Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Hello everybody.

Today I had browsed through all the articles on this website choosing my favorite game. For now, as the size of this community is not that impressive it is probably an ok system.

First things first. I don't intend to help with the implementation of all this. But I'd really like the discussion had.

Anyway for the future I'd like to raise some issues.

1. It does not seem to me apropiate that all favorite games share the same level.  There are definitely games among my favorites that I like more than others. A neat propose I think it would be to have gold preferences scoring 4 points, silver preferences scoring 2 points and bronze preferences scoring 1 point.

2. Next, I don't think this system makes the favorites enumerating (the hearts) a valuable commodity. After a certain lowest threshold (in the 4,2,1 system according to my calculations 80 points should be fine, as I have roughly 40 games which in average should worth 2 points, with maybe a distribution of bronze hearts> silver hearts> than gold hearts, by a healthy margin), the number favorites should have a lower impact if you gave an overall score higher than the average score given by all users, and a higher impact if you gave an overall score lower than the average score given by all users. Also the impact of someone "hearting" the games should by influenced by other factors like writing recognized scientific articles on the matter, writing a popular computer program for CV, having a reasonable distribution among your bronze, silver and gold hearts, or even being an older member :)!

Hope to hear from you guys!

Good luck :)!

Regarding the Favorites list, I think some weighting is effectively accomplished by the sheer number of people favouriting a game, and also if one notes if an inventor is favouriting his own game that's in question (if so, this would presumably mean less in the eyes of at least some CVP members or visitors).

There is also another sort of form of weighting done, in effect, by whether people's favourite variant(s) make e.g. the Recognized Chess Variants list, the Top 50 played Game Courier games list, and possibly other lists (as of now, this might include whether a variant is given as a Primary Item, as chosen by editor[s], for the main alphabetical index). All this depends how much people are willing to look at all these other lists outside of the Favorites one, though.

Fwiw, I once suggested to Fergus in a Comment here that for the Favorites list, perhaps favourited games might not be shown on said list until they were favourited at least twice, to keep the Favorites list reasonably short (at least for a while).

First it seems that for some reason I had butchered this thread's title :(! Sorry! Any ideea how to change it?

(I've moved this thread under the Favorites page.)

The vast majority of people favorite only a small handful of games; these are the "gold hearts" games for those users.  For more granularity, there's the rating system in the comments, though we've mostly dropped support for that as a recommendation system due to disuse. (edited; see Kevin's next comment)

The more complicated we make the process, the more there is to quibble about specifics of implementation.  I like the Favorites list (mostly) as it stands.  I would consider developing a more complicated system, but would want it to be separate from this page.

A bit of information: at present, here's a table of how many favorites people have:

The average number of favorites (among those with a positive number) is 7.2.

Fwiw, here's the Average Game Ratings page, as linked to on the CVP main page under 'Which [variants] are the best?' I'm not absolutely sure, but I think this might be a relatively new page as started by Fergus:

http://www.chessvariants.com/index/avgratings.php

Thanks, Ben. Yesterday I have favd 44 games. I don't see myself in the list but thanks :)!

I did see myself in the end :)! Sorry :)!

I've recently made two lists for the Canadian Chess Federation (CFC) Discussion Board website, in a thread I started there about chess variants. The first list had a lot of relatively popular chess variants played in the world at large on it, from shogi to Seirawan Chess (similar to the list I recently gave in another CVP thread, i.e. Ideas for future of chess variants). I also gave a dozen chess variants seperately as examples of distinctive, weird and wonderful CVs, which I thought all seemed fairly playable, yet generally not having too many rules or highly unusual board shapes (as taken from my own long [approx. 130] CVP list of personal favorites). This list of 12 may seem too arbitrary, but I thought I'd share it in case it inspires, or has some value otherwise that I didn't anticipate. Anyway, if I one day could choose to rank some of my favorites as higher than the rest, perhaps this bunch would be close to the top, regardless of whether I currently play all of them well, or at all:

1. Alice Chess;

2. Altair;

3. Backlash;

4. Chaturanga - Four Kings - Double Mate;

5. Chess with Different Armies;

6. Clockwork Orange Chess;

7. Knightmare Chess;

8. Kriegspiel;

9. Maxima;

10. Pocket Mutation Chess;

11. Rococo;

12. Storm the Ivory Tower.

P.S.:

