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 BrainKing.com

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).

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19. April 2009, 13:30:10
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Ratings
Undertaker.: Did you already see that rating calculation in some game site for say if is good or bad? I don't think so.

Glicko you mean? It's used by FICS (free internet chess server), schemingmind.com and by the Australian Chess Federation, among others. I've played at both FICS and schemingmind. And I think it's also used by the ICS (internet chess server), but I haven't played there.

18. April 2009, 17:58:16
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Ratings
Undertaker.: For me, everybody must start each game rating with 1000 or 1200 points and each victory give between 10 and 50 points, in accordance with BKR opponent. For me would be the more correct rating calculation and would be necessary play many games and play against best players to be in the top.

IMO, that is really bad, and can cause really wild BKRs (like 3000+ BKR) easily. One should not only take into account the opponents BKR, but also how well estiblished that BKR is. If I play against someone who has 1500 more BKR points than me, but has only played a few games the last year, my BKR should not change much, regardless of the result. The point is that ratings should give an estimate of someones strength, but you can only estimate someone strength by comparing it to the strength of others. However, if you don't know someones strength very well (because someone hasn't played a lot), a result doesn't give much estimation of your strength, so your BKR should not change much.

In general, your BKR should change more the less established your BKR is, and the more your opponents BKR is. And it should change less the more established your BKR is, and the less established your opponents BKR is. And number of games finished is a poor estimation of how well established a BKR is. Number of recently finished games is a much better measurement than total number of games.

Ok, I'll say it one more time. Glicko.

7. April 2009, 15:09:36
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Fencer
Fencer: Well, there's the one who must not be named.

6. April 2009, 16:51:21
AbigailII 
Subject: Unlikely archievements.
Modified by AbigailII (7. April 2009, 07:40:50)

  1. Pass 25 turns in a row in backgammon instead of using autopass.
  2. Play at least 10 games of Cheversi, each lasting at least 10 moves.
  3. Have a simple feature request for at least years, but "more important things" need to be done first.
  4. Finish a game against a slow player in less than a year.
  5. Win at least 100 games against different opponents, each game lasting at least 500 moves.
  6. Take more than 3 months to answer interview questions.
  7. Win at least 50 games of Maharajah Chess against different opponents, as white.
  8. Score max possible points on all of Dice Poker, Triple Dice Poker, Dice Poker 6D and Triple Dice Poker 6D.
  9. Have at least 10 games running against different opponents, each lasting for at least a year, without taking any vacation time.
  10. Guess opponents Logic code on the first turn against at least 25 different opponents.
  11. Win at least 25 Dice 10x10 games against different opponents where the only pieces captured are the three Kings.
  12. Lose at least 25 Ludo games against different opponents, without rolling a single 6.
  13. Report 10 bugs whose status after 3 months is still "New".
  14. Appear on the "blocked users" list of at least 100 people.
  15. Make up a language. Pass it off as real. Translate BK to it.
  16. Kill the flying dragon.
  17. Win 25 games of Dark Battleboats against different opponents on your sixth turn.
  18. Accuse an innocent person of cheating and get him/her banned.
  19. Invent a game that sounds good, but turns out to be boring to play, and get Fencer to implement it.
  20. Get yourself banned from 25 boards or more.
  21. Refuse to resign a lost game. Ever.
  22. Have an active retirement in all the stairs, each lasting for at least a year.
    </ol>


[hrqls removed the name of a player]

2. April 2009, 10:41:25
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: GUESS WHO?
DeaD man WalkiN: Let me guess, it's the kid who claims I am not that lazy about himself on his user page.

9. March 2009, 22:12:36
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: time change
nodnarbo: Yes. Europe has changes in the last weekend of March for quite a number of years. It didn't follow the recent USA fad to change to "summer time" while it's still winter.

3. March 2009, 09:05:01
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: There are genuine cases where people get ill and end up in hospital.
Artful Dodger: I know that if my ISP went down, I'd have multiple options to connect and send a message to Fencer.

If you have multiple options to connect, you might as well play.

8. February 2009, 00:42:01
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
rod03801: Would the extreme situation of a person buying another year's membership every other month be allowed?

Think about it from Fencers point of view. He'd make EUR 432/year of such a member, as opposed to the EUR 36/years he makes of you. Why would he change the policy?

