A new puzzle - I need someone with brains lol!

[Jax2]

Hi again everyone!

This isn't a puzzle as much as an issue I need to solve and I have been wracking my brain and cannot come up with a solution.

On my site I have grid logic puzzles (which some of you may have seen on my other posts)...

I would, eventually, like to have competitions to allow people to try and solve the puzzle in the shortest time possible.

The way it works currently, if you are not a member of the site, you can still solve a puzzle and check your answers. If you log in, it will save your results (I.e., how long it took you to do which puzzle on what date). This is the problem!! If someone solves the puzzle, writes down the answer, logs in and just puts the answer in, they will have an abnormally short completion time. Likewise, if they do the puzzle on paper before attempting it on the site, again, could just put in the answer and have a short completion time.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out a way to ensure people are honest and complete the puzzle in a fair manner for the competitions, and even for normal leader boards when not in a competition.

Anyone able to wrap their brain around all that and come up with a viable solution? I can't seem to!

The closest I got to an answer was make it a special puzzle that can only be viewed once per person, so they have to solve it then and there, but that doesn't help with leaderboards heh

[HansV]

Unless you require people to log in before they can view a puzzle, I don't think there is a real solution to that problem. Hiding puzzles from visitors might reduce the popularity of your website though. So perhaps you shouldn't keep track of how long people take to solve a puzzle, just of who solved it.

[dasadler]

Just for inspiration, you might take a look at websudoku.com. They allow you to solve the puzzles with or without logging in. As far competition goes, if you log in, it will track your times and show hoe you compare to all other players and other players in your age group. There is not a winner but you can see how you compare to everyone else and if you cheat you're only fooling yourself. One one feature it has that I like is that once you complete a puzzle, it allows you to email a challenge to someone to solve the same puzzle.

[BobH]

I think you will have to require logging in to solve your quandary. If you require login, you could defer presenting a puzzle until the use logged in then you could present a random puzzle unseen by that user before and begin the clock when the puzzle is displayed. If the puzzle is not completed in that first session, present only the incomplete puzzle to that user each time he logs in unless he cries "uncle" admitting defeat. Then you never show that user that puzzle again but display a random puzzle to him on the next try.

[Leif]

I would have sample puzzles that don't count. If someone is interested (and honest) enough to want to take part, they would need to register and log in, and could then see the 'real' puzzles and have their scores logged.

I think you'll find that if someone really wants to cheat, they will find a way round most methods. They could just as easily log in with one set of credentials, find the answer, then log in again with another set with the answer to hand...

[BobH]

I would have sample puzzles that don't count. If someone is interested (and honest) enough to want to take part, they would need to register and log in, and could then see the 'real' puzzles and have their scores logged.

I think you'll find that if someone really wants to cheat, they will find a way round most methods. They could just as easily log in with one set of credentials, find the answer, then log in again with another set with the answer to hand...

Would not the use of IP addresses to identify users prevent - or at least deter - that sort of cheating? Or, perhaps, IP addresses are easier to spoof than I think.

[StuartR]

Many IP addresses are shared, for example if I connect from work there could be thousands of us using the same proxy server. Even if I connect from home then I have the same IP address as the rest of the family.

[BobH]

Many IP addresses are shared, for example if I connect from work there could be thousands of us using the same proxy server. Even if I connect from home then I have the same IP address as the rest of the family.

Thank you, Stuart!

I did a little online digging after making my post and learned a good deal about IP addresses. As always, you are correct . . . IP addresses would not work in the situation described.