I am LaskoVortex of the Chess Tactics Server, and this is my chess blog. CTS must be the original tactics server, and today, in an effort to get a quick blog entry, I'm going to rip some text I wrote right from the Message Board (with some minor edits). This was a response to waaek, a fellow Tactician, who wondered what history information the CTS keeps. So, I replied with some prose that goes a little like this:
I think CTS keeps a stat for number right and total problems. And that's all they need to calculate your accuracy. It'd be nice if we got the entire history. This site has served less than 20M problems. So, if each problem took up 4 bytes for the time stamp, 3 bytes for how long the problem took with 1/10th second precision (with a max time of 24.2726 days per problem and a special value if it was a fail, like 0), 3 bytes for the problem number (assuming they will never have more than 16.77 million problems to choose from), and 8 bytes for the tactician ID (assuming no real limit on the number of tacticians who can sign up), and 8 bytes total for both the problem rating and the tactician rating when they did the problem, and another 2 bytes for how their rating changed, then the total bytes per problem would be 4+3+3+8+8+2=28 bytes. So 28*20M = 560M bytes. This means they could have stored every problem every tactician has done on this site on a $20.00 USB memory stick with plenty of space left over.
You might think that I must have already considered the issue of saving every problem for every user of CTS and what the space requirements for that would be--well, you would be correct. More on that in the future--it will become important.
For now, I leave you with the Chess Vortex motto (stolen from Jason D. Enochs and paraphrased a tiny bit):
If you aren't sick of working chess problems, then you haven't been applying yourself.
1 comment:
they used to say on Wall Street, when your manager reported (smiles) that you had upset some prospective client with an overzealous pitch:
"if you arent pissing some people off on occassion, you aren't trying hard enough"
as my super astute people person branch manager used to say (he was one of those super salesman master communicators who looked THROUGH you),
who ultimately became district manager (only to develop a rare male breast cancer--read very obesse).
warmest, dk
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