ChessJam and Robots – A.I. saves the day
A few days ago, I blogged about the roll-out of ChessJam, an online chess app built on Flex/AIR, ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services. The roll-out has gone well but we have quickly learned that our real challenge is creating a new chess playing community! From analyzing our logs, here is the typical experience over the past few days:
- User installs the app, creates a profile
- User clicks around looking for someone to play with but finds nobody so they don’t even get the gaming experience
- User leaves the app after spending an average of 90 seconds
- Five minutes later, another user logs in and repeats the cycle!
We discussed a few options:
- Hiring middle-school kids to staff the room for $1/hr
- Me take a sabbatical now and play chess 24/7
- Employ some robots!
We went with option #3. If you were one of the users that went through the 90 second experience described above, come back and play a bot. Hopefully you’ll also see a few humans hanging out to play.
If your trial has run out, email us at chessjam -at- gmail -dot- com and we’ll get you going again.
To learn more about ChessJam, read my previous post.
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Try posting at chess.com. You’d get a ton of publicity.
Ben said this on October 19, 2009 at 9:25 pm |
One more way is to provide an option for non-real time game, where users can log-in, submit their move and so on..in short correspondence. Although real time in very cool..correspondence chess will go long way to build a devoted community
Sandeep said this on October 26, 2009 at 6:20 am |
It’s definitely on our list…hopefully in the next few weeks right after we get multiple-games at once finished.
Thanks!
Greg
gregorywilson said this on October 26, 2009 at 6:50 am |