How quickly are TCIs generated

Wondering how Criticker works, or have a question that doesn't seem to fit under requests or bugs?
Sebolains
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How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by Sebolains »

Hi! I'm new to the site, and I was just wondering how often TCIs are generated. I understand that I can prompt the generation of 50 TCIs manually, but I am referring to the automatic generation of them. As I understand it, (and correct me if I'm wrong) Criticker will slowly but constantly generate TCIs for me. Ideally, it refresh ALL the TCIs every day, but the amount of computation that would take obviously makes it impossible. But sure enough, as I understand it, the site will generate TCIs for me and all the users with enough time. So my question is just how fast that is. How many new TCIs are automatically generated for me every day/hour/minute?

Thank you so much for your help. I'm loving the site, and I'm planning on sticking around!!

zljk
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by zljk »

Did you figure it out somehow ? I'd also like to know...

livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

My impression is that TCIs are never calculated automatically.

I can see this, because I doubled the "minium movies in common" percentage, but it had no effect on my TCI list. Almost all of my TCIs are "old" ones that don't meet the threshold, and the few new ones I have which do meet the threshold, I got with the "generate 50 more TCIs" button. It doesn't appear as though new ones are added by themselves.

The only other occasions, where you receive 1 new TCI, is when another user clicks on your user profile or adds 50 TCIs and you are among them, then your mutual TCI is calculated and obviously updated in your list as well.

So my impression/observation (which - again - might be totall wrong) is, that TCI calculation must be triggered manually:
- when you add 50 TCIs or
- when another user adds you as part of his new 50 TCIs or
- when you click on a userprofile in your best TCI list
- or when another user clicks on your profile (which updates your mutual TCI)

There may be other triggers I am oblivious of, but I am afraid it's always a manual trigger.

My problem is, that all of my best 1000 TCIs are calculated based on the ~50 movies I have ranked here so far, but I have a few hundred movies rated on IMDB which I have not yet imported to criticker. When I add all these movie ratings, I want that to affect my TCI list accordingly, but it won't.

    As unfortunately there is no "delete all TCIs" button, it seems like I have only 2 choices:
    1) delete my account (which I don't want), create a new one and add all rankings BEFORE starting to generate TCIs.
    or
    2) click on the userprofile of all 1000 users in my "best TCI" list, tu update my TCI list (which will take forever and a day)

Or is there another solution ?


    You can test this by
    - either raising the "minimum movies in common" threshold dramatically and watch out how often new TCIs meeting the new threshold appear among your 50 best TCIs
    - or lowering the threshold and watch out how often new TCIs appear in your list, that are below your old threshold

    An even easier and also more correct way would be to take a screenshot of your TCI list and compare it a week later.

    Obviously you must not generate TCIs manually in the meantime, as the goal is to observe which (if any) TCIs are added without your intervention.

From my observations, few to none.
And if a new TCI is added/updated, this is probably because another user has manually triggered that event.

I would actually hope, that TCIs are all automatically updated periodically (in regular intervals), but I am afraid from what I can see, this does not seem the case.

When you update your userprofile, there is a section saying:

Films In Common Minimum (10-50%): [____]
Updating to a higher value removes TCIs not meeting the new minimum


But after updating to a higher value, the TCIs not meeting the new minimum are NOT removed as you can see when you click on your "best TCIs" list.
(They are however removed, when you click on them to view their userprofile. But agin, are we supposed to click on all 1000 TCIs in the list to remove them all !?)

Maybe one of the staff members can clarify ?
Thank you.
Last edited by livelove on Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

dardan
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by dardan »


livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

Dardan wrote:Have you tried info@criticker.com

No, because everyone should benefit from the staff's answer.
For this very reason PMs to admins/staff are generally discouraged, whenever the content can be posted on the forums just as well.


No, I don't see this as a feature request, but possibly a problem with the very core functionality of this site.

I will continue to observe for a while.
I hope I am missing something, but I am afraid I don't.
Last edited by livelove on Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:16 am, edited 2 times in total.

livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

OK, I have set my "Films in Common minimum" to 50% now and am waiting to see how long it takes for any TCIs meeting that 50% threshold to show up in my best TCI list without any manual TCI calculations on my behalf ("generate 50 more TCIs", etc.).

You can try this and you will see that there is NO immediate effect whatsoever on your best TCI list.
TCIs with <50% movies in common will NOT be removed from that list immediately.

Now I am waiting to see how long it takes
for new TCIs showing up and
for the TCIs below 50% to be removed.

livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

livelove wrote:OK, I have set my "Films in Common minimum" to 50% now and am waiting to see how long it takes for any TCIs meeting that 50% threshold to show up in my best TCI list […]

OK, it's been exactly 1 week now, that I raised the threshold to 50% and guess what, it did not change my "best TCI" list in any way. In my top 50 TCIs, all users are below the threshold. They should all be gone by now. But they are all there, still.

The first TCI meeting the threshold is at #165.
So #165 should actually be my #1 TCI, and #1-#164 should be all gone, but they aren't.

So without manual intervention (manually generating TCIs) it's clearly not working at all.

And even manually generating TCIs would not remove the TCIs below the threshold, but just worsen their ranking (IF I am lucky enough to generate better ones). So to remove TCIs below the threshold, I would still have to click manually on all of them, to make them disappear, which amounts to almost 1000 clicks ... quite tedious.

I can't believe, I am the only one who noticed that.

