Was finally inspired to join the forum after lurking for months. I built myself a spreadsheet to see if I've been improving on the metas. The answer is... unclear. My success rate has skyrocketed of late! But I also went back through Mike's comments to compile the history of successful solves, devised a formula to rate the difficulty of a meta, and plotted a running (weighted) average. Beginning around July, there is a clear shift in the difficulty, with many more meta-solvers each week. The rub, of course, is that I have no way of knowing if the community of meta-attempters is growing or shrinking.
Thought I'd share in case anyone is interested to see how the difficulty has been evolving this year. Here's my own performance: https://bit.ly/2YX8dsU
Happy to share the details of the sheet if anyone would like to track their own (hopefully not dis-)improvement.
WSJ difficulty over time
- BarbaraK
- Posts: 2652
- Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 2:37 pm
- Location: Virginia
Welcome! Great to see a kindred spirit here.
I also have a spreadsheet with results data. Although I haven't tried to quantify the difficulty week by week, I am confident that the pool of solvers has been growing over time. My benchmark for that is the weeks with the maximum number of submissions.
In 2016, that was 1457
In 2017, 1863
In 2018, 2161
In 2019, 2844
So an average increase of 25% each year.
I also have a spreadsheet with results data. Although I haven't tried to quantify the difficulty week by week, I am confident that the pool of solvers has been growing over time. My benchmark for that is the weeks with the maximum number of submissions.
In 2016, that was 1457
In 2017, 1863
In 2018, 2161
In 2019, 2844
So an average increase of 25% each year.