calculating percentage success @ CTS, note from/to spacecowboy

The following is in response to a note from spacecowboy at chessChat.org: David, I was glad to learn from your blog that your head is feeling better.

Have you noticed what I have noticed? I have recently noticed that my percent accuracy appears like it is being calculated differently on CTS than it has been calculated in the past. I have already climbed from 88.8% to 88.9% in what seems like less than one week! This would have been nearly impossible using the previous method of calulating percent accuracy. The previous method of calulating percent accuracy was to average the entire history of problems that the tactician has done on the CTS server. I suspect there is now a new CTS method of calculating the percent accuracy of each tactician which does not use the entire history of problems that the tactician has done on the server.

P. (spacecowboy)




(at left) a deranged chess dog, attempting to portray an even more deranged bobby fischer but without quite nearly the same volts, watts, joules, ergs, omms, or stanford-binets iq test juice, plots his next disparaging remark, immediately subsequent to any dktransform post at CTS, thus attempting to have others 'feel his pain as their own' in utter futility

my reply: dear p., spacecowboy:

i cannot take any big titles at CTS, but one title i qualify for is maniacal tracking in morbid detail percentage success. since i lay out an array of circles, like you get in a school exam, each night, and fill in each problem solved with a 'circle' and each failed with an 'X', i know quite well my success, in sets of eight, then sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, then forty, then i relog in.

if i am at 6f/44s=50tries, (or 6f/50 as wormstor prefers to represent at our respective blogs), then i will try extra hard to get zero wrong to go 6f/54s=60, and hit my haloed ninety percent, or more.



when i am at 1512/13 as i was last night, i exchange, in a way, rating for more care, and so slow a tiny bit, finishing 1510.9. my algorythm for some time, is that as long as im above 1500, preferably above 1510 for some contingency, then i try to get as many correct as possible, exactly as you do so well, and thus push up my averages. as you know so well in your remarkably logical and heuristically individual way, this approaches real chess.

1510 or 1540 does not matter to me, as long as i maintain a level that is respectable, for my skill, relative to myself. what matters to me is sustained accurate thinking, as you do better than 99% of all users there, except maybe my nemesis who we won't name, or trallala, and other names well known to you.



if someone is a blitz specialist, as i am not, then 65 to 70% is ok. but if you play as i do 3/8 (3min/8 sec increment =8:20 for 40 moves, or 3/12 as i did for many years= 11 min for 40 moves), then such a pace as 85 to 92% is a more valid test. you might sit on your hands at times, surely not at every move, as you and i do at CTS, and find the right move, even if it takes 28 or 33 or even 43 seconds, without feeling silly. believe me, when i play, i see this care show up, and know when to whip out the moves, and when to pause.

i am not sure of what you say about a new method. im more than willing to test it. if youve read any of my posts at blogger, then you know ive derived my percentage, such as when i am 83.947, then when i expect 83.9501+ look for the report back = 84.0% switched over from 83.9, so know quite well there.

when and if i cross an integrer or decimal, then if shortly thereafter i cross back, again watch, so from 72 to 84%, have gotten to do this not only 130 times, but more like 250 times, since ive gone over and back several times.

if i may please ask, what is your background? you used to be at blogger, but inactive there, despite wormstar (a.k.a wormwood), and tempo all over there mousetraper, loomis (to name but a few of many fine efforts), and now even me. wonderfull stuff. seen your comments. but, of course, recognize we cannot be all things to all persons.

i hate to edit, so send this as is now, and wish you the best.

warmly, david, from the pacific northwest usa, in seattle

spacecowboy 2nd post: I appreciate your interest and I await your determination of the issue I have raised. Again, the issue is whether the method of percent accuracy calculation has changed on the CTS server. It is likely that there are few people, if any, besides yourself who are doing the work to put themselves in position to determine the answer to this question.

and in reply to my question: "if i may please ask, what is your background?"

Later please. All in good time.

