Author: Graham Laight
Date: 18:23:57 12/21/99
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On December 21, 1999 at 18:10:05, Fernando Villegas wrote: >On December 21, 1999 at 13:15:11, Graham Laight wrote: > >>I apologise for bringing up a subject which has undoubtedly already been >>discussed, but according to the SSDF ratings, Chess Tiger is 2696. >> >>According to the FIDE ratings, there are only 11 players in the world with a >>higher rating than this. >> >>Can this possibly be correct? >> >>Graham > >As it has been said before, Elo rating between computers are valid in he >communuty of computers and has a not very clear and perhaps definitively dark >relation with Elo of human players. In fact, there is not any known method to >determinate that relation, until now. Only guesses. If monkeys played chess, >they too would have an elo rating, but I am sure you would not equate the elo of >Sheeta with that of Gary. Sorry for the monkeys >Fernando If monkeys could play chess, their Elo rating would be very low - so they would be comparable to Gary. Monkey Elo would probably be about 100, Gary's is over 2800. Following the link on Albert Silver's post to the previous discussion, it appears that Albert (and others) are saying the same thing - that because you're not comparing like with like, the computer Elo ratings are not valid. I have yet to be convinced, I'm afraid. Firstly, on their web site, SSDF say they have done some research to ensure that their rating ranges are reasonably accurate. In the past, for example, they have used the Aegon tournament to check the validity of their rating ranges. Secondly, much of the argument revolved around the idea that computers are prone to making moves which are weak from the positional perspective - and that only 1 such weak move is needed to lose a game with a grandmaster. However, I would question this for the following reasons: * Computers have a remarkably good ability to survive the resulting "crushing" attacks. Sometimes, when they find an escape, they are able to go on and win the game * IMs and above tend to divide themselves into "active" players (e.g. Maurice Ashley) and "positional" players (e.g. Yasser Sierewan, Anatoly Karpov). Certainly players like Yasser were, in the past, able to beat computers (Yasser is a previous winner of Aegon). But players like Kasparov (who tends to lose to computers) must have all (or most) of the positional players' knowledge, because his Elo rating is so much higher than theirs. To organise another Aegon style tournament would probably cost about $120,000 and it's entirely possible that, because IBM have basically milked much of the publicity available for human v computer chess, that sponsorship would be very difficult to obtain. So, for the time being, we're stuck with jumping on every little scrap of information to try to create a (moving) picture of what the reality of the ratings is like. Graham
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