16. January 2009, 17:37:52
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: memory laspe again..lol
Snoopy: Well, it counts as a single result - but unfortunally, it's a "winner takes all" kind of result. It doesn't matter whether you win a match 1-0 (single game), 15-0 or 11-10.


This is unlike (ELO) chess ratings. There the rating difference between players A and B would, for instance, say that in a 10 game match, A is expected to win 7-3. If A wins the match 6-4, A would actually lose rating points (and B would win rating points).


This is why I seldomly play matches.


14. January 2009, 13:55:45
AbigailII 
Subject: Ideas for new games.
The site Setup Group has information (and rules) about quite a number of perfect information games. Some of them are already found on Brainking, but many aren't. Most of them have quite simple rules, and won't require new graphics if they were implemented here.

Perhaps Fencer will get some inspiration and surprise us with some new games in the future.

13. January 2009, 17:46:04
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Finished Games
pauloaguia: I've played many 2-game matches where both sides have won one game. Brainking always reports them as a draw. It counts as a single game when calculating BKR. So, I assume it's counted as a 'draw' in the statistics on the rules page as well.

13. January 2009, 14:46:09
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Finished Games
Hrqls: Actually, that number gives you the number of finished matches. If you and I play a '9 win match', and you win 9 games, I win 8, and we have 7 draws, it counts for just 1 in the statistics, but we have played 24 games.

5. January 2009, 15:51:37
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Help boss.....
MadMonkey: That's why I generate the tournaments I create with a script. I won't forget that way.

5. January 2009, 15:01:59
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Help boss.....
MadMonkey: How about a setting in the Tournament that by default is the way it is OR that can be changed to play another game

That's already possible. What I do when I create an elimination game is to not use 'normal game' but a '1 win'. In that case, the game is replayed (with switched colours) in case of a draw.

2. January 2009, 23:00:56
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Constellation36: Things you can try: 1) disable JavaScript. 2) Install an adblocker and block http://brainking.com/images/gui/flame-left.gif and http://brainking.com/images/gui/dragon-left.gif.


Can't garantee anything though. I don't use the castle layout, and even if I switch to castle layout, the dragon isn't taking 99% cpu resources.

24. August 2008, 23:44:26
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
coan.net: Considering that one can create a tournament up to two years in advance, why bicker about a 23 day difference?


In fact, why ask for tournament creation restrictions? Why not ask for more filter options? Restrictions on tournament creation options is limiting someone else, while better filter options allows everyone to get what he/she wants.


You know, kind of like the difference between the autopass we have , and autopass we want.


3. June 2008, 09:01:44
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
alanback: As I said, those constraints are set by the file system, not the applications.

2. June 2008, 23:11:21
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Modified by AbigailII (2. June 2008, 23:11:57)
alanback: "Most applications"? I don't know any application that is case-insensitive with respect to filenames. I know *filesystems* that are, but not all file systems are case insenstive. Just image if you have files "Foo" and "foo", and your case insenstive application is told to do something with file "fOO". Which one will it take? "Foo"? "foo"? or will it create "f00"?

29. May 2008, 13:16:13
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: so long since this happened
Snoopy: It depends on what kind of match type is used. If it's a single game (or another fixed number) then as others wrote, the one with the lower ranking goes through. But if the match type is one win, in case of a draw, there's a rematch.

It took me a while to figure this out. I don't really like the idea of a player going through based on her rating; therefore when I create an elimination tournament, I try to remember selecting "1 win" as the match type.

13. April 2008, 22:23:40
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Czuch: Why would using the BKR at game start make more sense than the BKR at game end? As for a counter example, take a game with a 30 day move limit. At the start, my opponent has a rating of 2200. 4 weeks later, when he makes his first move, his rating has dropped to 1800. After his first move, the game is finished in a few hours. Wouldn't 1800 make more sense than using 2200 in this particular case?

The problem is that whatever BKR you use, there will always be an example that can be constructed that shows the choice was bad. Ratings will chance over time, and games here take a long time. There's no way around it. The only answer is to not take ratings too seriously.

11. March 2008, 09:06:44
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Fencer: I am not working on any games now.

But, but, it's almost a week without a new game! This site will surely die soon if we don't get new games fast! ;-) ;-)

10. March 2008, 11:11:39
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
MadMonkey: It doesn't look that way. There's no king on the board.

16. February 2008, 23:20:12
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Czuch: I think my average of in-game messages is about one message a year, if even that. I don't care about in-line chit-chat, I play too many games with a too slow time control for chatting to be relevant.