P. (spacecowboy)



dk plots his next move--after a mind expanding session with his moldavian girlfriend, musician tatiana--in rebutal to an ever move vicious attack from chessDog, after consulting zurich psychotherapists, and they all concur that he has no need to concern himself with this obviously psychologically damaged little boy.

and i replied:

dear spacecowboy: thank you for the acknowledgement that i could and would resolve this question, that is to say, whether, the method of calculation at CTS has been modified.

while i detect no change, at the moment, i just hit and passed 84.00%, so until i get a little closer to 84.049%, to thus be able to watch as to when 84.051% happens and then see a rounded report to 84.1%, and in so doing see whether this next tiny milestone occurs slight more accelerated, accelerated, or significantly more rapid, i cannot know.

after many years as a private money manager, managing many millions of dollars on wall street (as what is commonly called a 'stock-broker', only much more advanced), i have a LOT of experience with moving averages. this is like the monthly government jobs report (the graphic in the nyTimes with the moving average line is way better, but this is a start), which is always posted on the first friday of every month at 8:30 est, or 5:30 am pst, and since labor or job creation is so variable, they smooth the data, and this happens a lot in stocks, where the 50 day, 20 day, and 200 day moving averages are watched VERY closely by traders. i am not a math person, but a pattern person, either as architect, trader, self taught reading and writing basic japanese, and of course our beloved chess.

this is a feedback process, where expectations shift perception, and those in turn create rapid changes in group or crowd psychology, and in turn again alters perception. like in complex adaptive systems, some large physical systems become 'strange attractors', and clusters form, and elements around those clusters into stable constructs. add society and mind, and then we have our human world.

at CTS the true percentage success has been a cumulative summ, as you know. if the change has happened, after rest in days ahead, and get myself back to 88 and 90% success, i can pretty quickly see if this is a '1000 try' MA (moving average), or 10,000, or 100, or even an exponential moving average. thanks for your question.

david, aka dktransform

When the Brain Does Not Hurt...

When the brain does not hurt, you can actually perform! Each day is getting better, and better.


















chess dog

Todays CTS:

08f/102s= 110 @ 92.73% (Tuesday, Moldavian woman uses Russian technique massage on my sore neck last night. Kasparov probably had this done a time or two.)
1503.13 elo

07f/063s= 070 @ 90.00% (Monday)
12f/088s= 100 @ 88.00% (Sunday, hiking all day with... a lovely...himmmm....)
06f/054s= 060 @ 90.00% (Saturday)
15f/100s= 115 @ 86.96% (Friday)
14f/101s= 115 @ 87.83% (Thursday, off work sick, lots of Tylenol!
Moldavian woman kisses my head, with chessik Russian accent)
12f/058s= 070 @ 82.86 (Wednesday, day of hospitalization for a concussion!)
------------------
totals, recent activity through recovery:
66f/464s= 530 @ 87.55% for last six sessions. Raw total or cumulative absolute:

2735f/14345s= 17,080 @ 83.9871%.

My goal is 20,000 tries by 15sept, and 30,000 tries by 31dec. I expect to hit 85.00% at 25,000, my overall goal, and early in this series enumberated above, this meant that I needed 87.284% for the next 8100 problems, or:
1030f/7070s=8100 @ 87.284%.

david

Yalta catching up to Tempo

"David, I tell you, this is all you need to do. Are you listening? Ok. Now here is how: just do another 45,000 problems in the next year, then after he does another twenty thousand, you just need to apply yourself a little bit more and you will be there":



Yalta Accord:
picture of wormwood (left), and spacecowboy (center) , trallala (right) counciling transformation (hidden at right) at the famous amsterdam chess park.








dkTransform has hired a personal fitness trainer Helga Von Franz (above) to help him decompress from the rigours of OBP, the sustained pressure of training at CTS, and recovering from making a MESS at the CTS message board last week.

recently at CTS and OBP

recently at cts i have been pushing hard to arrive at the exact 85.00% mark at the 20,000 tries watershed at CTS . while this pretty much had me holding between a 1500 and 1508 elo in rating, recently ive seen a fall. not to worry: i have not "fallen under the wagon". at the same time, i try specifically try in every sesion for 90.0%, and while this does not commonly happen, this is exactly what i am trying to do in every tranch of problems and effects rating significantly since i not only am trying to reduce error, but the trying to reduce error has a big impart on rating.

for every set of problems, i lay out a sheet of paper, drawing an array of circles in rows of ten to mark those succeeded or failed, and so can visually see at a glance how i am doing along the way--marking sets of eight, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, then forty, the repeat. and when at time i just got three out of four wrong (always a bad sign!), or two out three wrong, then i buckle down extra hard: as Lao Tzu said: "The men of olde, so carefull! Like crossing a sheet of ice!"













