Chess Tempo

2nd July 2008

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15th June 2008

An important problem set update has been made. Lots of positions which had alternative winning lines have either been removed or had their alternatives explicitly recorded. If moves recorded as alternative winning lines are played, the user is told they have played a good move but asked to look for another one. No points are lost for choosing a recorded alternative. I'm hoping this change leads to a signficant improvement in perceived problem set quality, especially for higher rated players.

The threshold for being considered an active user has been dropped from an RD of 140 to an RD of 80. This should allow a wider range of users to appear in the top rated lists due to inactive users dropping out more quickly.

27th May 2008

An improved problem selection algorithm has been deployed. It should cluster problems more reliably around the user's current rating. The new selection sytem also prefers to give users problems they have not seen before or where that is not possible, the least recently seen from the appropriate range.

The new system may cause some short term rating fluctuations, but should ensure that users are given a set of problems more appropriate to their current level.

23rd May 2008

Another smaller update has just been made. Ratings are now stored as floating point numbers. This prevents the annoying behaviour where ratings changes between 0 and 0.5 were rounded to 0. The correct/failed reporting for the just completed problem is now kept around until replaced by the next problem's result.

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21st May 2008

A major upgrade to problem sets and the user interface has just been made. Many improvements have been made, you can read about the details in this forum post

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I expect some rating inflation to occur, especially in standard mode due to removing the questionable mate problems. Hopefully this will not get out of control, I'll keep a close eye on it for the next few days.

8th January 2008

Another 14543 problems have been added to the site. Again it will take a few days before the new problems settle into reasonable ratings. I tested a "Provisional" system where new problems didn't impact user ratings, unfortunately the result seemed more annoying than the issue it addressed so I've scrapped it for now. This will be the last set of problems generated with the old problem generator. The next addition will (hopefully!) come from an improved generator. Happy New Year! :-)

3rd September 2007

3712 new positions have been added to the problem set. It will take several days for the new problems to receive appropriate ratings, so expect the unexpected until that occurs :-)

13th August 2007

Another problem set update has been made. This update should further improve problem set quality for non-mating tactics. Further details in this forum post.

25th June 2007

A PGN Viewer has been added to the site. The viewer can show arbitrary PGN formatted games using the board from the tactics interface. The viewer can also be embedded into your own webpage to view PGN games on your own site. Several improvements made to the board during development of the viewer should also improve the tactics UI. This includes the capability (but not yet the interface [coming soon]) to select alternative piece styles and board looks. The PGN parsing component is still under active development, so please let me know if you find PGN files that the viewer has trouble with.

27th May 2007

Another update to the problem set has been made. In addition to adding new problems, this update also removes some ambiguous mates that crept in recently. An issue with ratings adjustment has also been resolved. As a result of this, blitz users may receive larger penalties for taking too long on a problem.

13th May 2007

The problem set has been updated. Many problems with more than one "best move" have been removed from the set. See this forum post for more details.

20th April 2007

Site goes live! Currently we are still testing the site so apologies in advance for any problems you may come across. Firefox 2.x, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and recent versions of Safari should work with the site. The Opera browser has issues with the tactics page which are being investigated.