You can try out for yourself, set the threshold to 50% and then wait and see if your best TCI list is updated automatically (without your manual intervention, i.e. no manual generation of 50 new TCIs and no clicks on user profiles).

And if you think "oh well, I don't care, because I don't need to set my threshold as high as 50%" you are wrong, you should care, because the 50% is not the point. It rather goes to show that the system does not work, meaning that whenever you rate new movies, it does not affect your best TCI list, although it should. (It only affects "50 more TCIs" as well as TCI calculation when you click on a user profile.) So this problem affects everyone of you.

I will continue to wait and report back after 1 month, because if by then the best TCI list still has not updated, it never will on its own.

I guess, the threadstarter's original question "How quickly are TCIs generated?" can be answered by either "extremely rarely" or "never".
Last edited by livelove on Fri Oct 09, 2015 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

livelove wrote: I will continue to wait and report back after 1 month, because if by then the best TCI list still has not updated, it never will on its own.

Ok, more than 1 month has passed now, and my best TCI list still has not changed, and still none of my 150 best TCIs match my threshold setting, although they should ALL be gone by now!

This means that TCIs are NEVER generated automatically.

I'm so disappointed, because I love this site so much, but what is it good for, if ranking new movies has no effect whatsoever ? :( :cry:
Last edited by livelove on Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

dardan
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by dardan »

Doesn't spamming the 'generate 50 new TCI's' button for one minute work? It generates and removes ~8 people within your top 1000 TCI's with every click and you can click about 40x per minute. Either way, my PSI's still change much despite me not spamming that button. Regular use of the site as you described it refreshes it quickly enough for me, but then I have a lot more rankings/stability.

If you import your hundreds of rankings, then there will be a much higher threshold for people to be in your top 1000 (10% in common) and pretty much most of them will be discarded/ refreshed that way.

livelove
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Re: How quickly are TCIs generated

Post by livelove »

Hello Dardan. Many thanks for chiming in. I am thankful for every thought that goes into that issue, so that eventually some light will be shed onto it.

Dardan wrote:Doesn't spamming the 'generate 50 new TCI's' button for one minute work? It generates and removes ~8 people within your top 1000 TCI's with every click and you can click about 40x per minute.


Unfortunately, it does not work for me. There are several problems with that approach:
  • (1) We have to distinguish between ADDING TCIs and UPDATING TCIs. The 50 TCI button accomplishes only the former, not the latter.
  • (2) As a consequence of (1), the button does not remove any users in my TCI list below the threshold (not having enough films in common with me). As explained above, none of my 150 best TCIs meet the threshold.
  • (3) The 50 TCIs are not selected from users meeting your threshold but from ALL users. I just hit the 50 TCI button once and only 1 user had enough films in common, the other 49 didn't. And the 1 user was outside my 1000 best TCIs. You see that it won't work that way.
  • (4) Even if it did work (which it doesn't) and it would generate 8 people within your top 1000 as you said, it would only remove TCIs 993-1000 from your list, which are not the most important ones. The most important ones are your best TCIs, because the top-10 TCIs are used to calculate the PSI for each film. So if those top-10 users for any given movie have not been UPDATED, then your PSI value is false, obviously. Hence the need to UPDATE ALL your TCIs.
  • (5) So even if the adding did work fine (which it does not for me), it would always still leave wrong (not-updated) TCIs in your list, which poison your PSI values. The only way to get rid of the wrong TCI values would be a complete update. mpowell said that all your TCI values are updated regularly, but from my personal observation, this does not seem to be the case, or at least the intervals are longer than 5 weeks (which I doubt).

Dardan wrote:Either way, my PSI's still change much despite me not spamming that button.

The thread is mainly about TCIs. But just as a sidenote: Yes PSIs do change, but that is also due to the action of the other users. The critical point is, that CHANGING does not mean "getting more accurate". It could actually be just the opposite. As PSI are based on the top-10 TCIs that have rated the movie, the PSI are only accurate if the TCIs (on which they are based upon) are up-to-date. Which brings us back to the issue of not updated TCIs.

Dardan wrote: Regular use of the site as you described it refreshes it quickly enough for me, but then I have a lot more rankings/stability.

When you think about it, the more rankings you have, the MORE stable your TCIs and PSIs are supposed to be. On the flipside, a user like me, who has only few ranked movies, should see a lot more fluctuation of TCIs and PSI. It's logical that when you have 5000 movies ranked, adding 5 more movies should not change a lot, whereas for a user with 50 movies that's 10% new movies. So the argument, that you have a lot more rankings/stability is actually an argument that I should see more changes/fluctuation than you.

Dardan wrote: If you import your hundreds of rankings, then there will be a much higher threshold for people to be in your top 1000 (10% in common) and pretty much most of them will be discarded/refreshed that way.

Again, this in argument that underlines that there is a problem, rather than the opposite. As the absolute number of films needed to meet the threshold grows (by importing hundreds of rankings), fewer and fewer users will meet the threshold, so it will be less and less likely that the 50 TCI button will pick users meeting that threshold. So importing lots of movies will make my problem only worse.
ADDITIONALLY (as said above) the 50 TCI button does NOT refresh/update any TCIs, so no TCIs are discarded (as you said). It only pushes the worst TCIs beyond the top-1000, and that's if you lucky enough. It neither removes users below your threshold nor updates your existing TCIs. If you want to do just that (update TCI + delete it if below threshold) you actually have to click on the user profile. So the only way I currently see to update all your TCIs, is to click on all of those 1000 user profiles. Which would take ages. :(
Last edited by livelove on Fri Nov 06, 2015 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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