Life In 19x19

Anoek (one of the devs at online-go.com) was kind enough to dump some information from the player database and let me do some simple analysis of it. The result is here, including a histogram of ranks of active players:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/thouis ... 14ff802f92

Since they eliminated 'guest' users, I would think the user database is tainted with an ever growing number of use-once-and-throw-away random user names like qwerty and asdfg. I am not sure what the thinking was behind that change, but I think it showed an overly optimistic view of human nature.

True. These are reflected in the upper dark bar in the graphs under "Days since active vs days since registered". Luckily, there's a dark bar on the bottom of those plots indicating a large number of players that hang around.

In graph 12 there are a few dots in the 6/7d with several hundred games region. I presume one of these is me, but who are the others? Are there some new active strong players? When I left I thought I was the only one that rank with many games. Maybe Sadaharu has played a lot of 9x9s?

P.S. I suppose they could be real time players too now.

vitality, Mikasa, wtw, Sadaharu, crazystone (not the program), Ukasuhs all have >100 games, all rated above 2400 (4d).

It looks like guest accounts still exist (you can join chat directly from the login page, as well as browse games). They're just not as obvious.