Monday, June 26, 2006

CTS at home

Since CTS proves to be an uncertain factor it becomes clear I have to find a way to become more independent of it. So I started to research a way to generate my own problem sets.
The basic idea is to automatically rip existing gamebases to create problemsets of my own.

This gives additional possibilities:
  • I can create sets for area's where I'm weak at. For instance with endgame problems.
  • I can reduce the amount of problems in a set so that spaced repetition becomes possible.
  • I can experiment with the solving time.
Generating problemsets will not be so difficult with existing programs.
But CTS has 2 strong points which aren't so easy to copy without making a program myself (which I like to avoid!):
  • The automatic rating of problems .
  • The time system.
Maybe the first point can be solved by generating problems in a set with identical degree of difficulty. The timing system is another matter. Maybe I can make use of the timing system of chessbase. I have no idea if that is possible.

During my research I found a lot of usable problemsets on the web already.
For instance at Gunther Ossimitz' Chess page

14 comments:

  1. Have you tried PCT? It has everything but openings.

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  2. PCT tracks your problem-solving speed, which is very nice. Unfortunately it's much buggier than CTS or CT-ART. In problems with two or three equal solutions, it demands one specific answer. It lacks built-in Crafty analysis, so double-checking an answer takes more time.

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  3. yeah, i agree that time spent building a problemset could be also spent solving.

    double checking takes 10 seconds more time in PCT--- the program copies the current FEN to the clipboard.

    i agree that sometimes PCT does not accept an equally valid move. i recall one puzzle where it takes Qa1# but not Qa4#.

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  4. CTS' strong point is thut it has a large user-base... so thut it can rate the problems by evaluating differrent user's solving rate.

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  5. Blue Devil, good idea! I started with it today. I never worked with it in the past because it required something like vba or .net installed. What is not convenient at the moment. But they solved that problem and it is now usable. It looks good.

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  6. Likesforests,
    luckily I'm not easy to frustrate. Otherwise I had given up George Renko long ago:)

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  7. Patrick,
    the point in building your own problemset is that you can finetune it for your own specific weaknesses. As long as there are enough problemsets around which cover your weaknesses, I agree with you. But I hope there will come a moment that I become so good that I will need a special finetuned set:) Did I already mention I plan decades?

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  8. Space,
    I never thought of Bookup as a progam to train something else than openings with. It sounds like a good idea! Where do you get your problemsets from?

    I belief Edwin has extended experience with PCT. Go and see http://www.lrci.blogspot.com/

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  9. Space,
    thx for answering. I own an editable version of Bookup. I'm going to try your suggestions.

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  10. I am going to write a Delphi program to capture the solution times for individual problems. I believe that I can do better than the CTS rating system.

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