Answer given already, read posts 38 and down.
In short: bot spam (not go bots)
One question coming to my mind, is it because there is so much pollution that OGS don’t have a leaderboard with players rating classification? I mean most go servers have this.
I think if you take into account that some part of the site has existed for ~16 years and other aspects of it ~8 years maybe it’s not so surprising that one can have a lot of accounts registered but not all of them active.
There are less than 3,500 six-figure IDs left.
Get in whilst you can!
I see the palindrome ID 990099 (SpaceMonkey9) has played a few games since last month, including against William Choi (from GK).
Maybe a bit of topic, but some time ago we passed the 30.000 puzzles in OGS Puzzles.
@anoek needs to have the 1,000,000 account as an alt
then i will challenge him for it, later.
I would be very happy for the OGS team to somehow cheat to get #1,000,000.
That could be the official account of OGS on OGS.
At the current rate of sign-ups, we should hit 1,000,000 in about 6.5 days.
so, we wait.
for the fate of the universe.
How do you check without creating new account?
I do trial and error, change the number to say 950000 and see if it is an actual profile or an empty page. Then try 25000 back or forth and check again.
I’m sure there’s a smarter way tho
That one is a bit mysterious: somehow it is 6p, but it lost twice to a 1p here in an even ranked game…
We’re currently on player number 997562, in case anyone’s wondering. Mods have an all-seeing eye on this sort of thing.
Huh? SpaceMonkey9 is ?-ranked.
Hah - I confused that name with spaceman009 ! I guess you can see the similarity… the mystery remains though.
As numerous people have opined, including Redmond, the difference between the professional ranks has decreased over time.
Consider Match Handicap System at Sensei's Library – nearly a century ago, in 1924, a Nihon Kiin 7p was expected to be able to give a 2p two stones. Modern professionals would find this laughable.
The fact that professionals no longer play each other with handicap simply because of having different ranks indicates that there is less than a stone difference between the typical 1p and the ordinary 9p.
I remember the long-time Go teacher shygost, when he was on Clossius’ stream, commenting that when he began teaching in the '70s “there was a real difference between a 1p and a 6p”, that difference having presumably now largely eroded away.
To clarify, it’s my opinion that there are at least two stones difference between the very strongest and very weakest active professionals, and perhaps three or even four depending on how one defines “active” and “professional”.
My issue is with to what extent professional strength correlates to rank.
I’m sure its been mentioned elsewhere that the pro rank is more a mark of achievement than it is a measure of strength. The two correlate in that one expect someone with a lot of wins in domestic or international tournaments to be stronger than someone without but that doesn’t mean a new and upcoming world champion thats 1p or 2p isn’t stronger than a retiring 9p.
Yeah, I agree. That’s something I meant to make more clear.
I think I kind of knew that, now that you point it out. I hadn’t realised how significant it really is.