Hey there LiChess Community,
I have two suggestions for updates in the Training section.
First I would like to have a function which allows me to mark a problem so I can redo the marked problems later and create my own set of problems which suit me because I had difficulties with them or they were somehow interesting to me.
Second I suggest we implement a voting system based on themes of the puzzle, where after each solved problem the user can vote which type of problem this was e.g. Smothered Mate.
It should be possible to tag a puzzle with multiple themes.
Furthermore when this system is established and most of the puzzles are tagged the possibility to command the trainer to only show puzzles with a certain tag would also be nice and helpful to the training experience.
What are your thoughts on this ?
Sincerely,
Clemens
Tagging puzzles and allowing users to pick only a specific category would make ratings largely irrelevant and hard to adjust based on performance, because "the expected action" is supposed to be figured out, while if it's given directly, the value in the performance is rendered mostly irrelevant.
Unihedron is correct in that tagging puzzles would defeat the purpose. However, I think if the tag were only relevant to puzzles already completed in which you could no longer gain or lose rating from, this would be a helpful way to return to a theme. That's what training is about...repetition. If I want to mark a set of puzzles under the theme "deliver mate" and return to practice over and over the mating puzzles I've already completed, that would be an extremely useful training feature. As it stands now, there isn't even a good way to just go back over puzzles I've already completed, let alone practicing said completed puzzles around a theme. Having a feature to review puzzles and have the review filtered by a tag would be the ultimate improvement to the already robust (while sometimes flawed) puzzle system.
2,
I think PapstClemens meant that he has the ability to mark the puzzle after he had already tried it. Something that all marked puzzles by a user will become a personal puzzle collections.
The system would provide the user the ability to train on those personal puzzle collections. The lichess puzzle rating is not updated with these personal puzzle training.
CapaAlek sums it up pretty nicely.
All possibilities to train which are not the current trainer should not be rated or have a separate rating.
I can imagine to have several rating for different tags even thou I think this would have to be limited by LiChess on which tags it is possible to have a separate rating.
While thinking about this I also realize this seems very complex and I don't expect it to happen just wanted to share this idea :).
While reading your comments another idea came to mind.
A statistic on how good one behaves on different puzzle themes in rated training would come handy to become vigilant of ones weaknesses.
The puzzles could have the categories but you would not get rated for those ones. That would allow the tagging of puzzles without changing rating.
I think that if puzzles were tagged with things like
Beginner / mating
Intermediate / mating
Advanced / mating
Beginner / Material advantage (it could even be more specific than this)
Beginner / Pins / Skewer / Fork / Positional Adv or even for the end game puzzles / Queening and Precise
and so on
I still agree with Uni that tagging is a bad idea if the puzzles are able to be filtered or tags viewed while doing the rated training. However, I really do like the idea of having a "review completed puzzles" option with hidden tags that can be filtered, along with sorting them by highest user confidence (e.g. only review puzzles that have at least 100 up votes) and so forth. Hopefully this summer when the devs get really excited to have some extra time to work on projects this is something someone will tackle, as I think a lot of people want a completed puzzle review option, especially one that lets us focus on certain types.
Free tagging is not constructive. I mean, just look at the Q&A section.
Deciding on the default list of tags to use isn't constructive either. This is because users may miss some, and it's not worth the effort to create a tag synonym or tag tree system. Then there may be times when new tags are needed and somehow old puzzles that could use the tags don't get the attention it deserves, and because editing details for puzzles are a nuisance only the interested users would bother voting. In the end the feature would either be massively underused and lack sustainability.
How about this: Someone or a group of activists go to each puzzle manually from 1 onwards and build a list (hopefully in plaintext and parseable so we can just script it in and be done with it) of tags for each and every puzzle. Then send it to lichess.contact@gmail.com so we can see if it's useful and start from there. However, a voting mechanism would be very, very bad.
Uni, that's a great idea. How many puzzles are there? I'd consider working on such a project (at worst it forces me to actually do more puzzles, which I've been meaning to do anyway).
Could you message me what sort of format this would ideally be? (example: 1: mate, discovered check, double check; 2: material gain, check fork, temporary sacrifice) Basically, just how it should be formatted for parsing; also we should probably decide on what the expected tags would be so they're consistent.
(And yes, even if I can't solve a 2000+ rated puzzle, when viewing the solution I'm fairly confident I can understand all the nuances of the tactic; I watch a lot of high rated games and commentary and such and understand all the terminology and themes even though I can't always produce them over the board. hahah)
