I’ve got a hankering to get some more information from the Web. The question I want answered with more certainty is: how good are the problems on the ATS? Look, I know that to a certain extent, any problem is good if you haven’t seen it and it gets you to exercise your chess muscles, but there are some problems that really drive home a point. There are those, too, that while you may pick something up from them, just don’t stand out as brilliant. And there are those that are just sort of… bleh.
Mandatory (?) Voting on Instructional Value
April 6th, 2009The Adaptive Tactics Server Tactical Weakness Blaster
March 8th, 2009The whole point of the Adaptive Tactics Server is to identify the tactical motifs you are weakest at and give you practice specifically in those areas. Each problem in the ATS problem set has been tagged with one or more types. These include such common tactical motifs as pin, skewer, decoy, undermining, etc. Your performance in each of these categories is saved and maintained by the server on the server.
Chess Training is Like Bodybuilding
March 1st, 2009Recently, I re-established contact with an old friend with whom I cut my teeth when I first started playing chess. He now teaches chess, and I’ve asked him to play the role of sherpa/cheerleader in my quest for chess improvement. That being said, I’ve been studying tactics for a while now and I wanted to add some color to my training routine.
Philosophy and Purpose of the Adaptive Tactics Server
February 6th, 2009Recently, on Weeding Out Bad Problems, I was forced to think about why certain problems, and by extension, certain types of problems, are included in the snufflenose chess problem collection. davidr has been really great about pointing out ambiguous positions and problems in the rotation that should be reexamined. One of the problems he pointed out was one in which there is an extremely huge material advantage in favor of one side. davidr asked, “who cares what White’s best move is when he’s two queens, a rook and a pawn up?”
Read the rest of this entry »
How To Eliminate Your Tactical Weaknesses Using the ATS
February 2nd, 2009So here’s the thing: as a standalone trainer, the Adaptive Tactics Server (ATS) hosted here on snufflenose.com is not the best system to use. The positions are not overly tricky or difficult. There aren’t all that many of them. But that is not the point of the ATS. The ATS helps you to find your tactical weaknesses. But what then?
ATS Update Jan 29, 2009
January 30th, 2009There are several new features and one important bug-fix. The bug involved the content-length of the user-settings page. Apparently the hosting company that I use for this site, has restrictions on the content length that the “Get” method can return that my test machine does not. As a result, I didn’t notice the problem for some time. That page should work as expected now.
Read the rest of this entry »
ATS Update Jan 28, 2009
January 28th, 2009There are a few more features, now. You can access them through the “ATS Settings” page, that now works as expected. I don’t have time at the moment to enumerate the features, but I will tonight. Bon Appetit!
ATS Update Feb 13, 2008
February 13th, 2008I know. It looks like nothing has been going on, right? Wrong. I’m working on what I think are some really neat new features. To implement them, though, I have to do a lot of work to add some data to the problem database. I’m plugging away, though. In the past few weeks I’ve been testing some stuff on my machine at home that I really like. The features are close to release-ready, but I’m still fooling with them to get them to work in a nice and neat manner. Here’s a teaser:
Do we have a problem here?
On Chess Problem Generation
November 24th, 2007On Weeding Out Bad Problems, davidr has been pointing out problems that are questionable. The problems that are clearly ambiguous are easy… they need to be changed or removed. But I need to fine tune how we share problems on the ATS.
Read the rest of this entry »
Commenting on Problems
February 2nd, 2008I saw that some of the problems that I think are very instructive are getting very low marks for instructional value. That made me scratch my head. I think to myself, “What’s wrong with this problem?” Sometimes, I think maybe people don’t get the problem right off, so they don’t like it so they give it low marks. Whatever. That’s not what the voting for Instructional Value is for. It is to root out positions that are less than useful in learning how the pieces fit together. Anyhow… because of this, I’ve spent some time working out a way for folks to comment on the problems.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bad problems, comments, instructional values
Posted in Chess | 2 Comments »