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Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

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Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#121

Post by creepydata »

chesserik wrote: post #74
windowshopping wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can help you understand how and why! Computers set limits internally on how big numbers can be when they're keeping track of stuff. Your developers had given each game a number to identify it. So your first game was #1, the 40th game was #40, and so on. The limit for how big the number could be was a bit over 2 billion, and your players have just now played a bit over 2 billion games, and so that id number suddenl…

Yes - I understand HOW it happened, just not sure WHY. Meaning, I'm not sure what the developer was thinking, and at this point, I'm not going to track down exactly who it was and point fingers. I think everyone has learned enough through this highly interesting bug. It certainly was interesting to see the slack room exploding with theories and debugging. A new iOS client has been submitted to Apple (hurry plz!!!), a…

This is an fairly easy mistake to make for a novice developer to make. It even has a specific name - integer overflow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_overflow

The original Pacman crashes at level 256 for the same reason. - http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Map_256_Glitch

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#122

Post by lstamour »

brianwawok wrote: post #120
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see: IPv4 vs IPv6. Remember, these fancy computing devices were built for the rich and the government, not for the average joe, noone thought computing would be this easily accessible.

Except that isn't a great example because with Nat, ip4 can get us oodles of devices still. Can't really use NAT on a primary key...

Sharding, or a second key, or detecting the iPad and using a lower number with an offset internally? Still requires special handling at one end or another.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#124

Post by marcelluspye »

Zanta wrote: post #110
callumjones wrote: post #57

> For f sake how are we supposed to Anderstand that. I suppose your French fry maker is broken ? Didn't expect Chess.com and YouTube to have a crossover of users? Surprised there isn't active moderation on a site this size.

In my experience the chat on chess.com harbors a similar demographic to that of most video games. You'd think that chess would attract a more mature player base, but nope.

The only time I've observed people in real life acting like people in video games is at a chess tournament. Constantly trash-talking until they lose, then accusations of cheating. You certainly don't see this type at all (or most) chess events; I think the lack of entry free drew them out into the open.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#125

Post by i_cant_speel »

blktiger wrote: post #78
CGamesPlay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually read that quote as fully sarcastic.

As expected, sarcasm always translates correctly into textual form.

It's weird that you say that, because I always felt sarcasm didn't translate well to text.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#127

Post by sbov »

justin66 wrote: post #94
wongarsu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who among us is writing code today worried about how it will be used in 2052? This decade I knowingly wrote code that will break in 2036 [1]. My supervisor was against investing the time to do it future-proof (he will be retired by 2036), and I have good reason to believe the code will still be around by that time. I don't think I'm the only programmer in that position. [1] Library specific variant of the y2038 prob…

- This decade I knowingly wrote code that will breaks in 2038 Sure, but how bad was it really? Something you could fix relatively quickly with a little time and money, or an instance of Lovecraftian horror unleashed upon the world like so much COBOL code?

Even then, mix in people switching jobs, losing the knowledge of where or what all these landmines are, and add similar but unrelated issues across your entire codebase. This stuff adds up. I like to at least add stern log messages when we are at 10%-50% of the limitation. It's saved my ass before, especially when your base assumption can be faulty.

In one of those scenarios, where we expected the growth of an integer to last at least 100 years, due to certain unaccounted for pathological behaviors, a user burned through 20% of that in a single day. But we had heavy warnings around this, so we were able to address the problem before it escalated.

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#129

Post by jazoom »

i_cant_speel wrote: post #125
blktiger wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As expected, sarcasm always translates correctly into textual form.

It's weird that you say that, because I always felt sarcasm didn't translate well to text.

I think it was sarcasm

Re: Chess.com stopped working on 32bit iPads because 2^31 games have been played

#130

Post by Slartie »

vxxzy wrote: post #3

How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?

World of Warcraft for quite some time, I think about 4 years, had a "mysterious" limit for the maximum amount of gold that you could accumulate on a single character. It was 214.748 gold, 36 silver and 47 copper...

At least they put an actual check in there - you didn't suddenly overrun and wake up with an enormous debt, so I'll give them some credit for that ;-)

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