Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:10:07 06/15/01
Go up one level in this thread
On June 15, 2001 at 18:41:00, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote: >On June 15, 2001 at 18:32:18, Ricardo Gibert wrote: > >>Why ressurrect this thread? Are you trolling? > >Because the issue at hand was never resolved. > >They said sorry-sorry, but the thread itself died >out because of the name-calling. > >>Hopefully, your post will be ignored by the parties involved. > >If they are unable to talk about this in a mature manner, >that's whay they should do. > >That's why I chose the subject as it is. I'd like to discuss >this further, but I realize it may not be possible. ELO is a very simple system. It measures exactly this: "On a broad average, what is the probability of points scored between two opponents in a tested pool of talent?" If the opponents are from different pools, the results are suspect. If the opponents played under different conditions, the results are suspect. If the number of trials is small, the results are suspect. So exactly what is it useful for? Imagine a USCF tournament. Two players have played hundreds of games against various opponents. If they should play against each other, what is the most likely outcome? [NOT to be confused with the actual outcome]. What classification should a player be in? Things like that. Imagine a SSDF test run. A program is tried against two dozen other programs, which have each played hundreds of games against each other. Many trials are run. We can now predict (with measured certainty) what will happen if we match this new program against another program from this pool of known strength, under exactly the same conditions of hardware, time control, etc. It does not answer this question: What happens if a USCF player plays a game against an SSDF program? It does not answer this question: What happens if Paul Morphy played against Garry Kasparov? It does not answer this question: Why will people never get the hang of the ELO system? ;-) Of course, it was never designed to address any of those.
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