If I want to chat, I use IRC.

12. February 2008, 11:54:45
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Blogs and such
Andersp: beside the extra hassle of having to create another account, and going to a different site, there's another reason why people may not want to post a comment at brainking.info: if you post there, your name will link to your email address, something that is hidden from other users at the brainking.com site.

11. February 2008, 01:52:03
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Andersp: Well, the advantage of ranting on the blog is that you can use a different name (someone elses name for instance), and create an account under that name.

In fact, you could create 500 accounts and have 500 people complaining how slow the site is.

18. January 2008, 00:02:16
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
nodnarbo: external stylesheets work in lightweight mode.

17. January 2008, 23:58:31
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: lightweight version on the setting page
redfrog: I switched 10 minutes ago or so, and it seems to be noticable faster. But it's too early to say for sure that it's the setting. And the data transfer is still a bit "jerky". And I haven't found a missing feature yet.

16. January 2008, 16:52:22
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Fencer: the OS could recognize that a smart and instant low-level reconfiguration is required and should do it itself" which is not possible, of course. It's more complicated (Abigail please don't start a too technical discussion here)

Let's just say that "technically, it can be done (off the 'shelf' even), but then everyone's fee would have to increase a hundred or a thousand fold, and it'll take a long time to implement". (High end servers can reconfigure themselves without going down. But they are bloody expensive).

Fencer is quite right that it's impossible given the constraints (money, knowledge, labour involved) BK has.

I hope I wasn't "too" technical.


15. January 2008, 00:02:09
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Hrqls: i know some people who dont have connection problems, and some who do .. if thats the case then it cant be the brainking server

That's way too simplistic. That's like saying since it takes some people more than an hour to drive from The Hague to Amsterdam, but it takes some people less, there cannot be traffic jams - they must have slow cars. You're discounting the fact that traffic jams don't occur all the time. It's the same with the connection to Brainking. The fact that some people consider everything to be fine doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. It maybe that those people play at different times than the people complaining. It maybe that the people who consider everything to be fine have low expectations. It maybe that the people who have no problems happen to have a provider that has good peering with Brainkings provider, and the people that have problems have providers with bad peering agreements. Or maybe the Check Republic has just one lousy connection to the USA, and an excellent connection to Italy, so people from the USA will complain, and people from Italy will say it's fine. (And yes, Brainking *can* do something about that (relocate for instance), if it were the case - but 'can' is something else than 'should').

Now, I've my own ideas about whether or not there are problems, and if there are whether or not it's something BK can or should address. Fencer has made it quite clear what his viewpoint is. Expressing your disagreement in a public folder doesn't do anyone any good. Play here as long as you can tolerate it - and if it become to slow for you, vote with your feet.

But I will speak up if someone expresses himself naively.


14. January 2008, 17:53:19
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
redfrog: Well, I'm not a native English speaker, but any qualification that starts with "Board for everybody who ..." for me is a qualification about the people who use the board, and not a qualification about the topic. Yes, I know it's pedantic, but I don't think it's any less pedantic than all the "this is off-topic" posts we have been seeing.

You want to keep waving "off-topic" graphics in everyone face? Then I think you start by being clear what the board is about - not as a post interpreting your idea what the charter of the board is, but by writing it down in the charter.


14. January 2008, 16:45:25
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Modified by AbigailII (14. January 2008, 16:46:16)
Hrqls: this board is about brainking and its future

To be pedantic, that's not what this page says. It says Board for everybody who is interested in BrainKing itself, its structure, features and future., so, from the description one could deduce this board doesn't have a topic, just a vague restriction on who can read/write the board.

I don't care much (although I find the smiley posts a waste of time) about what goes on on the board, but if people are eager to slap others with "off topic", perhaps people should start with clearly defining what is on topic. As it stands now, nothing is defined to be either on, or off topic.

8. January 2008, 09:05:00
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: hope this post is ok
Jason: brainking.com doesn't reply to ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packages, so you traceroute packages time out.

7. January 2008, 13:48:45
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Is it just me? or is this site slower than a cheapskate at the checkout counter
Fencer: Whatever happens OUTSIDE BrainKing, i.e. on the way to the user's web browser, is not (and cannot be) our problem.

Well, if your goal is to keep your current customers, and to attract more, unsatisfied customers should be your problem, whether you can do something about or not, and whether the problems are real or imaginary.

