make my own problems

[d-man]

I have no idea how feasible this would be, but it would be cool if I could make my own problems from scratch. I go through my own games and make positions into problems similar to those on this site. I like the interface on here. Maybe even allow users to make them open for others to try.

(or does anyone know of software that can make quiz problems like this site?)

[richard]

Hi D-man,

That's a great idea. I've been wanting to allow users to create their own positions/move sequences so they can show alternative ideas for a problem in the problem comments (and on the forum).  Once that was done it would be fairly easy to allow users to enter their own problems.  Given that premium users can create their own problem sets based on subsets of the current set, having a problem set that only includes your created problems should also be fairly easy (thanks for the signup btw :-)  ).  I'll add this to the todo list and will look at it once the position editor for the comments is done.

Regards,
Richard.

[boybawang]

Agree,

It's vital for the community to make and share problems because I can foresee this site to evolve with Endgames and Strategy quizzes as well.  Now that's what I call perfect chess training site!

[richard]

boybawang: User generated content for strategy training is certainly something I'd like to do.  Computers are quite good  auto-generating reasonably high quality tactics and endgame training positions but it is very hard to create computer generated strategy material that would be anywhere near useful.

Regards,
Richard.

[boybawang]

Yes i know.  Strategy should be manually generated. But we don't need to create a new set because Chess literature has already plenty for us.  It's easy to find them arranged already by themes.

[richard]

boybawang:

I think one of the issues with strategy is that the point of a position is not always self evident by just  looking at a position.  With a tactic, it is usually obvious once you see the solution what the point of the position was. Strategy requires some kind of explanation to go with the position which is the part that needs original content (copyright issues prevent just taking the descriptions from existing literature).

Regards,
Richard.

[d-man]

I'm glad to sign up, the site is well worth it.

I had another thought I may as well not start a new thread, it is really interesting to see the wrong moves (and how often I make the same mistakes!) but it would also be nice to see a list of alternate winning moves after the problem is over.

[richard]

Hi d-man,

I have some grandiose plans for the move list.  I'd like to display the full move list of the tactic as well as the 2nd,3rd and 4th best move at each move in the tactic (with computer evaluation and the full line).  I'd also like to integrate the mistakes into the move list and eventually add computer evaluations of the mistakes (to reassure users that they are actually mistakes). Essentially this will probably end up looking like the standard view of a pgn file will multiple variations. I need to make some changes to the generator to keep more of the evaluation data around and other tasks have kept me from this. Having a decent move list will be a big improvement so this is a fairly high priority item , but will probably still be a few weeks away (not least of all because once I've made the changes to the generator I'll need to do another problem set verification run to gather the evaluation data which I haven't kept in a reusable format in the past).

Regards,
Richard.