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#1: Joe (infrapinklizzard) on Dec 24, 2010 [HINT]

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I know this is definitely solvable with only logic, but 16,777,215 raters seem to disagree with me.

http://postimage.org/image/x1494qsk/

x_x

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fun solve (without the hint needed like mendy)

Ditto Bugaboo!

I enjoyed it as well but I needed the hint. Nice one

maybe delete this puzzle and create it again under a new puzzle number so the number of raters is actually accurate?

Thanks, everyone!

bugaboo - that seems a bit extreme. The rating actually went up and the question mark disappeared, so that number can't be being used in the average calculations.

I don't get why the difficulty rating is 1 tho... ?_?

once again
thats because something is messed up with the ratings

Found to be logically solvable by Gator.

I found this easy to solve with intuition. . .
one lucky guess or intuitive move and the rest fell into place.
I like the image because it isn't the usual way this theme is depicted.

i'm a little late solving this but very fun - i needed the hint.

Great puzzle, great solving. Thanks.

Thanks for the compliments!

This is shown as a "beginner puzzle. It is a little harder than that. Nice puzzle.

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As usual a very enjoyable solve! Thanks!

Hm. This is definitely not a beginner puzzle. I have no idea why the database says that 16 million people rated it that way, but clearly something weird happened to it many years ago. Should I blank out the ratings for this puzzle and let future solvers set a new rating for it? I think that would make sense.

I find it interesting that the number of raters has not changed over the years. And yet the quality rating *has* changed.

Is there something special about the number 16,777,215? Is it displaying garbage that is not actually stored in the db?

Since the quality rating has increased, it must somehow be keeping track of how many people have rated it for quality, even if the total count is borked. (I assume the original error somehow increased the count of the "difficulty" rating by an anomalous amount when someone [our old 1-star troll] made a rating of 1)

This might be worth keeping around for that future time when you have the leisure to poke at it to find the bug that caused it. You know, that mythical future time when things get easier and we all have more spare time

The other various ratings for this puzzle (quality, logical solvability, etc.) don't have anything weird about them that I've noticed, only the difficulty rating and the number of people who have entered a difficulty rating. These two numbers are each stored as an "unsigned mediumint" in the database. The maximum value an unsigned mediumint can have is 16,777,215. My theory is that when the puzzle was new, someone rated it and then deleted their rating, and the software for whatever reason tried to set those totals to -1 instead of to zero. An "unsigned integer" can't be negative, because it is unsigned, so it wraps around, and -1 is the same as 16,777,215. Later, when other people rated it, the database software realized that each number was already at its maximum and left it there.

Adding to the complexity, there are actually two difficulty rating systems in webpbn, an old one and the current one. The part with the giant numbers is this puzzle's old-style rating. When the website computes a difficulty rating for a puzzle that has old-style and new-style entries, it combines the old and new ratings to get a difficulty score. The first comment about a giant number of raters is from 2010. So I think whatever software had the bug must have been a part of the old ratings system that isn't being used anymore. So I think a good solution here would be to blank out this puzzle's old-system difficulty ratings and let only the new-system difficulty ratings determine its difficulty score.

I was curious how many puzzles are affected by this problem, so I looked it up in the database. There are three: this puzzle, puzzle 19822: https://webpbn.com/19822 , and puzzle 20584: https://webpbn.com/20584 . For whatever that's worth.

Difficulty ratings did not work the way I thought they did, but people's ratings are stored in the database, and I was able to recompute the difficulty score for this puzzle and fix it.

Thanks for fixing the difficulty rating. After the fix, the puzzle popped up in my search, and I greatly enjoyed it.

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