Fencer: Our power ends at the outgoing port of our firewall.

Yes...., but, where your firewall ends is something you can do about. If there's a network problem, and that problem is caused by your upstream provider, then you aren't entirely powerless. You could switch provider, or get a faster pipe. I'm not saying you should, or that it's wise business wise, just pointing out that just brushing it off with "oh well, nothing we can do" is a bit short sighted. If Disney had build Disneyworld at the end of a dirt road, and people would complain it's hard to reach, Disney wouldn't say "oh, but the lines in the park are short, and it isn't our problem there's only a dirt road to our park".

A website cannot control the speed of the Internet, but it can decide where it connects to the Internet.


21. December 2007, 01:07:27
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Xmas Holidays
Puckish: I do get off with Christmas, and I don't have to go to work. Which means, I can play. I don't play from the office - perhaps Fencer should give me 225 extra vacation days.

20. December 2007, 22:38:14
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Xmas Holidays
MadMonkey: We got extra vacation days/year to compensate for the fact that there's to block out period for holidays. Considering this is an international site, time outs would hardly happen if for every holiday somewhere time control is disabled for that day.

Of course, Christmas is only a "problem" for people who 1) don't have holidays left, 2) play games with a time control of 24hours/move or less, 3) aren't taking the time to move on Christmas, and 4) actually have to move that day. Considering that a combination of 1) and 2) is bad anytime, not only at Christmas, I'd say that it's just bad planning, and rules shouldn't be reinstated because of that.

19. November 2007, 20:21:48
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: YAY!
Fencer: Redundancy has crashed too.

And all your daily backups as well? ;-)

29. October 2007, 10:02:39
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: More bad news!
Fencer: Yes, that's true. ISPs are obliged to keep their DNS lists updated and the only thing we can do for that is to broadcast the up to date information and "ask them" to accept it.

Yeah, but you can make your change the "right" way, or the "wrong" way. DNS records have a TTL (time to live). If I look at the current DNS record for brainking.com, the TTL is one day (which is a typical value). Now, if the TTL of brainking.com was one day before making a change, it means that it may take an day before everyone knows about the change. No ISP would be violating any RFC. The "right way" (that is, decrease the time it takes for everyone to notice) of making a DNS change is to first lower the TTL to a short period (say, 900 seconds), and do this more than a day in advance (a day because that's the old value of the TTL). That tells any name resolver that it should not keep an entry in its cache for more than 15 minutes. Then you make your DNS change, and you can set the TTL to one day again.

Now, obviously, I do not know how the DNS change was made, but judging from the reactions of the board, it seems that for about a day, people had problems with name resolving. Which seems to suggest a change to a record with a TTL of a day was made.

17. October 2007, 14:49:01
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: connection
Hrqls: They could be routed differently if they have the same IP address, and it could be they are routed identical if the IP addresses differ.

17. October 2007, 14:10:39
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: connection
Hrqls: Whether or not two addresses resolve to the same IP address doesn't say anything whether they are the same website or not. Some identical websites have more than one IP address, and a single box (using one external IP address) can host hundreds, if not thousands, of completely different websites.

Now, I would assume that the only difference between brainking.com and brainking.nl are just a set of language dependent templates, but stranger things have happened.

10. September 2007, 09:31:51
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: a typo
tippyc: This is what the bug tracker is for. It's much easier for a maintainer to track bugs (including trivial things such as typos) using a tracking system than the boards.

Furthermore, noone else needs to be bothered.

10. August 2007, 22:18:38
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: a new game idea
tippyc: You know, long time ago, I thought that card games would be a nice addition. But then I realized that most card games don't work well on sites where there can be days, if not weeks between moves, and one game could last half a year, or longer. See, with go or chess or checkers, or most other games here, whenever you see a board, you see all the information. History is not important - you base your move on the current position, and it doesn't matter how you got there.

But that is quite different with card games. Previous played card matter. In some games, knowing which cards have been played, by whom, and in which order, is vital. And that works well when you play a card game face-to-face. You play on game at the time, and it's finished in a reasonable amount of time. Playing a myriad of games at once, streched over long periods of time just isn't the same. Even if you had a game history to browse. (Which you normally don't have).

Don't get me wrong. I love card games. I love them even more than board games. I just don't thinkt they will work well on a turn based site.

