Scores bug 11th – 18th January
On Wednesday 18th, we spotted some strange data patterns with user scores (and a few users also wrote in). After a lengthy investigation, we discovered that a pesky gremlin had somehow crept into Kwiziq’s super brain at some point between 5am and 6am UK time on Wednesday 11th. In fact, the bug had been happening on a much less serious basis for a lot longer. Unfortunately, it was extremely hard to spot because it wasn’t repeatable and only happened sporadically until the last week. (Nerdy details*)
The good news is, we’ve not only fixed the bug, but programmed KwizBot to go back and regenerate all the scores, improvement timelines and Brainmaps for all affected users. He spent the weekend regenerating and generally healing himself, and his understanding of your French grammar proficiency is all top-notch again.
If you joined Kwiziq between the 11th and the 18th January – or took kwizzes that week – then you’ll have almost certainly been affected by KwizBot’s temporary glitch.
He’s very sorry and promises not to do it again.
Kwiziq Scores version 4.0 coming soon!
As some of you keen kwizzers know, there’s been a new update to KwizBot’s scoring system in development for some time. This was supposed to go out before Christmas but sadly had to be postponed. It’s very close to being finished and KwizBot will be getting another brain upgrade hopefully within in the next week or so.
The new scoring system fixes a problem which prevents students from scoring 100% in some topics and will make going for your gold shields and foundation trophies for levels (and the much sought after Kwiziq kudos points) somewhat easier as a result.
We’ll keep you posted!
Gruff
* It was caused by an unexpected edge-case where two of our servers’ internal clocks drifted out of sync during high CPU load which had the knock-on effect of causing our some data denormalisation triggers to lose visibility on the most recent kwiz data in an unpredictable and non-deterministic way because of a race condition which was never supposed to happen. Which also makes a great chat up line, no?
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.