1eyedjack, on Mar 8 2008, 09:25 PM, said:
Ugh! not a happy first experience
For a while I have been wondering about the net gains and losses enjoyed in the long term by opening 1N on 5422 shapes, so I thought I would take advantage of "free Saturday" to try out BrBr which hitherto looked beyond my capabilities, but hey, it was a free trial and if I could master this simple search I was on the cusp of going for it.
So I started by asking the dataset to find all hands where 1NT had been opened and where opener had 5422 shape, and left it running. And running. And running. I must have started it off at about 21:00 local time (give or take), but hoped that Saturday didn't expire State-side for another 8 hours or so.
After about 3 hours the hand counters were still incrementing, which to my mind suggested that it was not finished. Having spent a day erecting a glass-house I was a bit knackered so I thought I would catch a kip and check back in again at about 04:00. As it happened I woke up again at 02:00, looked at the screen and what do I see? A pop-up message at about 01:00 saying that I seem to be undertaking a large search and to send an email immediately or I will be disconnected (no email address was supplied, even if I had been awake at 01:00 to respond), and another pop-up (presumably sent a few minutes later) confirming that I had been disconnected. I don't even have the benefit of a statistical analysis of the 2000 odd hands out of about 40K that it had already identified.
Not a happy bunny.
This is a poor design for a search... if you have stayed at the computer, you would have seen the message from stephen pickett offering you help so that you don't need to just sit there and let the hand records churn away.
Since you were away from the computer, what happened was his popup menu when unanswered, and after a while of no-activity, you were "timed-out". All would not be lost if you had simply clicked any of the "connect" buttons found on several of the search tabs, you would have been re-connected and your search, as painfully as you designed, would have continued.
So what was happening, was you were offered help to make your life easier, and the disconnect message was, well sounded rather rude, ok, but you could have reconnected and if you had answered it (or at least clicked the "ok" button to show you were there, it would have continued no problem.
Brute force searches can be quite slow, as you noted, you spent hours on this search, and were probably not close to finished. On the plus side for us, you were hammering away for hours without bringing down the site, or disrupting other users who were also testing the system. On the down side for you, you went to sleep while letting it run, and it is not clear it would be finished when you woke up. You are not the only one to get such a message... han was given one too, and he contacted me, and I offered to help show him how to improve his search strategy.
In reality, your search should not take more than 15-30 minutes or so. So you can see why help was trying to be offered. There is no way you would know how to choose the best search stategies from scratch. We have some guidence in our old newsletters (see
http://www.homebasec...com/newsletters) and there are hints within the help files on bridgebrowser, but the best strategy is for us to make some how to videos showing the fast way to do searches like what you wanted.
OF course, I wonder if you watched the videos? But anyway, we need to post some videos on how to use indexed searches to speed things along. To "reconnect" all you need do is press the "connect" button without closing the program (so nothing is lost). OF course, your "painful" experience will spur me to create some tip videos showing how to do searches like what you tried to do.. maybe i will even use your specific example, why not? A reasonable one to show.
First things first, the databases have "indexed" and "non-indexed" terms. If you search on indexed terms (like player name or contract) the search is fast. 54 hands are not indexed. 54 hands with specific hcp are not indexed. So this becomes painfully slow to search on those items. However, there is a way to quickly build an index using the "brd Shaper/hcp" tab. When you use this tab, you tell it the number of hcp, the shape, etc you want. Then you can choose the whatever additional criteria you want as "aux terms". This probably doesn't make sense to everyone right now. But i could have walked you through it in 5 or 6 mintues, and a movie will make it very clear.
So,
- the message was an attempt to help, despite the way it sounded.
- if you failed to respond to the message, you would have been disconnected in about 30 minutes anyway...software autodisconnects for no activity
- Connect button puts you right back where you were, no lost data if you are ever disconnected, nothing lost,
- perhaps having two people on line most of the day to offer help wasn't enough, one on the server and me floating, but one test was to see what people would do. Most people managed ok, at least from what i am hearing back. And if we could have chatted with you, i could have helped with your search so that you would not have to worry about getting it done in time.
Anyway, what they say in your case maybe true. You get what you paid for. In your case you paid nothing, and seems you got about the same. I would say I learned from your experience, but i already learned from my own that there are right ways and wrong ways to do searches. I too have collected data for hours and hours the way you did... one problem you will run into is that after collecting about 500000 hands or so, your computer will fail (memory dependent). This is another reason stephen tried to step in and direct you to him or me. But i will have to work on insturctions for this type of search (I think one of the newsletters discusses this issue, if so, it will be one of the late ones).
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ing) tr. v. - Any bid made by bridge player with which partner disagrees.