I just thought it’s strange to call a decimal comma a “European decimal point”. Wouldn’t it be strange to call a decimal point a “British decimal comma”?
Yes, this would be strange, because this is an English speaking server, and most of the users are American. So for all foreigners, even in some cases for the British too, generally the American version is default and any alternative should be clarified. That’s why it is the European decimal point. If this were a predominantly French server, maybe then we would say American/British decimal comma.
I assume our numbers look as strange to you as your numbers do to us?
I suppose we’re more exposed to decimal points than you are to decimal commas (especially in the digital age).
As a software engineer in an international company, I suppose I’m even more exposed to decimal points than the average Dutch person.
Still, I had no idea that a decimal comma is commonly called a “European decimal point” in the US (and possibly in Australia as well?).
I don’t think it’s commonly called anything, as I’ve never in my life seen a decimal comma outside of these forums.
Although the US is the predominant country, I don’t think most users are American on OGS. See this post:
but since this is an English speaking forum, I write numbers like 1234.12, while on a French forum I use 1234,12. Both conventions look natural, but 1,234.12 feels weird to me.
I just learned that, although that convention is used in many Commonwealth states, in the UK and the US the convention is 1 234.12 i.e. using a space as the thousands separator instead of a comma (at least in education, possibly with an exception for currency values). Decimal separator - Wikipedia
[I’m sorry for causing a thread derailment into numerical notation pedantry]
No you’re not
I can get behind this generally, but care needs to be taken to make it obvious it’s all one number.
Generally I think my bias makes the most sense because grammatically commas are less severe than periods, and I believe breaking up dollars for ease of readability is less severe than seperating dollars and cents.
Talking to myself , I just checked that.
The bulk OGS download is in SGF format, so we should be able to extract the number of moves… but I didn’t because it was too much work for me.
I extracted only main informations about the games, such as outcome and players’ ranks, but my subset of data is pretty useless here.
I would say that in the US, using a comma is more common than using a space as the thousands separator. However, using a space is possible and would be understood in many contexts.
Oh could you also do one about what % of games people resign at any given rank?
These are ranked games on 19x19 ended by resignation, by year:
They should be only games actually played on the server (no uploaded SGFs).
This is the shape of players’ ranks for those games (EDIT: this is just a subset of the data, full sample in the next message):
Nice question. I’ll work on that later
First thing: in the previous message I was posting a wrong picture.
Here is the shape for games that ended by resignation, having ranks for both players on the axes.
As you can see, there are a lot more points than before, since the previous one was just a test on a subset of data.
Ranks span from -67 up to 45.
This is a little confusing for me, since I’m used to this conversion table:
- 38 is for 9 dan
- 30 is for 1 dan
- 29 for 1 kyu, down to
- 5 for 25kyu
I’ve seen before numbers lower than 5, even negative ones, but not down to -67!
Similarly, I’ve seen before high numbers such as 39 or 40. I was classifying them as 9d+
Now I see that we have PRO players on OGS and their rank goes up to 45.
Of course there’s a lot of bots in the higher ranks. I don’t have an easy way to filter them out. I should pick them one by one, based on their names, which would be too hard for me.
There’s also a strange number of “zero” ranks which don’t seem correct.
As an example, we have a couple games by Yeonwoo as black, where her rank is 0.
But overall the “zero rank” players draw some stripes in the above chart, which seem strange.
To answer @_KoBa 's question, let’s take a look on how many games end by resignation, compared to the other possible outcomes, by year. These are ranked games on a 19x19 board.
Resignation is the highest part of games outcome. Then we have respectiverly scoring, timeout and cancellation.
If we look at percentages, the resignation share was increasing through the years. I’ve drawn a reference line at 50% value.
I then placed on the X axis the rank of the losing player instead of years.
This way we can compare game outcome against the rank for the player who possibly resigned the game. I removed ranks below 5 (25k). The chart goes up to rank 45, but there’s a very few games on the highest rank levels.
I drew reference lines for ranks 5 (25k), 30 (1 dan) and 38 (9 dan)
Looking at percentages, it seems that higher kyus tend to resign more than lower kyus, but the overall range is pretty consistent, spanning from about 40% to less than 60%…
In the dan zone the decreasing number of games is affecting a lot the chart. The trend is not clear. It seems that scoring tends to disappear. Resignation is still about the 50% of cases.
For the highest rank we have only few games and the chart becomes highly affected by accidents, such as cancellation and disconnection. This information is not very significant.
The above charts are based on all games available (ranked, 19x19).
I wonder if we could do any analysis based specifically on players:
- are there players that never resign?
- what is the incidence of resigned games for people who do resign sometimes?
People may have very different habits and approaches, but maybe the big numbers could draw some more general shape
I’d call it a convention at best. If it’s used with any frequency, I haven’t run into it living in the US. The closest thing I can thing of is using _
in numeric literals in programming, which many languages allow
Agreed (assuming you mean thin space; a full width space just looks ugly and confusing). I might use a half width space if I were trying to be unambiguous in an international context and didn’t think the context would disambiguate that I was using the 9,999.99 convention?
EDIT: I did a little more reading, and I think the narrow no-break space would be better. Either way, I just use the 9,999.99 convention