all that sounds like it's raining on someone(s) parade...it probably is.

$0.02

lk911 Amen to you .

lk911: I love your suggestion. So much easier. All I have to do is recommend to Dr_God that the Rankings Explanation for Who's Hot be changed to refer to the top 200 point totals earned from puzzles posted over the last 2 weeks, which will eliminate the misunderstandings about whether solving a puzzle from the archives counts towards your What's Hot ranking. We can then all continue to enjoy looking at essentially the same alphabetically ordered What's Hot list day after day, week after week, with an occasional minor variation when a player is momentarily distracted or when a new player arrives with multiple blank spaces at the beginning of her username. I know I will find it reassuring that I will always be able to find my username at the same place in the list for as long as I play IronSudoku. But wait... perhaps you are being humorous and don't mean a word of what you are saying? Or maybe the ether has something to do with it? I'm so confused....

done

As an off-and-on regular, who occasionally lurks on the chat, I find the rankings rather pointless. Who cares who's hot, or cold, or has completed all the puzzles....? I do Sudoku for relaxation, and a bit of a mental challenge, and try to keep up with current ones; I also sometimes delve into the archives in a somewhat compulsive way. To advertise who has spent hours doing old puzzles in recent days seems counter-productive to me. It would be a list of shame: 'Who's addicted' would be more appropriate.

Kukana, I don't understand. Doesn't the standard you have used for evaluating the proposed change to the Who's Hot rankings make the Elite, Experts (and maybe the Pros) lists also "lists of shame"? Also, if you find all the rankings "rather pointless" why pay any attention to them at all, and especially why bother to comment on a proposed change? You ask "who cares...?" I am asking myself the same thing.

go

done

You asked for input :) I don't particularly care about the rankings - I agree that the 'who's hot' ones are somewhat pointless as they are now, and don't remember the last time I looked at them. But if it switched to your suggestion, I'd be a lot less inclined to do any archive puzzles - how embarrassing to be the person wasting the most time on compulsively doing old Sudokus! From time to time I do look at the other ranking things, to see if I'm anywhere nearer moving to another category - I have a long way to go - and I suppose that's a kind of motivation to keep digging into the archives right now - but I don't see it as a competition. And yes, it's a bit embarrassing thinking of how many hours I must have spent (days, probably...) doing Sudokus!

Done

Kukana, thank you for sharing. It's interesting how differently we look at the issue of time management. I am using Sudoku as a way of retraining my brain, which until recently had been deteriorating quite quickly for at least a year as a result of undiagnosed serious sleep apnea. Whenever I do an easy puzzle, a question arises in my mind as to why I am not challenging my brain more by tackling an expert puzzle from the archives instead. So, for me, easy puzzles seem like a waste of time which I could be devoting to expert puzzles. If I understand your viewpoint correctly, I believe you see doing the daily puzzle as normal, standard behavior, while doing archived puzzles is deviant behavior which you would be embarrassed about if other players knew about it. Of course, we are both right because we are seeing the issue from completely different viewpoints. I expect there are many players who, like you, set the daily puzzle as their objective and would feel guilty about "wasting" any more time than that. Equally, I expect there are lots of other people who, for their own reasons, experience visits to the archives as time well spent.

I feel like I should be doing something when I have extra time and no pressing tasks on hand. I fill that time in by reading or doing some kind of puzzle, whether it's Sudoku or a crossword. Besides Iron Sudoku I have a Sudoku app that I use. I don't know if it's helping my brain or not but it makes me feel better so it doesn't really matter. I don't pay much attention to the rankings one way another, so it's not really a big deal to me whether they change them or keep them the way they are.

I do the puzzles cause they are fun.

I do the puzzles because they give me an attaboy when I'm finished. Need that. My wife only gives me "Why dint you...?" and "You never...."

I'll say one thing for you, TallMike -- you've generated a lot more chat in this space than we've seen in a long time!

I suppose you could say that there are three types of puzzlers here: the slow-and-steady types (turtles), the bingers and racers (rabbits), and the sporadic users (hummingbirds?). Which isn't to say that rabbits may not become turtles or hummingbirds after a while, or even vice versa.

And of course we all have different skill levels and reasons for doing the puzzles.

I belong in the slow-and-steady category. Most days, I do the daily puzzle plus one from the archive. Although logic tells me that if I continue at this pace I will eventually reach Elite status, I find it motivating to track my progress through the ranks. I rarely look at the "Who's Hot" list, but I do agree with TallMike that his definition for such a list would be more meaningful than the current one, and would probably have more appeal to the rabbits out there.

DING. Some early loners I couldn't find while sleepy. Other than that, not bad. 20.

janetb50: The really odd thing that almost everyone is missing is that the official definition (explanation) of the Who's Hot Rankings list is already worded to apply to all points earned during the last 2 weeks, without any distinction between points earned from current puzzles and those earned from archived puzzles. When I first signed up here a few months ago, I assumed that I could make it at least to the bottom of the What's Hot list if I practiced on expert puzzles in the archives. It took me a while to remember all the various Sudoku techniques I used to know several years ago, but eventually my performance improved to the point that I had earned more than enough points during a 2 week period to qualify for What's Hot. So why was my username still absent from the list? That was the beginning of some real life detective work. Pretty soon I noticed that the top 100+ What's Hot players had exactly the same score on any particular day, but the actual score number for those players varied from day to day in the 20 to 30 range. How could this be, when I had demonstrated that it was pretty easy to score far more than 30 points in 2 weeks? That's when the answer hit me: the way the What's Hot ranking is calculated does not follow the official explanation. Kind of amazing, don't you think?

there is only one type of puzzler here. The ones who like to do puzzles