Comparing Levels vs. Flow Free

To compare my levels to Flow Free (Standard levels only), I designed and executed the following study:

I took 180 levels from Flow Free – 30 levels each of 6 different board sizes, and then found 30 levels of the same board sizes from Connect Unlimited 2. These levels were randomly chosen, but in a way that the distribution of dots/board size matched the levels from Flow Free.

The levels from Flow Free came from 3 different level packs:

The 30 8×8 and 9×9 levels from the first pack in Flow Free – the Regular Pack.
The 30 10×10 and 11×11 levels from the Jumbo Pack.
The 30 14×11 and 15×12 levels from the Jumbo Rectangle Pack.

To use these levels for the study, they were translated into levels for my game – a semi-automated process that involved taking screenshots of each level (I had to purchase the Jumbo Rectangle Pack to do this). Fortunately, this work was done about a year ago, otherwise I would have undoubtedly remembered some of the levels. For the record, I never distributed any of the levels from Flow Free in my games, and only did this because I wanted to compare them to my own levels.

In total I had 360 levels – 180 from Flow Free, and 180 levels with the same board sizes and corresponding dot counts from Connect Unlimited 2. I put these levels into a level pack (randomly ordered within each set of 60 levels for each board size) in a test version of Connect the Dots: Portals, which has a “rate the level” feature:

And for proof that at least one of the levels is from Flow Free:

Excuse the inconsistent cell shading in my version, it is because I am a bad programmer.

I played all 360 levels, and rated each level that I thought was from Flow a 1, and each level that I thought was from Connect Unlimited 2 a 2.

I then checked my guesses against the truth, and tallied up the results shown in this table:

Size	Correct	Pct
8×8	36	60%
9×9	35	58.3%
10×10	33	55%
11×11	26	43.3%
14×11	30	50%
15×12	29	48.3%
Total	189	52.5%

In total, I guessed correctly for 189 out of 360 levels – just a bit better than 50%. I was also much better with the smaller board sizes – 57.8% for the first 3 versus 47.2% for the last 3 (this surprised me, as I expected to get better, not worse, with increasing board sizes).

For the most part – my guesses were basically coin flips, however there were a few levels that I felt were probably from Flow Free because I didn’t think similarity filtering would like them. These were mostly in the 8×8 and 9×9 levels, and might explain my relative success for those board sizes. There were also a handful of levels that I thought were from Connect Unlimited 2 because of a specific pattern that I know to be more common in my levels than Flow Free’s. Despite this additional info, a monkey throwing darts would have a better than 15% chance of picking more correct answers than I did.

Below are images for all 360 levels. Each image has four levels – and two of the quadrants are always from Flow Free, while the other 2 are always from Connect Unlimited 2. The answer to this is below.