Board for everybody who is interested in BrainKing itself, its structure, features and future.
If you experience connection or speed problems with BrainKing, please visit Host Tracker and check "BrainKing.com" accessibility from various sites around the world. It may answer whether an issue is caused by BrainKing itself or your local network (or ISP provider).
That's what is was, for sure. GothicChess.org is hosted on a "Fencer box", not sure if it is the same one as the BK box, but when we are down at the same time as BK, it is almost certainly the server.
Under the old Elo system, you get 400 points more
than each player over your first 20 games or so if you win, subtract 400 from them if you lose, and add their rating if the game is a draw, then average the results.
For "obvious results" (like losing to a player > 400 points over your provisional rating, or winning against someone 400 below you) not being factored in to pull you down.
When we all started, our Gothic BKR was 1300. So it was very very difficult to "climb up". We had 1900 and 2000 players clubbing each other to break 1500.
Mt 2400 rating was an 1100 point climb the hard way. That other person's was from winning against a "higher rated" player, then mediocre play compounded the rating.
All you have to do is beat a strong person early on, once, and you can pole vault over someone who has won 500 games and lost none.
From then on, just draw every game, and you lose 0 points.
Not a very realistic representation of a real rating system.
Conversely, I win over 100 games of Gothic Chess without a loss, and hardly scrape past 2400. Then someone else comes along and goes only 7-0 and was rated higher than me for a few months.
No comment from me on the ratings. After all, I am mentioned by Mark Glickman, official USCF Ratings Chairman, as having successfully implemented his new, highly accurate system correctly in his first paper he published on it years ago at Boston Universtity.
I offered to help Fencer way back when, but got the stereotypical "nothing is wrong with the ratings" reply.
I know exactly what Fencer is doing wrong, since he is constantly referring to a very old paper Mark wrote, which DOES NOT consider calculating the so-called "rating period" variable properly the way we need (rate after a 1-game trial, not many provisional games in parallel).
Hope everyone else enjoys the random 4-digit number next to their name :)
As it was a "BrainKing.com" issue, I did my part to identify a bug in the BrainKing.com software, notify the BrainKing.com admin, and post to the BrainKing.com board.
Since Fencer is now aware of the bug, has acknowledged the report, has restored the affected games, all he needs to do now is adjust the 3 peoples' ratings that were adversely changed, and the error will have been corrected in full.
I think this now closes the issue and there is no need for further responses.
For the record, I did send Fencer a PM, which he did not respond to. If he simply said he had other things which he was attending to, that would have been fine.
As he did not, and others may have been adversely affected, I notified the community through this discussion board.
My message was to Fencer, I will only acknowledge comments from Fencer, ignoring all others. This bug might have effected other players also. I had 2+ days to move in all of my games, and in the morning I had two timeout messages.
Ugh, I will not re-post here what you have said in another board.
I will state that, in summary, your participation in the Gothic Chess discussions is punctuated by very long absences, returning only to engage in some "battle" that does not concern you.
What is so curious is that you have not played a single game of Gothic Chess, yet you make it your business to throw negative comments my way at every turn as soon as some precipitation of an argument starts to condense.
Your interest is then, therefore, by definition, purely belligerent.
As this is not the venue for this discussion as it did not involve nor impact BrainKing.com, I will leave off here.
I think all of you "martyrs" should petition Fencer via message rather than drone on incessantly about your own personal tragedy.
The odds of drawing 1 out of 12 if 1 out of 12. It does not matter is I have all 4 suits, or 3 of the 4 suits, or just 1 of the four suits.
The odds of picking 1 out of 12 is 1 out of 12.
We happened to know, AFTER THE FACT, that the other card was the same.
Put another way: Say I draw 4 cards out of the deck, and they are all tens. What are the odds the next card I draw will be a ten?
You are saying 1 out of 48 (52-4) and I am saying 0 chance (of the 12x4 remaining, none are tens.)
The "specificity" is accounted for.
As this is basic combinatorics, I think we can leave it off here.
But just so you know, if you click here I showed how to count all of the Gothic Chess positions before any one piece comes off of the board. That number is 32,099,674,107,692,140,366,789,953,222,888,490,987,180,838,400,000,000 which makes doing "card math" a piece of cake :)
Kevin, if you have 4 groups of 13 different cards, then pull out all 4 10's, there are just 12 different ones remaining, correct?
2 2 2 2
3 3 3 3
4 4 4 4
. . . .
A A A A
OK, now I am going to remove 1, then remove another exactly like it.
Surely there are 12 sets of matching cards to start with. And, even after I draw 1 card, there are still 12 identical sets. One set will only have 3 cards, but that does not matter.
Now, there are 11 of the same sets with 4 cards, and one set of cards only has 2.
I know I am not drawing from the set that has 2, or I will have another pair.
Actually, it was part of this picture where my daughter and I both had the same exact hand in poker. I was getting ready to play in a Texas Hold'Em tournament in Australia, so I was using the Adelaide Casino deck (blue diamonds and green clubs.)
Brittany likes to play 5-card draw so I was taking a break playing a few hands with her.
We both ended up with a pair of tens, and an Ace-Queen-2. It was kind of funny, because at the show down she said "Pair of tens". So I asked her what her next high card was. She said "I have an Ace, so I win." I laughed and said I had an Ace too. I told her I had a Queen, then she laughed and said "darn, you probably will win, I only have a 2."
It was such an unlikely occurence, one of the other players took a picture of it for us.
...someone could create the "Back In The Day" Fellowship where members could upload everything from their baby pictures to when they were teenages, to young adults, then old cronies :)
Kevin, I believe if your buttocks caught fire somehow, you would go participate in your extra-curricular activites, then go look for water about 1 minute before any trace of your rear end was left.
...I was refering to was a checkers game I had with CaOz. I was about 2200 at the time, he was 2400+, the game was a draw, and no points were exchanged.
There should have been a +12 gain for me and a loss of 12 points for him given a 200 point disparity in ratings.
Recall a 400 point difference means the higher rated player would win a very, very large percentage of your contested games.
I posed the very same question on more than one occasion. As I worked with Mark Glickman on a few projects, and he created the most-recent version of the system for the United States Chess Federation, I assured Fencer his rating calculations were not correct.
The BKR for the provisional period is off by orders of magnitude. The handling of draws is also incorrect.
Fencer uses the "parallel" Glicko calculation for
"many results" being rated at the same time during the provisional period, and Mark Glickman later retracted this method.
If you are interested in a high BKR, all you have to do is win a few games against strong opponents during your provision BKR stage, then just gets draws once you have 25+ games. Your rating will never go down.
This is not the way the rest of the world operates.
Lower rated players will gain points when drawing a higher rated opponent, and the higher rated player would lose points if drawing a lower rated one.
This site is going to be very busy for the next couple of weeks I would imagine. Fencer is working hard to restore games that have been lost. The ratings are skewed now, and this has the chance to permanently effect all subsequent games being rated.
Given this is the case, I think we should have a moritorium on the creation of new tournaments for a while. New tournaments means new games which means activity which means the website would be taxed.
How about we let Fencer just work on getting things as close to normal as possible without putting the extra load on the server?
Let 's take a 2 week break from creating new tournaments to let things stabilize a bit.
(do skréše) Dež přejedeš tó meščárkó nad špilošovó maluvkó členstvi, okáže se tě takové jakobe řádek s hlavnima plkama o špilošovi. (pauloaguia) (okázat šecke vechetávke)