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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

#161

Post by thaumasiotes »

Sonorous wrote: post #113
sbov wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a whole class of problem - I wonder if there's a name for it. More examples include: talking about welfare being unnecessary because no one is starving. Or people on medications stopping because they feel better (while still on them).

For a pop-culture name, I'd call it the Head & Shoulders Problem, after those old shampoo commercials: "You use Head & Shoulders? But you don't have dandruff!" "Exactly!"

I wish. I do have dandruff (depending on where in the world I happen to be). Head & Shoulders does absolutely nothing.

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

#163

Post by ewjordan »

wvenable wrote: post #141
chesserik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Meaning, I'm not sure what the developer was thinking A 32bit integer is pretty much the default numeric type for the majority of programming tasks over the last 20 years. Even with 64bit CPUs, 32bit is still a common practice. Probably 99% of all programmers would make the same choice unless given specific requirements to support more than 2 billion values.

It's often not even an explicit choice, it's just default behavior.

Up until recently, Rails defaulted to 32 bit IDs, so there are a ton of apps out there that could have these issues, especially since Rails has always prided itself on providing sane defaults: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/26266

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

#164

Post by sundvor »

eponeponepon wrote: post #16

It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing. I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.

"Wait, we spent two million dollars servicing your fleet of 100 cars in the last year, and you're complaining that none of them broke down? Why spend all that money on maintenance when they just keep running?"

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

#165

Post by alanbernstein »

MichaelGG wrote: post #148
wpietri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Definitely not goofy. My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine. Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writin…

But a 2 digit date should take less than 7 bits. Were they using systems that didn't use 8 bit bytes? Why wouldn't the dates work from, say 1900 to 2155?

Good question! Nobody was writing 1900 + (year % 100), right?

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelGG wrote: post #148
wpietri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Definitely not goofy. My dad was a programmer in the early days. The machines he started on in the 1960s had 8 KB of RAM. Saving a byte then is the equivalent today of saving 1 MB on an 8 GB machine. Multiply that times, say, the thousands of customer orders you're trying to process and the goofy thing would be burning a lot of additional RAM because it might help somebody 35 years later. Who among us is writin…

But a 2 digit date should take less than 7 bits. Were they using systems that didn't use 8 bit bytes? Why wouldn't the dates work from, say 1900 to 2155?

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by blacksqr »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #4

"This was obviously an unforeseen bug that was nearly impossible to anticipate..." Snarky... Except that there were probably years of games to notice that you were approaching a "magic number" like 2^31.

On the contrary, this is pretty much the perfect example of the completely anticipatible bug.

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

#168

Post by rcthompson »

glhaynes wrote: post #34
eponeponepon wrote: post #16

It's fascinating... the Y2K problem never came to fruition because - arguably - of the immense effort put in behind the scenes by people who understood what might have happened if they hadn't. The end result has been that the entire class of problems is overlooked, because people see it as having been a fuss over nothing. I sometimes think it would've been better if a few things had visibly failed in January 2000.

Similar to how much effort goes into dealing with things like dangerous strains of bird flu, only to have people complain about how much money was spent on "nothing" when an outbreak doesn't occur.

I wonder if there's a general law here, something like "prevention is socially unsustainable".

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

#169

Post by sundvor »

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…

As a consolation: Over 2 billion games played - congratulations!

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

#170

Post by mirimir »

brlewis wrote: post #143
mirimir wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm is recursive.

Yours is the first comment in this chain that I can say pretty confidently isn't sarcasm. So it kind of breaks the chain, making the sarcasm in this chain non-recursive. Which means maybe you were being sarcastic after all? Actually I don't even know if my own comment is sarcasm or not.

Your comment comes across as sincere. Mine was sincere, but an overstatement. I should have said that sarcasm tends to be recursive, until broken by sincerity. Anyway, here's my take on the chain:

SomeHacker44 -- sincere

CGamesPlay -- sincere

blktiger -- sarcastic

i_cant_speel -- mildly sarcastic

jazoom -- sincere

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