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#puzzle-difficulty
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Wang et al.: Gauging Tetris Block Puzzle Difficulty by How Fast a Strong AI Learns — Fukai Reads
An arXiv preprint from a National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and Academia Sinica group that measures the difficulty of the popular mobile game Tetris Block Puzzle. It rates rule variants by how fast and high a strong AI (Stochastic Gumbel AlphaZero) can learn to play, finding that more holding/preview blocks make the game easier while adding block shapes makes it harder (the T-pentomino most of all).
"Difficulty is structural" — a study that exactly decomposes the difficulty of arithmetic puzzles (4OPS, arXiv / accepted at AIED 2026, March 2026)
One article today. Yunus E. Zeytuncu's paper "4OPS: Structural Difficulty Modeling in Integer Arithmetic Puzzles" (University of Michigan-Dearborn) studies the Countdown / Des chiffres et des lettres style numbers puzzle, where you combine given integers with the four operations to reach a target. Using an exact dynamic-programming solver over 3.4 million instances, the author shows that difficulty is not explained by surface features (the size of the numbers or the target) but is fully determined by the number of inputs a minimal solution must use — a 'minimal sufficient statistic' for difficulty. I read it not as player criticism but as a piece that speaks directly to how designers can define and sequence puzzle difficulty. The preprint is from March 2026 and is accepted at AIED 2026.
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