From the Recognized Variants thread, on the topic of Primary Items (from an exchange I had with Fergus that I'd forgotten - may be a good idea to post this in the present thread, too):

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2020-04-03 EDT 'That's something that David Howe instituted so that the most important pages would be at the top of the list when listing search results. I think he largely included the Recognized Variants, though some other things are also included. It might be a good idea to replace Recognized Variants and Primary Items with Featured Games and Featured Pages, the former being a subset of the latter. Featured pages would be ones that we want to draw greater attention to or that we expect users would be looking for more. These could include links to games that enough of us think highly of, links to well-known or popular games, and links to commercially available commercial games. These could be featured at the top of search results, as Primary Items are, but referred to as Featured Pages instead. Also, they could be a bit more dynamic than Recognized Variants, meaning we could drop something from the Featured Pages, such as a commercial game no longer being made, or a game that has been reevaluated.'

Continued from another thread:

Wrt the favouriting threshold, I wonder whether it might be an idea for favourites to be weighted? Such that people with less discriminating tastes who have many ‘favourites’ are weighted less than those who make very selective choices? Seems to me that would incentivise keeping your list short while still allowing the flexibility to show appreciation for many games for those who need(?) it (to which ofc the counterpoint is ꝥ that's what Ratings are for, though those are completely lacking in discoverability and are vulnerable to the same issues). Ofc how to determine the right weighting (obviously(?) it can't just be inverse‐linear) is a potentially subtle question.

the situation where childish inventors would create a massive number of garbage variants just to create voting power

I'd imagine that's what the Editors are there to avoid?

But in general I agree that favouriting your own games is something that really ought to be earned; I'd be tempted to propose that could be factored in to a weighting algorithm too, though at that point it starts becoming really quite complicated

EDIT: looking at this comment thread I see that some form of more complex system has been proposed but at least Ben would prefer it to be a separate system; I'd note two things wrt this suggestion: firstly it would be more complicated, but only on the back end — the user experience (selecting whether or not a game is a ‘favourite’) remains identical; secondly, it seems a little odd to be proliferating systems like this — the Featured Games programme is kinda already on that threshold for me tbh, which is why I haven't really engaged with it (otherwise I probably would have been happy to second Metamachy, f.ex., though I don't disagree with H.G.'s assessment about diversity). Just because it might take a little more than 10s to invent a new discoverability system…

I thought about this too, and also came to the conclusion that inverse linear is not ideal. Furthermore, I would like to avoid fractional scores. A possibility that occurred to me was this: everyone has a 'budget' for favoring variants, and can choose to favor a variant multiple times. To favorite a variant N times would take N squared out of his budget, though. This should be enough to discourage excessively favoring a single variant.

E.g. if we set the budget to 128 (which is enough to accomodate the situation described in a posting lower down in this topic thread), people that would want to favor only a single variant could favor it 11 times; more typical people that favor 8 variants could assign each of those 4 times (giving the 'all on one' attempt not even 3 times as much weight), and less critical people who want to favor 127 would have to do with a single favor for each of those.

This would need enhancement of the interface to also allow users to favor variants multiple times, and 'unfavor' those they favored before, in order to make room for more favored variants. If we feel it is unnecessary for a user to distinguish between variants he favors, the current interface would suffice. But in reporting the score the votes of each user would be weighted by multiplying those with a number N, which is the largest integer that, squared and multiplied by the number of variants favored by the user would not exceed 128.

To implement the latter it would only be necessary to modify the script that prepares the overview page. I don't think we would need a new 'awards program' for that. We can even have this page show both numbers: the weighted sums, (on which the variants are then sorted), as well as the number of users that contributed to this total (as it does now).

The weighted totals could be calculated in two iterations: the first one would discard all self-voting. After that it would be calculated how many weighted votes each user received, and how many self-votes this would earn him. In the second iteration the self-votes of users that did not go 'over budget' in self-voting would be counted in the weighted total.

In my opinion you are making a cathedral. It is too complex, just the maths there give me an headache. OK if we were a community with thousands of voters, but we are few tens. Very soon you will have less people participating than fingers in one hand.

First, I want to say that I hope that you understood that my call for "seconding" Metamachy was a kind of joke. I don't care at all about this Featured Games stuff. It is not my sort of things. Neither Metamachy nor none of my variants need this.

Second, me too I think that, indeed, it would be interesting to shine some light on one "Innovative CV". Proposers would have to say why they propose one when doing so. Of course, no self-proposal.