My results for the last few sessions:
14f/106s= 120 88.33% (Thursday)
12f/088s= 100 88.00% (Wednesday)
12f/068s= 080 85.00% (Tuesday)
34f/136s= 170 80.00% (Monday): terrable! just awefull!
31f/159s= 180 88.33% (Sunday)
14f/106s= 120 88.33% (Saturday)
21f/147s= 168 87.50% (Friday)
15f/113s= 128 88.28% (Thursday)
--------------------

totals:
153f/923s= 1076totals 85.78% for this series, take me to 83.8322% for 16670 tries
1486 elo.

ive started back at OBP after a several month hiatus. this particular post is less to one more time cite my results at CTS, and more about some other things. its' amazing. just as tempo describes dramatic improvement in his OBP, so the same in this corner.

by OBP--which is usually meant to describe over the board play for those who play a lot over the internet--by me is simply meant real chess. for me, "real chess" is chess play against a live opponent as against chess training only, as i spend virtually 99% of my chess time training, as i find OBP to be too stressfull. i almost don't actually enjoy it, or, if i do enjoy it, it is only when i am not tired or not late at night after a long days work.



after an initial flash of beating two elo's above me at 1836 and a 1725, i have struggled a bit, but do see real noticable improvment.

when we play our peers after 5,000 or 10,000 problems in just a few recent months, we tend to run circles around them. how unfair!

very sweet. more latter, have to run to work now...

Letters to a Young 1200 ELO Soul

To Philwillb at chess tactical server, or CTS at chess.emarld.net is darn good! way to go. 90% is the bomb! Thank you for sharing.

One suggestion (if I may humbly suggest [I am only 1650 but do love to study]:),

I believe that I can show that I am able to make reasonable comments with care and respect for other persons without making a MESS of things:











* some blitz with increment (so you don't wind up in a silly mouse race) such as 3/12 =3min 12 sec increm (this is 11 minutes. an average game of 38 moves is 10:36: five minutes is just too fast for now; and fifteen does NOT allow you to rapidly ramp up to get the experience you need, such as a thousand or more game to start). Review your mistakes each time, however briefly. Do NOT just hit start and begin a new game. Take a moment.

* balance this with review of GM games. you can get some via pgn files, and view them in winBoard. If you really want to become a "real chess player", I CANNOT SUGGEST ANYTHING better than to not only learn to save, copy, and paste games simply into winBoard (chessBase.com has a competing commercial platform. winBoard is free shareware and will get you started handsomely), but to load the 62 simple, clean, eligant games by hand or manually into pgn of lovely and dear Irving Chernev's The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played.

While his more popular Logical Chess Move by Move is also quite good, this first book ties together simple middle to endgame transitions in memorable form. If you load then review one game every four days, you can have it done in eight months. This will solidify anyones play from swashbuckling to more solid, well-knit play. The founations of Strategy and study as against Tactics and time pressure.

* basic endings. Pandolphinis Endgame Course has a few errors, but as Florida Master and early pioneer in chess blogging, A.J. Goldsby aptly says, the book is great anyway. It is all there!

* slower tactics. CT-Art is too advanced for you (yet), but my dear friend at blogger Blue Devil Knight raves about Chess Tactics for Beginners. I'm impressed.

Looking forward to your future comments.

FYI, if you or anyone else cares to post a comment at chess.emrald.net that I am not a bad guy but DO need an edit feature, and tell Tempo that what he said was not particularly gracious, I'd much appreciate that. Sad. I have been, I thought, gracious to him in private email including notifying him in early July--personally--within mintues of my discovering that the server was back up and running, and have writen him always constructivley here at blogger, wrote many nice comments to him at chess.emrald.net, and he says this to me in public when he could have done it privately? What punishment do I deserve? What have I done to deserve this?

Its ten times better if someone else says it and asks the rancor at CTS to stop please, and I made an honest mistake that I am really sorry for. Sorry folks. Volunteers, please?



At the same time, now we have another issue: some are 1600 elo in chess but 1200 elo in kindness and spiritually and I pray for the expansion of their hearts. Disloyalty stings and kind loyalty can make a world kind and decent. Thank you.

David, aka dktransform at CTS

Advancing Chess Tactical Server!

