Biographer Bistro (kibitz #18239)

Can tournaments/events that spans multi-years have a link to previous and next, like kibitz'n pages, or maybe even possible, jump to box?

Example: If I am viewing 2018 US Championship, and I want to go to 2012, (jump to box) or if someone is viewing 2015 Gibraltar (this tournament page would have Previous and Next) and want to go to 2016.

Here's how we've tackled it. Suppose you're on the page for the 4th Euwe Memorial (1990). You may wonder if we have a page for the 3rd Euwe Memorial. You guess it was in 1989 but you're not even sure of that. You may also want to learn more about the 5th (assuming there was one.)

Luckily, our tireless CG editors have already written into the introductory article many links to the previous and next events, if they exist. In this case the page reads:

<The 3rd Euwe Memorial (1989) and 5th Euwe Memorial (1991) were the previous and next tournaments in this series.>

Note that one is a link and the other isn't. That means that one is in the Tournament Index and the other (probably) isn't.

Clearly there are some problems with this approach. One, it relies on humans, so it's fallible. The CG editors don't always do this, and sometimes the tournament is added and nobody thinks to go update the adjacent events. And the format is never quite the same.

Also, not everybody knows to look at the bottom of the article. And we can't have neat little left and right arrows. And you can only go one forward and one backward.

Also it's important to note, if you're stuck on #3, and there is a #6 but #5 is absent, you're stuck on an island. (You can't leap to #6 no matter what you do.)

There's no page where you can see all the events in the group. There's no way that groups can have subgroups, even though that's how most very large events are structured. I think we all agree, it's not a perfect solution.

((73476 73627) (73477 85467) 73478)

Or, perhaps it's best in expanded format with helpful comments, shown below. Everything after a semicolon is just exposition to assist in future editing of the file.

( ; US Championship 2011

  (73476 ;Group A
   73627 ;Knock-Out Final
   )
  (73477 ;Group B
   85467 ;Group B Play-Off
   )
  73478 ;Women
)

Now the software will get this string <(73476 (73477 85467) 73478 73627)> and see that the events are:

US Championship (Group A) (2011)
US Championship (Knock-out) (2011)
US Championship (Group B) (2011)
US Championship (Group B play-off) (2011)
US Championship (Women) (2011)

Based on that, it already knows that the entire group can be rightly labeled "US Championship" with a year of "2011".

Technically this event has 3 elements (Group A, Group B, and Women) — not 5 groups, as two of the elements are subgroups.

If nothing else, this would allow us to automatically create a small link complex that shows something like this, without the need for CG editors to toil:

<<
US CHAMPIONSHIP (2011)
< Group A | Knock-Out > < Group B | Play-Off > < Women >
>>

But wait, it gets better. Imagine that all of our US Championships are set up in the format shown above. Now it's a simple matter of putting parentheses around all of them, so it looks like

( ;*** US Championships ***
72731; Showalter-Judd 1891
...
81337 ; 1962
79231 ; 1963/64
81336 ; 1966
...
( ;2011
  (73476 ;Group A
   73627 ;Knock-Out Final
   )
  (73477 ;Group B
   85467 ;Group B Play-Off
   )
  73478 ;Women
)
...
)

(Imagine it much longer than that, filling in "..." with countless US Championship data.)

Now we've declared that all of these tournaments, some of which are groups of tournaments unto themselves, we've defined a new "supergroup" called "US Championship (1891-2018)". One payoff would be link complexes that would naturally expand and collapse as you navigate. Any tournament could easily offer links to related tournament, whether they were concurrent or previous/next.

I just like the easy(ness) of being able to go from year-to-year in a tournament and see performance of a repeat player.

*except for an unknown diehard of Laser 11 (Computer) (lol, right?)

You see, what's happening is that there are two valid formats of PGN when it comes to certain moves. In this case it's Nxb4 vs Ndxb4. (Both are acceptable, because although there is a knight on c6, it is pinned.) They provided the Nxb4 format and we accepted it. Then they provided the Ndxb4 format, and a duplicate was created. So we deleted the first one assuming they changed their mind.

Then the next day they go back to Nxb4. A day later, it's Ndxb4 again. Later in that day, back to the Nxb4. I can't account for why they do that. For now I'm just deleting the extraneous ones as they pop up.

"sorry, but if you say the word literally inside Continental, you have five minutes to finish your drink, and then you must leave."

The one exception I ran into was what we call "Class Championships" (at least in the states) — usually it's a big open of players of all different ratings, and your placement in your rating category determines your prize. Sometimes states combine this with their state championship, but not always. Florida is one state where the events are separate. So it might wrongly say "Class Championship" in a few places where I didn't spot it by hand, but I think we can live with that. It will be easier to fix the exceptions than the typical cases.

<Aaaaaall right, I've updated the bio links :)> I was going to do that next; you beat me to it! I still need to write software to reprocess all the HTML from the bios, if I haven't already.