Bending Time

[tbhp]

As a sidebar, I'm also looking at the "thinking time" chart at the bottom of the replay here and trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the time scale on the X-axis... https://boardgamearena.com/gamereview?table=896163224 The first major tick is at 3 hours, which appears to be 3 hours after your opponent finally took a move, not 3 hours from the beginning of the game. And then the subsequent major ticks are labeled 1 day, 2 days, and then 4-9 days. Anybody following this thread know what's going on here?

The scale probably adjusts to only show the times when something happened. It's not supposed to be linear. It's like when reading a book, the parts where nothing interesting happens are skipped over. The number of the page is not supposed to be proportional to how much time has passed.

Which also fits very well the title of this thread, "bending time".

[Shivaware]

As a sidebar, I'm also looking at the "thinking time" chart at the bottom of the replay here and trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the time scale on the X-axis... https://boardgamearena.com/gamereview?table=896163224 The first major tick is at 3 hours, which appears to be 3 hours after your opponent finally took a move, not 3 hours from the beginning of the game. And then the subsequent major ticks are labeled 1 day, 2 days, and then 4-9 days. Anybody following this thread know what's going on here?

As far as I can see, the major ticks on these charts seem to have intervals whose duration is some power of 10 number of seconds. The actual values seem to measure the time since the first move, rather than when the game begins.

For this table, the major ticks are 100000 seconds = 1.1574 days apart. The first label seems to be arbitrarily chosen, probably to spread out the graph following some internal criteria I haven't deduced. The labels are then rounded to the nearest integer value of either minutes, hours, or days. The first one happens to be 3 hours (= 0.125 days). The next one is 0.125 + 1.1574 = 1.2824 days which is rounded to 1. The following values are 2.4398 and 3.5972, which are rounded to 2 and 4. Next come 4.7546, 5.9120, 7.0694, 8.2269, and 9.3843 which are rounded to 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Real-time game charts have intervals of 100, 1000, or maybe 10000 seconds.

[tbhp]

The actual values seem to measure the time since the first move, rather than when the game begins.

Yeah, that seems to be the logical way to do it, because if the game took days to start, what would be the point of having most of the graph show as empty and having to squeeze your eyes to look at the actually interesting part?

[BarnardsStar]

As far as I can see, the major ticks on these charts seem to have intervals whose duration is some power of 10 number of seconds. The actual values seem to measure the time since the first move, rather than when the game begins.

For this table, the major ticks are 100000 seconds = 1.1574 days apart. The first label seems to be arbitrarily chosen, probably to spread out the graph following some internal criteria I haven't deduced. The labels are then rounded to the nearest integer value of either minutes, hours, or days. The first one happens to be 3 hours (= 0.125 days). The next one is 0.125 + 1.1574 = 1.2824 days which is rounded to 1. The following values are 2.4398 and 3.5972, which are rounded to 2 and 4. Next come 4.7546, 5.9120, 7.0694, 8.2269, and 9.3843 which are rounded to 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

That looks to be accurate and completely screwy. Thanks for the great answer!

My supposition now is that the major ticks also line up with the number of seconds since the epoch (00:00:00 GMT on 1/1/1970)... notice that the 3-hour tick happens right when the opponent's thinking time first makes a small drop down from 36 hours to 34ish hours (at turn 72). According to the logs this was at 22:18:44 UTC on the 10th... and the number of seconds since the epoch at that point was 1786400324 -- just 5 minutes after a multiple of 100,000 (which is what it seems the major ticks represent). Later, at the 7 day tick, their thinking time drops substantially at turn 110 to 11ish hours ... this is at 21:18:35 UTC on the 17th, which was at epoch 1787001515 - 25 minutes after a multiple of 100k, which you can see by the way it doesn't quite line up on the graph - the 5 minute margin was a better alignment.

[Shivaware]

As far as I can see, the major ticks on these charts seem to have intervals whose duration is some power of 10 number of seconds. The actual values seem to measure the time since the first move, rather than when the game begins.

For this table, the major ticks are 100000 seconds = 1.1574 days apart. The first label seems to be arbitrarily chosen, probably to spread out the graph following some internal criteria I haven't deduced. The labels are then rounded to the nearest integer value of either minutes, hours, or days. The first one happens to be 3 hours (= 0.125 days). The next one is 0.125 + 1.1574 = 1.2824 days which is rounded to 1. The following values are 2.4398 and 3.5972, which are rounded to 2 and 4. Next come 4.7546, 5.9120, 7.0694, 8.2269, and 9.3843 which are rounded to 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

That looks to be accurate and completely screwy. Thanks for the great answer!

My supposition now is that the major ticks also line up with the number of seconds since the epoch (00:00:00 GMT on 1/1/1970)... notice that the 3-hour tick happens right when the opponent's thinking time first makes a small drop down from 36 hours to 34ish hours (at turn 72). According to the logs this was at 22:18:44 UTC on the 10th... and the number of seconds since the epoch at that point was 1786400324 -- just 5 minutes after a multiple of 100,000 (which is what it seems the major ticks represent). Later, at the 7 day tick, their thinking time drops substantially at turn 110 to 11ish hours ... this is at 21:18:35 UTC on the 17th, which was at epoch 1787001515 - 25 minutes after a multiple of 100k, which you can see by the way it doesn't quite line up on the graph - the 5 minute margin was a better alignment.

Yes, using those epoch times for the ticks sounds fairly plausible. Good insight!