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#1: Adam Nielson (monkeyboy) on Jan 11, 2009 [SPOILER]

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well, for once the title didn't give it away...I have no idea what it is either.

*phew* I thought it was just my poor brain...glad I wasn't the only one who didn't get it!

I'll need someone to explain this one to me, unless its the way I feel right now ...

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This puzzle is actually supposed to be something (the debate over what that is can continue endlessly), and has a creative title, yet it gets a solid "1" on quality. Then the puzzle called "Random Gibberish" that really is nothing at all, gets over a 1 on quality??? Hmmm. Once again it shows the fallacy of the rating system. :-)

Yep, difficult to rate some puzzles. I give more excellents than poors. I think its the disappointment. Shay has made some better than average puzzles.

The rating isn't only on image quality. It's also on how much fun it is to solve. Some bad pictures are interesting to solve. So aren't.

Unfortunately, Jan, you are right. I wish there was a 3rd category to rate on... "funness."

I really think that makes perfect sense to include in "quality". I think "quality" is best thought of as "Suppose you had a friend who was looking for a puzzle of this size, number of colors and level of difficulty. How much would you recommend this one to him or her?"

That's what the ratings get used for, after all. People don't need your ratings to choose a puzzle of a size and number of colors that they like. They've already got a separate difficulty rating. So "quality" should tell how good the puzzle is, given all that. And a puzzle can be good in many different ways - good picture, fun to solve, witty title, etc. It's kind of overkill to rate all those things separately. Instead we should just rate the overall experience.

So a 5x5 puzzle and a 60x60 puzzle might both get five star ratings, but probably for different reasons. And that's fine.

I agree. The only thing is... how many 5x5 puzzles have you ever seen rated above a 2? :-)

I've given many small puzzles 5's. Partly because I know how hard it is to make really good ones, and partly to compensate for people who undervalue them.

But yeah, I had to tweak the "best puzzles" things to have a lower threshold for easy puzzles. Maybe it's because more people solve small/easy puzzles, so the pool of raters is a less select crowd.

"Small puzzles," certainly, can be given 5's on quality... but not 5x5 puzzles.

There are 298,023,223,876,953,125 possible 5x5 paint-by-number puzzles. Surely one of them must be brilliant.

Surely there MIGHT be, but alas, there isn't one. Even a "4" rating is very high for such a small puzzle. Please feel free to look through all the ones that have been done, or please create one yourself,that is honestly worthy of a "5," and I will say no more.

I don't understand this one.

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Tension makes me think of springs but I don't see springs.

Adam, I looked for puzzles of any size with a quality level of 5. There's only one and its new with only one rater.

Exactly. I have done that as well. Then I narrowed the list down to puzzles of 4 and 3/4 to 5, and found a few of mine. Then, I lowered it down to 4 and 1/2 to 5, and found several more.

The point is, even extremely good larger puzzles, over time, will continually get rated lower and lower as more people solve and rate them. So especially small puzzles will NEVER get overall high-ish ratings (regardless of the fact 1 or 2 people might actually rate them high).

Puzzles with high ratings tend to get more people to play them, which tends to lower their ratings.

I bet this happens with netFlix too. A new obscure movie gets watched by people who think it looks like the kind of thing they would like. They like it, and rate it high. Then people start renting it because it is rated high, even though it isn't especially the kind of thing they like. Many of them aren't impressed, and rate it lower.

Hmmm...why would you want to share this puzzle with anyone? After one does it...one has a satisfactory experience? No. Don't do this. You are better than this. My opinion.

It seems like a LOT of people rate these puzzles on the quality of the image. But that's definitely not how I rate. Since quality is a subjective category, it's absolutely possible to rate a 5x5 with a 5 for quality. Some people will never rate a puzzle that small very high (maybe they don't feel the image is good or they don't like easy puzzles), but others never rate a very large puzzle high because they are less impressed with the ability to get a nice image into a 99x99 grid. And personally, my idea of what rates a 5 probably changes from day to day depending on my mood. Overall, it probably mostly averages out. If a puzzle is rated 1.5, it's probably a good one to avoid.

This puzzle, on the other hand, is getting a low rating from me. I don't know what it is, and it isn't particularly interesting to solve.

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Makes sense to me, Martial. Thanks for the insight!

ditto #26. thanks Martial

now Jan, we both know several quadrillion of those possibilities don't have a unique solution and hundreds of trillions of them are trivial solves.

I wish Adam were still around to argue with about this. I've made a few 5x5 puzzle that I would argue were worth 5 for quality. There was a minimalist portrait that (if I do say so myself) was excellent and there was an image of a golf ball on a tee that totally popped at the end. Their overall rating isn't 5 for the reasons Jan state but they are definitely worthy. I'll go find the numbers and post them.

13938, 14053, and also check out 13604

27687 is another very underrated 5x5. I think people must use the quality rating as another difficulty rating. Yes they are easy, they are only twenty five pixels but some of them are so cute. They have real images that pop into existence on the last pixel. What more can you ask for?

I agree 100%, Brian.

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What ever happened to Adam? Does anybody know? Just curious!

I have no idea. I always thought he would pop up with yet another anonymous id to stir things up, but no one with his personality has surfaced since bugaboo. He certainly sparked some interesting conversations.

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Well that's alarming: I googled Adam's name and found an obituary. I have no idea if it's him -- I didn't know him well enough to know if the details match up. But this person passed away the day after Adam last logged on here, and two days after Bugaboo's last login here, so from the timing it seems possible:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/rgj/obituary.aspx?n=adam-nielson-huckaby&pid=164798462

Wow. That is a shocking discovery. Only 30 years old. I wonder what happened.

Adam described himself several times as a Physician's Assistant. (As here: https://webpbn.com/read.cgi?type=P&id=2493&what=all&start=1 )
That doesn't really fit with the schooling of A.N. Huckaby in the obituary. But then, not everyone on the internet is who they say they are.

I do too. The obituary and people's comments on the obituary's comments page all carefully don't say.

Jan was always trying to figure Adam out. Jan thought that Adam was probably young. Though Adam's first puzzle was posted in 2008, which would have made him 25 at the time, which is about ten years older than what Jan had guessed.

Of course, this Adam might not be the same person. But from the timing I wonder.

(Joe's comment was posted while I was typing. I was replying to Teresa.)

As I recall at the time, there were quite a few people who "left" webpbn at the same time. How many persona had Adam taken on? Does anyone know?

I never believed he was a medical professional. More than likely he was the graphic artist, judging by the quality of his puzzles. I think he was immature rather than young. He seemed to thrive on the drama here, and thought it was really out of character for him to leave without a trace like that. RIP monkeyboy.

And whatever happened to Jane Doe? I couldn't figure out whether that was his girlfriend/wife, or merely a female persona of Adam's.

I think they shared an IP address, if I remember correctly. Could be his sister or a co-worker, if he was using a computer at work. She had a baby boy, and his girlfriend had a baby girl.

If you're talking about telly, she last logged on in Nov 2018. There are three other Jane Does, two of which have logged in after 2013, and one whose last login was Oct 2012.
Of them all, telly is the only one who solved more than two puzzles.

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I never read this till today! Monkeyboy mystery lives on.

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