Rules for puzzles

The puzzles are often likely to be "solved" by guess rather than by analysis. Imagine a puzzle with only two legal moves in the starting position. Any player will guess it with 50% probability, but to see the winning variant may be beyond the abilities of a GM. Consequently at such puzzles the GM's rating will be same as the rating of a beginner.

The cause of that is the rule that in every position there must be only one winning move. Can this rule be dismissed? Let the player proceed further. The question arises, at which point to stop. That could be when the number of winning moves in the achieved position is enough large (e.g. 4 or more), which likely indicates that the position is "generally won" rather than a continued puzzle. Possibly there exist other criteria, I just suggest to think in that direction. The single winning move rule was imposed in the pre-computer era, now we have more opportunities.

@SIM62 said in #1:
> Imagine a puzzle with only two legal moves in the starting position. Any player will guess it with 50% probability, but to see the winning variant may be beyond the abilities of a GM. Consequently at such puzzles the GM's rating will be same as the rating of a beginner.
>

Which is not a problem, because the puzzle's rating will be very low then.

> The cause of that is the rule that in every position there must be only one winning move. Can this rule be dismissed? Let the player proceed further. The question arises, at which point to stop. That could be when the number of winning moves in the achieved position is enough large (e.g. 4 or more), which likely indicates that the position is "generally won" rather than a continued puzzle. Possibly there exist other criteria, I just suggest to think in that direction. The single winning move rule was imposed in the pre-computer era, now we have more opportunities.

Or simply play a normal game instead of solving puzzles?

@sheckley666 said in #2:
> Which is not a problem, because the puzzle's rating will be very low then.
That was an extreme example. In reality, it makes me upset when I see that a 2700 puzzle could be guessed in two moves, but its real difficulty is in another league. When I am lucky it does not make me happy, too.
@sheckley666 said in #2:
> Or simply play a normal game instead of solving puzzles?
That is another thing. The puzzles do exist for something, right?

@SIM62 said in #3:
> In reality, it makes me upset when I see that a 2700 puzzle could be guessed in two moves, but its real difficulty is in another league.
I doubt that a puzzle that would be so easy to guess would have a rating of 2700.

@mkubecek said in #4:
> I doubt that a puzzle that would be so easy to guess would have a rating of 2700.
See e.g. #z4fOZ (current rating 2674). Two checks qualify for the solution. Since the puzzle has a rating of 2674 they admittedly are not THAT easy to guess but they are obvious and rather tempting. To compare, try to find what should happen next.

@SIM62 said in #5:
> admittedly are not THAT easy to guess but they are obvious and rather tempting
Contradictory, isn't it?

@SIM62 puzzles teach us to find the best move so making more than 1 solution means we not searching for the best anymore

@sheckley666 said in #6:
> Contradictory, isn't it?
No. We have what we have. But if the first moves were less tempting (that is, guessable) the rating of the puzzle imo would be much higher. And that rating would correspond to the real difficulty of the analytical solution.

@for_cryingout_loud said in #7:
> puzzles teach us to find the best move so making more than 1 solution means we not searching for the best anymore
Not quite so. From the start the winning moves will remain single, that is, best. But let the player show that he has really solved the puzzle, rather than luckily guessed first moves. Sure, after making right first moves by guess it is easier to find a right continuation than it was in the starting position. But it still may be too difficult (and for the kind of puzzles in question it is really difficult), and the guesser will be likely to fail eventually.

Your first example is a contrived example of an unsolvable puzzle.

The rating of the puzzles directly reflects people succeeding and failing at it. If there would be several "correct" moves, this would not change anything in that regard. At the end, you either solved it or you didn't.

At the moment, the puzzle stops when there is more than one good move available. In general I agree that one could get a more useful set of puzzles if it wasn't limited to a single best move in each step, which seems to be limiting, and only justified by convention. (The soft-fails at chessable are a very mild version of allowing alternate solutions.)