The other criterias should be removed. If a CV is really interesting because it is innovative, THEN, it will be an incentive for someone to code it to be played somewhere, and for someone else to clean and arrange its web page. Currently, we are just doing the opposite.

Well, the users would not be exposed to the math, so they would not have to know anything about it. It is just a (not so big) one-time effort for the site developers to sort the variants mentioned on this page by a different criterion. Perhaps I should just make a clone of this page, and modify it to use the weighted sorting.

The criteria that the presentation should be in perfect shape are currently counterproductive, but only because we are extremely tardy in selecting a variant. People can propose or second all they like, it will be completely ignored until the last day of the month, and then all proposals will be dismissed because they are not sufficiently represented on this website, and something else will be chosen. If we would pick a variant, say, 1 month in advance, there would be time to fix the layout, include Interactive Diagrams, create a GC preset, etc. That way it would lead to perpetual improvement of the website.

(Can we please keep these two discussions on their relevant threads: Favorites and proposals for new/additional systems here, and the Featured variants on that page?)

Since the "127 favorites" from my 2018 comment on this thread came up, let me point out the reporting page that generates the table on demand. That user, right now, is up to 147 favorites, but has been overtaken by two users, with 187 and 389 favorites. Another thing to note is there are ~170 users who have favorited something. I'd be interested in seeing something broken down by self-favorites.

I'm pretty sure we used to have a cap on favorites, differentiated into three or so tiers (editors, contributors, members?). I'm in favor of doing something like that again, whether instituted as a points system to further distinguish "how much" someone favors a game or not. Simplicity in the UI is important though. Let's keep discussing.

Another thing I'd like to address: this list is now too long, IMO. I'd suggest dropping the one-favorite games, adding instead a link to a separate page for that list. Also note that there's a bug with favorited pages with no name or description provided here...

Well Ben, I have favorited quite a few games myself. And after asking if that is ok, I did it because I could. I have actually played and enjoyed all of them, though!

My apologies Ben, I had not seen that the conversation had slipped to a different thread in the Comment page. My comments were for the Featured list, not the Favorite list, again I'm sorry, I misunderstood.

Since the "127 favorites" from my 2018 comment on this thread came up, let me point out the reporting page that generates the table on demand. That user, right now, is up to 147 favorites, but has been overtaken by two users, with 187 and 389 favorites. Another thing to note is there are ~170 users who have favorited something. I'd be interested in seeing something broken down by self-favorites.

Well, it doesn't really matter what the maximum is. The score calculation can determine it. It could just scale up the weights of users that favored less than N-squared times fewer games by a factor N.

I had a go at improving the ranking of favorites by weighting the votes, approximately as 1 over the square root of the number of votes cast by the user, normalized to the most-voting user getting weight 1, and rounded down for the others. This mainly as an exercise for testing whether I understand enough of how the PHP scripts work here to implement such a change. There is no correction for self-voting yet.

The modified page is here. It displays both the total of the weighted votes (on which the list is sorted) and the number of people voting for it (the old sort key, which is now used as primary tie breaker).

That is cool, but maybe you could include a display of the rank!

I am not sure what you mean.

I now modified it to discard inventor votes in the calculation of the weighted total. Self-votes are still counted for determinig the weight a voter should get, though. (But because of rounding having a few extra self-votes usually would not decrease your weight for the other votes.) At the moment it displays the weighted total including the self votes, and the number of people voting for it (including self votes) in parentheses, just to judge how large the effect of these refinements is.

An interesting consequence is that there now also appear some games with a zero total at the bottom, where only the inventor favorited those. By comparing with the total including self votes it can be seen that weights run up to 19! (Presumably for persons that only favorited a single game.)

I'm not sure to well understand. With the weighting factor, someone who has favorised many games has a voice which counts less than someone who has favorised only one game. Is that correct or wrong?

Indeed, that is correct. If you have favorited 4 times as many games, your votes get 2 times lower weight. To avoid fractions, the person that casted the most votes is given weight 1. Currently that is someone who casted slightly less than 400 votes. That means that people that casted 100 - 400 all get weight 1, people that casted 44 - 100 votes get weight 2, casting 25 - 44 votes you get weight 3. If someone casted only a single vote that vote gets weight 19. So the weight increases with fewer votes, but it is not that everyone gets 400 votes and can give all of those to a single variant.

