Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Achieving 1 ELO error Margin

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 10:04:55 04/14/05

Go up one level in this thread


On April 14, 2005 at 11:17:56, Kolss wrote:

>On April 14, 2005 at 09:37:06, pavel wrote:
>
>>Not yet.
>>
>>In discussion with Dann. I wanted to try out to see how many games it would take
>>to achieve 1 ELO error margin. While I do agree with Dann that it would take
>>100,000s games to achieve this. I would like to see this in practice.
>>
>>So after the first 1000 games:
>>-------------------------------------------
>>
>>4/14/2005 9:27:02 AM :
>>
>>    Program                       Elo    +   -   Games   Score   Av.Op.  Draws
>>
>>  1 Aristarch 4.50              : 2519   19  19  1000    55.4 %   2481   23.3 %
>>  2 Yace Paderborn              : 2481   19  19  1000    44.6 %   2519   23.3 %

>The standard error (SE) goes down proportional to the square root of the number
>of events, i.e. games in this case - provided, as Uri pointed out, that the
>games are independent samples. Assuming that the fractions of wins, draws, and
>losses stay the same over the next games, you can expect to get the SE to a
>tenth (1.9) if you increase the number of games by a factor of 100 (100000).
>Your data would suggest that you need about 400000 games to get the SE down to 1
>ELO point. Have fun!

Actually, the standard deviation (which you call Standard error - yes?) is one
half of what Elostat shows. So the 100000 games will be good for 1%. It depends
on the strength difference, too. In this match, both opponents were of similar
strength, in which case one needs the fewest games, to get down the error. When
one engine score 95%, you will need many more games. This also is in accordance
to what one would expect.

It is difficult to judge, but I would fear, that with 100000 games, the games
are not really independent, even when both players use a very wide opening book.
IIRC, the typical "grandmaster only PGNs" from which many amateur opening books
are created, have a few 10000 games. Even if they all were different in the
first 20 moves or so, typical book selection algorithms of amateur engines would
not use them all, or would use the more popular systems more often than lesser
played variants. So in practice, it just will be impossible - even with lots of
patience and very fast time controls.

Regards,
Dieter



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.