Sunday, September 04, 2005

In search for The Ultimate Insult.

The last two days I could maintain my rating at CTS beyond 1550.
The 14,000 problems before I managed not even once to do so.
What's different?
Usually my mind works slow the first 200 problems every day and then speeds up.
These last two days my mind worked at full throttle from the beginning.
Hence a higher rating then ever before.
Today my mind feels slow again. And so the rating drops.
I have no clue why my mind is so slow now.

Not that there is something to worry about, I'm quite confident my rating will have improved another 30 points when I finish circle 2. But I like to know what makes those speed differences.

When you want to learn a foreign language, like english for instance, there are an infinite amount of methods you can follow. You can go to the pub and twaddle days on end.
Or you can try to translate the works of William Shakespeare.
If you go to the pub, you learn the language very fast, but the quality might be not so good.
If you try to translate Shakespeare you can do only a half page a day. So the amount of words you are exposed to is much lower than when going to the pub. But the quality is higher.
Say you want to perform a task, for instance you want to insult somebody. After two months in the pub that should be no problem. But after two months translating Shakespeare, the quality of your insult will be much higher. See The Shakespeare Insult Server and you'll understand what I mean.
I compare working with CTS with going to the pub, and working with Renko or CT-art with translating Shakespeare.


CTS
circle 0: 1470
circle 1: 1500
circle 2: 14,600 /70,000
Highest rating 1567

5 comments:

  1. So I suppose the key question at this point is: Do your OTB opponents feel put in their place after you insult them tactically?

    P.S. Did you see my post about the new Nederlander Knight?

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  2. Great comparison, I think this might even be a novelty!

    Tactics is a four letter word. One can use phrase like "Fork you!" almost on a daily basis but the pleasure of hurling a sophisticated ten move combination at your opponent might come only once a year.

    - bahus

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  3. Ups and downs are normal on CTS. Never mind. You have a success streak. Rating rises. CTS selects higher rated problems for you. More failures or longer time, which is the same ratingwise. Rating falls. You get more simple problems. Rating rises again ...

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