Visual Display of a Problem Session

Today, I will brainstorm about how to graphically display a session of tactical problem solving.

Last night, I came up with the following format and I unabashedly admit I am quite fond of it:

6p-1f-45p-1f-30p-1f-16p

A beautiful (in my humble opinion) aspect of this representation is that any tactician will immediately understand what it represents: alternating spans of successes and failures. Indeed, a computer could easily be programmed to parse the above information and and spew forth a variety of statistics about it. In fact, some would argue that the above actually represents a computer program because of its unambiguous grammar and semantics.

Incidentally, the above represents my efforts tonight at the CTS (97% @ 1428±92, 1403 final). I also must dutifully acknowledge that the "p/f" notation for tactical problem solving is borrowed from dktransform's method of representing his own success statistics on the CTS Message Board.

Though I really like this representation for both practical and narcissistic reasons, it omits some critical information. Most importantly, it groups problems, so that each looses its individual contribution to the session. Moreover, for each problem, it fails to represent (1) how long the problem took, (2) what the rating of the problem was, and (3) how the tactician's performance on the problem affected the tactician's rating.

At first glance, these three components of a problem appear too high in dimensionality to be represented on a two dimensional medium like a computer screen or a sheet of paper. But, upon deeper consideration, the information in (1) and (2) is convoluted into the information in (3), so we can conveniently move back to a lower dimensional space without sacrificing too much information to practical considerations.

So here is my proposal:

• A unit of time is 10 seconds, which is roughly the maximum time to solve a problem on the CTS and still be awarded points.
  
• Problems that are fails are bright red bars of unit width (say 3 pixles).
• Passes are darkish blue bars (we are color-blind friendly here).
• The time the tactician took to solve the problem is proportional (or perhaps logarithmically proportional) to its width.
• The contribution of a problem to a tactician's score is the height of the bar above (in the case of a pass) or below (in the case of a fail) a reference line.

Unfortunately, I have yet to implement this representation as I am still in the brainstorming phase. But, barring some compelling comments by fellow tacticians, I think I have settled and will probably work towards it in the very near future.

Now, for the

Chess Tactics Server Problem of the Day

p56972

Black to Move

Here's the solution and why I like it (start selecting text following the colon): 1...Rxb5. Now, 2.Qxb5?? results in a famous mate in five: 2...Qd4+ 3.Kh1 (not 3.Kf1 because of Qf2++) 3...Nf2+ 4.Kg1 Nh3+ 5.Kh1 Qg1+! 6.Rxg1 Nf2++. Of course if 2.cxb5? then 2...Bd4+ forks Q and K.