Chatty · Pattern difficulty taxonomy
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2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z
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Easy / Medium / Hard / Adversarial definitions and pattern anatomy. # 30.
30. Our difficulty taxonomy
Every practice question I generate will get classified.
🟢 Easy — Recognition
You know exactly which tool to use.
Example:
Find the slope through and .
🟡 Medium — Transformation
You must recognize and transform the problem.
Example:
A line is perpendicular to another line and passes through a given point. Find its equation.
🔴 Hard — Composition
Multiple concepts interact.
Example:
A probability problem requires counting → conditional probability → Bayes.
Or:
A Python question requires nested iteration → dictionary accumulation → condition filtering.
⚫ Adversarial
The mathematics/programming itself isn't necessarily difficult.
The difficulty comes from:
- unusual wording
- misleading representation
- hidden constraint
- boundary case
- distractor information
- inverse reasoning
- subtle Python semantics
These are the questions I particularly want to train you on for Quiz 2.
31. Every pattern will eventually have this anatomy
For example, take Bayes' theorem.
Pattern
Given evidence, infer the probability of the underlying cause.
Step 1 — Identify
What is the hypothesis?
What is the evidence?
Step 2 — Translate
Step 3 — Determine requested direction
Are they asking:
or
?
Step 4 — Recognize inversion
If the latter, Bayes is likely relevant.
Step 5 — Expand denominator
Step 6 — Substitute
Step 7 — Sanity check
Probability must lie in:
Step 8 — Generalize
Any problem involving:
prior → mechanism → observed evidence → posterior
belongs to the same family.
That is what I mean by "pattern" in this prep system.