Flickchart, and issues with
A recent hit to my productivity came in the discovery of a website called Flickchart. This tries to create a list of your favourite films by comparing them one by one. A laborious process, and a fun one, with some extremely tough choices at some points. Its certainly occupied me for quite a while. There are some irritations to the website though:1.Its clearly not capable of coping with the traffic it has managed to generate, and sometimes drops to a crawl. The design of the website is a little clunky, and its hard to tell if its actually responding to user input at some points, which is just messy
2.I am not happy with its sorting algorithms. It likes to match up similar films, but this isn't always useful. Films might be similar if they have the same director or genre, but if I have to compare a great film to three poor films of the same genre, the maximum rank my great film can acheive is fairly low, meaning a film I greatly admire may languish at #400 for a long time. In addition, this can mean that when I find another film I love and try to rate, it might compare it to a great film that hasn't been sorted properly yet. Ideally new films being added to the list should only be compared to films that have been compared at least 10 times, as otherwise their current position in the list may be a complete fluke.
3. I can't stop using the damn thing.
Labels: internet, random, rant
posted by Mr K @ 2:47 pm
4 Comments:
Incidentally, given a list with n components and a brand new entries I can place my new entry in a new position at a rate of 2^m for m comparisons.
So if I compare an item to a list with 200 entries, then with three entries I compare to the 100th entry, then if its better, to the 50th, then if better, to the 25th. Thats an eigth of the 200 entry. Typically I've found that on my list (which has about 800 films, so should be able to place new films at a 100 point) that films hover around the 400 point, whether they are good or bad. In fact, I've frequently rated a film as better than the three films its compared with and have it placed worse than a film rated worse than three others.
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Damn you Kieran
bwa ha ha!
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