Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

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Obergscheidle
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Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by Obergscheidle »

I am dreaming of a slight enhancement of the page https://projecteuler.net/progress
(which is BTW one of my favourite pages on my all-time favourite web site! Thanks to everyone involved for making this such a great project!)

I use this page a lot to try and decide which problem to tackle next. Sometimes I am in the mood to look for hard ones, sometimes I prefer to stay more easy going. The mouse-over functionality is very nice to see the title, numbers of solvers and the difficulty level.

But as programming is all about being lazy, I would like to see immediately where the easy and hard ones of my unsolved problems are hiding. So I imagine that perhaps for the hardest third (of the unsolved problems) the number could be shown in red, for the easiest they would be shown in green. The granularity may be subject to variation (using quintiles, deciles,...) but I am generally not in favour of visual overload, so one would have to find a good compromise or even personalise the number of levels.

If anyone who has access to the source code likes the idea, I would also volunteer to implement a prototype, if you give me the existing code and some time. But first I need to know whether anyone besides me would like to see such a feature.
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euler
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Re: Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by euler »

That's an interesting suggestion. I'll add it to the wish list.
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TripleM
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Re: Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by TripleM »

Obergscheidle wrote: Fri Jun 30, 2017 7:26 pm I use this page a lot to try and decide which problem to tackle next. Sometimes I am in the mood to look for hard ones, sometimes I prefer to stay more easy going. The mouse-over functionality is very nice to see the title, numbers of solvers and the difficulty level.

But as programming is all about being lazy, I would like to see immediately where the easy and hard ones of my unsolved problems are hiding.
Are you aware you can filter https://projecteuler.net/archives by unsolved problems, then sort by difficulty? You can see the exact same information (title, solvers, difficulty) without even a mouseover required, and can immediately choose a problem from the start, end, or middle of the scale.
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Obergscheidle
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Re: Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by Obergscheidle »

TripleM wrote: Mon Jul 03, 2017 6:38 am ...
Are you aware you can filter https://projecteuler.net/archives by unsolved problems, then sort by difficulty? You can see the exact same information (title, solvers, difficulty) without even a mouseover required, and can immediately choose a problem from the start, end, or middle of the scale.
First of all, thanks for the hint and sorry for answering only many years later. Yes, I was aware of these features, but still was sometimes missing the "heat map" display concerning my unsolved problems. I like colorful visualizations, and I assumed that seeing a cluster of unsolved hard problems (or easy ones, depending on the mood of the day) would motivate me to have a closer look at them.
Recently it occurred to me that I can actually have this missing feature via a slightly contrived workaround: I temporarily befriend one of the gurus who has solved almost all the problems and who happens to have disclosed a friend key that still works, then I view their progress page, and: Tadaa...
PE-heatmap.png
I see exactly the heat map of all the problems I was looking for, where the distinction between green and black number shows me whether I have solved it. So the only remaining issue is that this workaround is a bit cumbersome, and if many members would go this way, the friend lists abused in this way would soon fill up and stop being useful. So I still think it would be nice to have a native support for this (maybe an extra button that switches between different types of display), and I assume it would be fairly easy to implement, as all the required functionality already exists in the platform.
Anyhow, thanks for reading that far and let me close by heartfully thanking all of you who make PE such a great platform! It is a real marvel!
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euler
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Re: Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by euler »

I'm very busy at the moment completing other back-end changes to the main website and life in general, but I'll certainly look into implementing this idea when I get the time.
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Obergscheidle
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Re: Suggestion: Color-coding on the progress page

Post by Obergscheidle »

Thanks a lot for the reaction and don't worry, this is not at all urgent, it would just be cool to have at some time.
I am already happy to have this picture from my last post, which will not dramatically change in the near future, so I mainly wanted to share it here. I find it quite interesting to see the distribution of the really hard problems and where they accumulate, and my admiration for those who received the D for Dedication award is now even bigger than before 8-)

Thanks again for everything you and your co-workers achieved! You are making the world a better place, at least for me ;-)
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