8. August 2007, 19:18:20
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: connection to brainking
Hrqls: traceroute itself isn't very helpful. After getting off the backbone in Prague, 84.233.160.74 is the last hop that sends back a TIME_EXCEEDED response.

8. August 2007, 15:31:03
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: 22 times in the last hour :o(
Eriisa: Hmmm. So, if you put your phone off the hook, and someone complains he cannot call you, you also reply with "well, that's not a problem with my phone, it's a problem with the communication between your pnone and mine"?

If you cannot connect to the brainking server, then it may be a problem with the network between you and the server. But I certainly wouldn't rule out the server itself. Specially if one can connect to port 80 of brainking.info (89.250.246.180) without problems, while connecting to port 80 of brainking.com (89.250.246.182) times out.

Blaming the network doesn't always excuse oneself. Certainly, Fencer isn't responsible for the internet at large. But he does control where he places his servers. And the last part of the network *is* under his control.

If you'r going to plan a large event, and people have problems reaching it due to travel, you cannot be blamed for accidents on the highways holding up people. But if you plan your event in a busy city with narrow roads and no parking places, your choice of location could be better, and you aren't blameless.

Note that I'm not complaining about the slowness and other connection problems of brainking (it is slow, and there are connection problems - but it doesn't bother me too much). But I do complain about the ignorance of "oh, it's a connection problem, so it cannot be the server". Well, duh, there are three parts involved in a connection: both endpoints, and the network in between. In a connection problem, any part can be at fault.

3. August 2007, 13:09:07
AbigailII 
Subject: Re:
Modified by AbigailII (3. August 2007, 13:09:31)
MadMonkey: Yeah, it's quite common. Happens to me a few times each day when you cannot connect to the site for a short time. Usually 1 to 5 minutes.

No doubt Fencer will blame the international network. ;-)

22. July 2007, 00:07:18
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Smiley settings.
alanback: Considering the ration of smileys vs words some people use, yes, I do ignore people in real live who would act the same as they do here with smileys.

In fact, if people acted the same way outside of the web as they do here, half of them would be locked up.

21. July 2007, 18:23:15
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: Smiley settings.
pauloaguia: Yes, and? It's my choice, isn't it? If people are currently answering post with a silly blinking smiley (or worse, answering with a dozen of them), do you really think I'm going to spend a millisecond in trying to figure out what they mean?

If one can't be bothered to use words in a post, I can't be bothered to read them.

21. July 2007, 13:25:10
AbigailII 
Subject: Smiley settings.
I've a suggestion for smiley settings. Currently, the options are either smileys or numbers. My proposal is a three state switch: smileys, numbers, and no smileys. The latter would neither show smileys, nor numbers.

Oh, and a setting "ignore posts with more smileys than words" would be great as well.

19. July 2007, 14:22:32
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: new board ?
Eriisa: One post? Why do you think it will be restricted to one post? Do you think the proposed rule change for Turkish checkers was the very first time a rule change was suggested? And that it never happens again? Furthermore, your suggestion was to, and I quote you:

if there is a hot topic running on the board, that a general notice could be posted on here so that non-readers of a category board could know about it.

That to me doesn't suggest ONE post. It suggest that anytime someone thinks there's a "hot topic" running on a board, it's fine to post messages pointing to the topic on other boards.

And yes, a game is a feature. What do you imply with that? That all the postings on the dozens of boards dealing with the various games should be made here? Including the posts of the board you no longer wish to read (the Ludo board)? And I guess the "Feature requests" board is redundant as well.

Why not just cancel all the other boards, and just post everything here? It's all happening on "brainking.com" anyway....

19. July 2007, 13:57:20
AbigailII 
Subject: Re: new board ?
Eriisa: Eh, no, that doesn't make sense at all. Then all the boards would be cluttered with message "Hot topic on board XXX!".

If you want to know about threads on the Ludo board, you should read it (or view the RSS view). I'm not interested in many boards, but I am interested in this board. However, if this board would be cluttered with messages about hot topics on other boards, then I would no longer read this board. And then when there's a hot topic on this board, you would have to post it on the other boards so I can learn about them....

16. June 2007, 15:00:42
AbigailII 
Subject: "A note about Go"
So, can I send Fencer a message each time I collect 25 seeds in Mancala and my opponent keeps on playing? ;-)

OTOH, that situation is much easier to program than a Go endgame.

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