It seems like news has been everywhere: Tempo's 1600+ and Tempo's 1616 most impressive record high well after the notable 50,000, Spacecowboys 1474 after his 20,000, Wormwoods recent freshly minted 1533 (yowww!)after vigorously piercing 50,000 also, lots of interesting chat on the CTS message board about burning lots of problems into memory, and Markusgoths recent 25,000. It really is a daily work crowd deep in the night, like coal miners with lanterns on their head, digging deep into the earth, or in this case: chess, chess tactics, chess improvement, then lastly getting on line and beating somebody good who expects to take easy points for our rating, but we just did, well, we just did like 5,000 problems since our last game? Sound familiar to anyone??











Then my particular crowd paralleling much of the above: the etheric high percent crowd among those over 15,000 problems who are rated 1500 or above, ranked by tries: Tempo again 80.7%, nabla (FM) 87.2%, Trallala 92.9%, kawala 83.8%, spacecowboy again 88.7%, morkovkin 89.1%, chessdog in the honorably mentioned (<1500) absolutely amazing 95.7%, dktransform 83.8%, and alvis honorably mentioned (<15,000) at 88.3%.

I ask you chess.emrald.net users to go to the tactician tables and sort the top 51 active users by 'tries' and visually scan, asking yourself how many large users have done much over 83%? Nine persons.

I surveyed this by counting the number of users by percentage success only for sets of persons 60 to 61%, 62 to 63%, all the way up to 98%. I made sets of sets of those (I was VERY curious), then supersets, to simplify the core observation, and found the following (data from ten days ago):

60 to 63%= 137 users
64 to 67%= 154 users
68 to 71%= 157 users
72 to 75%= 178 users
76 to 79%= 146 users
80 to 83%= 127 users
84 to 87%= 098 users
88 to 91%= 041 users
92 to 95%= 024 users
96 to 98%= 004 users

If we look closely at chasing crowd at the "Hillary Step" (at Mount Everest in late May, their can be literally a log jamb of climbers waiting to pass at 200' below the summit, since their is so little room to pass) at the clump or cluster between 82 to 86% (85.0% is absolute my goal for 25,000), we find something quite interesting:

82%= 30
83%= 33
84%= 41*!*
85%= 23
86%= 18, etc.

In nature or complex adaptive systems, we often find other examples of 'buffering': sea tempuratures that make sudden jumbs, buffering between alkalai or acid states (I am not a chemist so please forgive errors of exact concept on this one). Why this here?

This takes me to my subject: I decided at 15,442 or 83.577% to go for 85.0 by 25k, and reversed engineered that I needed 87.183% for 9558 problems= 25,000.



Now the facts, making spacecowboys and trallalas and even chessdogs fine accomplishments all the more poingent: I had gotten used to putting it my mind: "Ok, every sixth one I can err or have errors on". 1:4=75%, 1:5=80%, 1:6=83.33%, 1:7= (natural sequence of 14, 28, 56 then repeats: 0.142856) 85.7144% or 85.72%, 1:8=87.5%, 1:9=88.9%, 1:10=90%, 1:11=90.9%, 1:12=91.33%, 1:15=93.4%, 1:20=95%.

It is very, very hard to avoid missing only one problem in seven, harder at eight. We all get those 1:10 runs where we get one wrong out of 20, then two in a row wrong, to get 3failed, 27 success=30 total. Then the bad days...

Since this decision, I have done:
12/126=138*(91.3%) Wednesday
21/147=168 (87.5%) Thursday
15/113=128 (88.3%) Friday
02/042=44 (95.4%) Saturday [1500.3 ... I tend to speed up when and if I go <15,>1520.
[or how wormwood likes to express it succinctly:
12f/138
1500.3 or:

12f/126s=138 total@ 1500]

It seems that in this clumping at 84% that is outlying data from the smooth sequence up from 60 to 79%, then down to 85%, we hit this natural resistence at 85%. And the rarety of it makes the desire of some of us % success folks who do not focus mainly on rating but more on accuracy (I am NOT suggesting that this is worth MORE, only to note this difference), makes our desire all that much stronger, since so few get there. Anyone who wishes to can try.

Some days the brain is tired, the eyes weak, the board vision dim. So we must really hit 88 to 90% on good days for a hundred problems or more since the bad days come to, such as last week when I had a terrable day at 80.5%. One mans humble opinion, please.