Is Kozman a bot?  Over 400 in one day on 7x8???  Pretty incredible.

Not as impressive as his 518 in one day on 8x4.

Look at the total number of plays for 8X4 ......540,590  Holy cow !  BUT, the avg. streak length is 42.

Look at the daily records for 10x6.  Huffy ain't no bot.

Kozman was on 7x8 today, 278 wins.

Pretty obvious jules is trying to deflect attention from that day she racked up 491 8x2s.  That's ok - we remember it well....

"Look at the total number of plays for 8X4 ......540,590  Holy cow !  BUT, the avg. streak length is 42."

When you factor time per game kozman is a top notch player. On 8x4 when I looked there were a lot of games the clock was running 15 or 20 minutes on easy games. True average was probably close to an even minute per game. Time per game being the same reason ELO doesn't reflect the true skill of some of the best players.

Titanic Tony stops the clock while he figures out the winning line with a deck of cards.  His true average time would be much higher.  It would be unfair to him to count time in figuring ELO.

What?

Oh.

Never mind.

TN - you are SO full of hooey, you silly wabbit

Ehhh.................What's up, Doc? 🐇

As a former moderator of the Freecell Chat, Julia is used to dealing with Freecell players in a somewhat brusque manner. She even once banished me to space for a short time, even though I'm completely harmless. So don't be surprised, TN, if she doesn't respond too politely to your friendly hint. 😉

What friendly hint?

Have you ever played 8x2?  There is no way I could get 491 in 8x2, and I haven't.  All you have to do is look at the scores.  He was just messing with me.

And if I banished to you outer space, you probably deserved it.  At least I thought you did.

I ain't worried about no bot - 'spec'ly no girl bot. 🤖😉

(Famous last words before being banished to 'wherever'?)

Hey Julia,

Your reputation for being strict has always made me tread lightly when responding. I mean, who wouldn't be cautious after a trip to outer space? 😅

It's pretty evident that achieving a streak of 491 in 8x2 is next to impossible. But doesn't that just highlight that TN was trying to playfully tease you? Similarly, back in the chat, I used to jest with some of the female participants. It seems you took my words at face value, giving you a reason to banish me. Just as you might've missed TN's playful intent, leading you to respond sharply to a friendly post.

All in good fun, though. Here's to more playful banter and fewer space trips!

Men - always the control freaks 🙄

In the Freecell Chat, the female moderators were much bigger control freaks than the men, at least from what I experienced. Just think of julia and mickyiw. They had the male chat participants firmly in their grasp with their banishments ...

You're on thin ice, SirPape.  Control freaks always need the last word.

If I didn't have the last word, he would still be using his potty chair.

See what I mean?

We women see right through your sneaky and nefarious ways. 

We rest our case.

Why am I on thin ice, firenze? 🤔 Truth be told, I've always had a certain admiration for control freaks. That's probably why I felt particularly drawn to the Freecell chat when Julia was moderating. 😊

Fir has mommy issues, if that isn't glaringly evident. 

Ok, ok, so he blames me for the circumcision.   In my defense, we didn't have YouTube back then.

>>>Sir Pape: "Truth be told, I've always had a certain admiration for control freaks. That's probably why I felt particularly drawn to the Freecell chat when Julia was moderating."

It was probably more being attracted to Julia than control freaks in general.

Being moderator had its perks. I was (inexplicably) a moderator of Freecell Chat for a brief time. It was mostly boring work, but it was during the time when winning a game automatically entered you into the chat room. Most people never noticed that they had been delivered into the chat room and simply played on. One day, I decided send all new entrants to the Janitor's Closet, a room you could enter but could not exit without exiting Chat altogether. Over a period of about 30 minutes, I stuffed about 400 people into that closet. Must have been a bit crowed. A supermoderator showed up and witnessed my shenanigans, and I was soon looking for new employment. 

BuzzClik, you might be right; Julia was indeed the nicest Freecell chat moderator. The thought of that overcrowded closet did make me smile. I understand why you did it. I've often wished that not every newbie could immediately join the chat, but only after proving themselves as serious players.

The nicest chat moderator was Crow, if you leave libby out of consideration.

"Any specific reason kozman would be a bot besides playing a large number of games and being a very fast solver?"

I only suspect and here are my reasons. I'll use the pronoun it.

- it only played 8x4 for a long time. Never tried any other variant or tournaments. This makes me think it was hardcoded to play the 8x4 only. Recently it started play other variants but I guess it didn't switch the variants frequently in a day. This makes me think it was parameterized to play a specific variant for a particular run.

- its average times are a bit strange. For example its 7x7 (1:28.813) is unexpectedly slow.

Similarly its 8x5 (1:33.711).

Compare them to my average times.

We have daily playlogs and we can further analyze its play times to see how humanly it is (or not). Out of curiosity, I think I'll do it. Stay tuned.

It's not a speed race for me. That would be anti- relaxing. But with high sum games like 7x8 and 10x6 I could do them in seconds per game but get bored with that at some point and quit playing those. I'm good, not fast, and not competitive, like I don't care when I lose. 

