Most of the puzzles are easily solvable by excluding the chars present in the right side of screen.

[KOLANICH]

[phikal]

What level are you on? It get's harder later on, but if you think that it stays the same, I could change the score algorithm to maybe look at the past strategies and give you less points if you used it too often, leading to the level lowering itself.

[KOLANICH]

I mean that now the optimal strategy in most cases is such:
1 create a regex [^]+
2 enumerate words
3 enumerate chars in each word, put them into list, tag each char with the word where it is present
4 check wheither the char is present in words from the left side, if it is exclude it from the list
5 sort chars by the count of words they are present in
6 take the minimal subset of chars present in all words from the right side
7 put them into regex before the last square bracket
For example if we have
Jfnd jemx
,rpcn djnr
Ufkz hxne
the winning regex will be [^je]+

[KOLANICH]

There is an easy way to distract this strategy: make sure that all the chars from the right are present in the left.

[phikal]

I wouldn't want to totally eliminate the strategy, but giving the player less chances to use it seems good enough. This could be done by having less characters on the right side than on the right. Adding to that the history-based points (maybe even negative point), it could be work out well.

[KOLANICH]

The fact is that it is best, it seems that it gives the shortest regex. So I think that since some difficulcy (not far from the beginning, maybe after 5 puzzles) the probability that the puzzle is solvable using this strategy should be negligible to make user use another one. Also the difficulcy raises too slowly, the rate should be increased not to make the game boring.

[phikal]

I still don't really want to exclude a possibility totally, but I agree that future versions should make it harder to use. Excluding it would oppose the idea I had for the game, declaring a few functions and algorithms that describe the whole game. You see, it's more of a proof of concept, than an entertainment spectacle.

Regarding the difficulty, the current level generation can be found here:

diff = (int) Math.round(1.2*Math.sqrt((prefs.getInt(SCORE, 0) + score * 1.1 + 1) / (game + 1)));

I am still optimizing the function to not grow too slowly. I may also have to modify the points calculation too:

 return Math.round(((max - len)/2+1) * (1 / ((Math.abs(right - wrong) + 1)) + 3 * calcVal(regex)));

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Hello,

I really like the idea of the game but I ran in the same trouble then KOLANICH (played only until level 9). It's not that hard to solve the puzzles.

And I would like to have more "real life" problems, like matching a certain URL and another one not (or maybe even subsetting, backward references, etc.) or matching a certain words in a sentence and so on. I know this is hard to randomize or auto generate but would make the game much more interesting.

However, nice idea! ;-)

[phikal]

@bastorran after thinking about it for a bit, I realized what I intended when writijg the code (was a while between finishing and publishing), when you use @KOLANICH's solution that always works, you'll rarely 100 points per round, usually about 80, which just isn't enough to level up past level 9. To get any further you will need to use complex regular expressions, with as many regular expression characters as possible. It's not ideal, but since the game was more of a proof of concept than anything else, it worked fine. But as mentioned, the score calculations should be improved in general. I am just using random characters (with increasing range and length through the game), because I realized that it is particularly hard to generate dictionary words without internet connection (at least in java as far as I know), not to speak of URLs or anything of that kind. I don't want to add (IMO) unnecessary permissions to a game intended to not waste space WSE. The random characters do seem to do the job (most of the time), although currently there is no connection between any of the words, so that could also be improved to make it more "real word".

[KOLANICH]

Hmm, look at http://regexcrossword.com and https://regex.alf.nu/

[phikal]

First of all I appologize for not fixing the issues earlier - I didn't have access to a computer with all the tool necessary, so I had to wait until I got home from my holidays.

Regarding the cheats like [^xzy]* or the qwe|rty|yui cheat mentioned in #4: after testing it I have realized that you can't actually level up past lvl 6-8 (approx.). To go beyond these levels you have to use more complex regular expressions to get at least +100 points (my high score was +225, maybe that should be in statistics too). I'm not saying that the specific numbers from the calculation should not be changed, but in itself it creates the game I intend it to be. The sqrt method lets the game go on forever while getting harder all the time. If you can't (or don't want to) solve a puzzle, you can use the hacks from above - but with the risk of maybe losing a level (can happen, especially after lvl. 11). All in all it seems fine for now - especially with the pop up implemented from #9. From my point of view I believe the issue can be closed, and I hope nobody had too much of a problem with it.

and to @KOLANICH's last message: http://regexcrossword.com is completely the opposite, while https://regex.alf.nu/ seems to have a set number of rounds. Both games are static and finite, while ReGeX is dynamic and infinite. regex.alf (f.e.) has the benefit of never having bad rounds, while ReGeX may have good or bad rounds by chance. I don't want my game to just be a clone, it it's not intended to be.