if you allow unlimited blocks, then the combined number of blocks could eventually exceed the possible positions on a chess board.
This would be bad, because then chess.com would have to purchase another hard drive and all you non paying members would have to see more advertising (to subsidise us paying members).
Hum... No. Do the math again. The max number of blocks is a poor square function of the number of members, when the number of possible positions is more like an exponential.
Assuming the storage of blocks is made by writing the names of people blocked under each user's profile (which is clearly suboptimal), with an average name of 10 octets and 100 000 players that block each other in the group (that's already a good time spent clicking 'block') it makes a poor 100 Go. That's nothing compared to the games database.
Storage place is really not the problem with many blocks. The absence of interactions between players eg the difficulty to match them.
You forget that once everyone is blocking everyone, there will be an exponential ballooning of sockpuppets to evade all the blockages and allow games to be played. Once you have created millions of puppets blocking millions of users + each of those users millions of sockpuppets, which are themseleves blocking all the other sockpuppets, the combined total is going increase the hard drive density to something approaching critical black hole mass. Back of the envelope calculations give a Scwarzchild radius of nearly .31415926 inches.
Games databases, on the other hand, are pretty trivial, what with the hashing of duplicate positions and linking to existing Capablanca endgames, which pretty much cover all possibilites anyway.
And then, paying membership becomes compulsory.
And mods start racketting users to remove them from others' block list.
And then the universe collapses.
OK. OK. I'm out.
if you allow unlimited blocks, then the combined number of blocks could eventually exceed the possible positions on a chess board.
This would be bad, because then chess.com would have to purchase another hard drive and all you non paying members would have to see more advertising (to subsidise us paying members).
Hum... No. Do the math again. The max number of blocks is a poor square function of the number of members, when the number of possible positions is more like an exponential.
Assuming the storage of blocks is made by writing the names of people blocked under each user's profile (which is clearly suboptimal), with an average name of 10 octets and 100 000 players that block each other in the group (that's already a good time spent clicking 'block') it makes a poor 100 Go. That's nothing compared to the games database.
Storage place is really not the problem with many blocks. The absence of interactions between players eg the difficulty to match them.
You forget that once everyone is blocking everyone, there will be an exponential ballooning of sockpuppets to evade all the blockages and allow games to be played. Once you have created millions of puppets blocking millions of users + each of those users millions of sockpuppets, which are themseleves blocking all the other sockpuppets, the combined total is going increase the hard drive density to something approaching critical black hole mass. Back of the envelope calculations give a Scwarzchild radius of nearly .31415926 inches.
Games databases, on the other hand, are pretty trivial, what with the hashing of duplicate positions and linking to existing Capablanca endgames, which pretty much cover all possibilites anyway.