Oh, I was reading the thread from the top and didn't get through it yet. I may never.

Does a bot find a solution to the entire game and then move, or does the bot play like most humans and find a likely sequence and then move? If it's the first then I don't think "it" was a bot. I've looked at the play history when it was active and there were games lost very quickly. The only oddity I noticed were some of which were easy 8x4 games that took 15 or 16 minutes. If it were a person, I would say they left the game active, it timed out then was completed in a minute or 2 when resumed.

If it is a bot, I guess it finds the solution first and plays the moves. But it should play the moves slowly (inserting some delays between moves) otherwise it would be much faster and it would be suspicious to play too fast. I guess/suspect there was a bug in the code to calculate the delays and it played unexpectedly slow in 7x7 and 8x5. Do you have any other reasonable explanation for that slowness?

 "Do you have any other reasonable explanation for that slowness?"

What I mentioned above. Most games were in the one minute range. Other games were
 a little over 15 minutes which would indicate a time out and disconnect from the server and then a quick solve after resuming. Those games could easily skew the average time.

I guess it could be explained either as a person leaving a game in progress without saving or some kind of bot issue. I have no idea which it would be.

Or it could be a mix. Maybe he plays some (most?) of the games as a bot and some as himself. That could be an explanation for that slowness. Maybe he was playing the slow ones as himself.

Also note that shortly after this thread was started, he stopped playing.

Hop - in your first post, I think it shows 7x8 as being the unexpectedly slow variant. Given that your examples (7x8 & 8x5) are those variants with (potentially) the highest number of winning strategies available, might it be an experimental 'bot' which analyses all possible roads to victory and selects the quickest winning solution, thus also making it the slowest highway to heaven? Kind of ironic, but then maybe it's just wasteful thinking on my part...

Maybe.

By the way, I just noticed its (his?) 9x5 average is also slower than its 9x4. That's weird.

i'm not seeing anything to convince me kozman34 is a bot

cellmate - where's your sense of conspiratorial frivolity?

Has kozman34 ever communicated on the discussion board?

Might its name be an acronym? Knowledge of zen makes automation necessary? Numerical? Nefarious (Rule 34)?

For what it's worth, check out "Last Seen" =>

Individual Stats - kozman34

If his bot has been working on one game since Oct 2023, it's really going to impact his average time. 

kozman was mentioned in the message of the day because he/she/it was an early leader in ELO that was previously unknown to most. 

He/she/it posted the word "hey" on the ELO thread at the time as a greeting to other player because he/she/it and a couple of other players were asked to introduce themselves on the message boards.

The average times could easily be explained if he/she/it was trying to set a new daily record for a variant. He/she/it would spend more time carefully solving each game so an easier variant could have a longer average time. 

There's also no explanation why he/she/it had an average 8x4 streak of 42, but on certain days solved several hundred games in a row. Was the bot trying harder on those days? What are the statistical odds of a bot winning that large a variance from it's average?

"The average times could easily be explained if he/she/it was trying to set a new daily record for a variant. He/she/it would spend more time carefully solving each game so an easier variant could have a longer average time. "

7x7 is already is an easy variant. Can it be an explanation for the slowness (an average over more two thousand games played) in 7x8? Even worse than his 8x4 average. What kind of human is this?

9x4 should also be a piece of cake for someone very fast in 8x4. Yet its 9x5 average worse than his 9x4.

I'm not sure if you can look at the play history, but you're dealing with a person or thing that appeared to leave unsolved games open without saving. The server would disconnect after 15 minutes of no activity (as I understand it). When I had looked at the play history there would be 10 games averaging a minute and the next game would be 15:45. This would repeat at random intervals. Unless this could be easily explained by some normal programming code, it doesn't seem average time would be reliable evidence of human or other activity for kozman.

Also, by eye I didn't notice any correlation of the 15+ minute games with low percentage win rate games. 

"I'm not sure if you can look at the play history"

We have daily playlogs starting Sep 13, 2021. I guess he started the other variants after that date. I know that 15+ thing. Happens a lot to me because of poor connection or power loss, etc.

Here's a plot for 7x variants:

Maybe it's Denny's buddy with the low profile who works on this site and he can do stuff that others cannot, while he is trying to fix all your little bugs. 🐞🪲🦗🦟🐝🐜 Maybe he is allergic to transparency and breaks out in hives when questioned. Maybe he ain't got time for that. 

Then it might be a bee with psychosomatic tendencies under stress? Or a spelling bee, which would suggest it's a witch...

Could bee 

Maybe Hop and julia are right. I just noticed that after 15 years playing kozman disappeared  about 2 weeks after julia's OP asking if kozman was a bot. Interesting coincidence.

Several days after this thread was started, I made another remark about his slower times when it gets wider.

Here's the thread.

I also mentioned that coincidence above.

We talked about his incredible speed many times in many places in this forum and also invited him to play tournaments expecting he would do very well but it didn't occur.