Why might someone "ping" another person online?

May 8, 2019 4:38 PM

The chess site I play on offers a "ping opponent" option while playing live games. I don't now what that means, which means I have no idea when/why I'd want want to do that. Can someone please explain? Gracias.
posted by BadgerDoctor to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (13 answers total)

I case the other person has gone AFK, maybe?
posted by humboldt32 at 4:39 PM on May 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

To see if someone is online before you invite them to play?
posted by dgeiser13 at 4:42 PM on May 8, 2019

Best answer: Ping is a thing a computer can do with another computer where computer 1 sends an "Are you there" signal and computer 2 says "Yes." It's been used in more colloquial speech in a way like "Hey ping me when you get into town" so it can mean small contact in any number of ways.

In your context it would be a way to send a small signal to an opponent "Hey are you there?"
posted by jessamyn at 4:42 PM on May 8, 2019 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Yeah, it should prompt the other person to respond (maybe by sending back their own "ping") so you can tell whether they are still around, or have wandered away. ("AFK" = "away from keyboard")

You would use this if your opponent has been sitting idle for a long time and you aren't sure whether they are still paying attention to the game.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:43 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

A 'ping' is just a "hey are you there?" -- usually a beep sound.
posted by Pastor of Muppets at 4:43 PM on May 8, 2019

Another thing it might be doing: this website suggests when playing chess, you might want to figure out the lag time between your computer and their computer; it's possible the "ping" here refers to functionality similar to the "ping" command on a *nix command line.
posted by foxfirefey at 4:48 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

(Not that you asked but it’s an onomatopoeia for the sound of a sonar pulse, like the one submarines use, that’s used to tell via echo whether something is there, and how far it is. In unrelated news, the movie of The Hunt for Red October has held up remarkably well.)
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 5:26 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]

It's the name of a unix program that uses one of the internet's maintenance protocols, ICMP, to check if there is a connection from one computer to another.
posted by sammyo at 5:57 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think it matters because serious chess players are playing with a timer and even a tiny bit of lag is a pain, as discussed here.
posted by selfmedicating at 6:14 PM on May 8, 2019

selfmedicating makes a great point. Ping has entered common usage to just mean remind/nudge, but as described in sammyo's link, the original command in Unix didn't just qualitatively test a connection, it told you how long it took your computer to connect to the other one in question. I have many memories of chatting with someone in our university's unix environment back in the day and pinging them to see if they weren't responding BC they were afk or because they had major lag.
posted by solotoro at 4:12 AM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Any "pinging" done to address timer issues around lag would be done seamlessly in the background as a function of the program and it's networking. As opposed to a user initiated function as the OP suggests.
posted by humboldt32 at 8:29 AM on May 9, 2019

The documentation for Playchess.com says:

Ping opponent: This sends a ping to your opponent and displays the lag time in the chat window.

posted by mbrubeck at 9:17 AM on May 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

The term "ping" is kind of inspired by sonar, if that helps conceptualize it. ("One ping only, Vasily") One machine sends a special kind of network message to the other machine, and the other machine (if it gets the message and is cooperating) will send an "I heard that!" response, and the first machine can measure the time between sending and receipt.
posted by rmd1023 at 11:49 AM on May 10, 2019 [1 favorite]