The general formula here is weight = sqrt(max_given_votes / given_votes), rounded down to an integer. Max_given_votes currently is 389, and sqrt(389) = 19.72 -> 19. Giving 2 votes the weight already drops to 13.93 -> 13, and for 3 votes to 11.39 -> 11. So another way of looking at this is that you get more votes to give if you distribute those over more variants.

This is still open for discussion. (E.g. we could also use a cube root instead of a square root, in which case the weight for a single vote would go up to 7, instead of 19.) But considering the large score the top contenders get this way, allowing the weight of a single vote to run up to 19 does not seem too disrupting.

Then, I'm not sure it is fair. Someone who is not fan of CV, or who just wants to please his friend who has made Turlutu chess, will vote for Turlutu chess and his voice will count x times mine who is enthusiast of CV and wanted to reward those I like or admire.

I prefer the system of 1 man 1 vote. Simpler and immediatly meaningful.

I would admit that self-votes are not accounted (but then, it would be nice to have a special sticker indicating "this variant is a preferred one of its author", because I wish to indicate which ones of my creations I prefer).

To avoid people having tons of preferred CV, which is like saying nothing as a matter of fact, I would understand that each user is limited to a maximum, maybe 50. With the possibility of removing a "like" of course, in order to favorise new ones.

The one-man-one-vote system is not so very different from the 1/sqrt(N) weighting. People that have casted 43 votes (close to the maximum of 50 that you propose) already get weight 3. So a weight of 19 does not advantage you as much as it sounds (but still a factor 6). It is mainly those that have casted more than 50 votes, which you don't want to allow at all, that get heavily discounted. With a more typical 10 votes the weight is still only 6.

With a cube root someone casting 48 votes would get weight 2, and those with more would be 50% discarded rather than being forbidden / ignored. While casting a single vote would give a weight of 7, only 3.5 times larger. With 10 votes the weight would be 3, only 50% more than with 48 votes.

The problem is that people giving 270 and 389 votes are already in the database, so what should we do with them? Completely ignoring all their votes seems a bit harsh, requiring them to 'unfavorite' several hundreds of variants a bit inhumane. It is like you say: if someone favorites tons of variants, it doesn't mean much. So it seems reasonable to reduce the weight of those votes, but a bit inflexible to reduce it by 100% always.

Perhaps the weight should be made to saturate at twice what you get for ~50 votes. Or even decrease if you favorite too few variants. That would thwart attempts to 'pump up' a single variant as a favor to a friend by people who otherwise do not care.

A special symbol could be added for variants preferred by its inventor. Like an asterisk behind the number of people that voted for it. This raises the question of how to put bounds on that, preventing inventors to automatically favor all their variants. Writing such a symbol is an all-or-nothing action, so you could do little else than omitting the symbol on all variants for an author who favorited, say, more than 25% of his submissions. This would then raise the technical problem that you would have to figure out how many games each author submitted, as he could have games that no one favorited. So going through the favorites list would not be enough, you would have to go through the entire database.

An alternative would be to allow one plus the number of his favorited variants divided by 3 (rounded down). Then inventors that never got any votes from others can only vote for one of their games (to vote for two you would need three favorited games). With 10 games favorited by others you could either vote for 4 of those, or 6 different ones.

I am not convinced by the fairness of one-man-one-vote. A variant that gets a vote from someone that voted 50 times can very well, even in the eyes of that person, rank below 49 other variants. While getting the vote from a person that only casted 10 votes means he thinks it belongs to the 10 best. So why should they get equal reward?

I'm now caught up on this discussion. I would propose having the script calculate two scores. One would be the raw score it calculates now, and the other would be an attenuated score that factors in how many games someone has marked as a favorite game. The formula I propose using for determining the value of someone's vote in calculating the attenuated score is this: min(1, 60/(n+50)) where n is the number of games someone has favorited. This will create fractional scores, which I'm not bothered with, as this would be a supplement to and not a replacement of the raw score. The page would then give two options for sorting the list. Since there is a difference of 10 between 60 and 50, this would allow someone to favorite up to ten games without any attenuation of his vote in the attenuated score. After ten votes, his votes would slowly reduce in value. At 70 votes, each vote would be worth only one half a vote. At 130, each would be worth one third. At 190, each would be worth a quarter. Continuing to add 60 more votes, 250 would be worth one fifth, 310 one sixth, etc. If we decide we want the value of votes to attenuate at a slower or faster rate, we could use different values than 60 and 50.