Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 05:50:41 04/20/00
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On April 20, 2000 at 08:34:05, James T. Walker wrote: >On April 19, 2000 at 23:53:31, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>As I had mentioned a while back, I have a sack full of quad xeon 550 machines >>in a beowulf cluster. While waiting on a few final pieces to arrive, I decided >>to do what I thought was an interesting test: >> >>two identical machines, and I mean _identical_. Quad xeon 550's, 27 gigs of >>SCSI disks in a raid-0 (striping) configuration, 512mb of ram, etc. IE >>everything is identical, with all the 3-4-5 piece compressed tablebases, >>same opening books, etc. >> >>The only difference was that 'crafty' plays computers and humans, while scrappy >>only plays humans. Several of us had postulated over the years that if you only >>play humans, you can drive your rating through the roof. Using the same >>formulas (5 3 blitz or faster, 60 60 standard or faster, or most any bullet) >>I have been watching the two programs for a month now. And they seem to >>hover at the point scrappy == crafty+100, roughly. Standard has crafty >>actually higher, but that is because crafty is playing standard against >>computers, while scrappy is playing very little standard as humans seem to be >>avoiding that for the most part... and those that do play standard play crafty >>as it is better known. >> >>100 points was a surprise... as I thought it would be more. At present crafty >>is at 31126 and scrappy is at 3219 blitz (which is the most stable ratings since >>most games are blitz). >> >>It seems that not playing computers is _not_ a way to grossly inflate your >>rating, unless you consider 100 as inflated. Note that a rating of 3200 is >>very high, considering that there are not a lot of GM players that are rated >>even 3000. I watched scrappy play a 16 game match earlier this week, it won >>8 games, lost one, then one 7 more, for a 15-1 result (5 3 blitz). It lost 32 >>rating points for the effort. :) >> >>I am going to continue the experiment until I get the rest of the beowulf >>hardware (another quad box and a fast ethernet switch to complement the >>giganet switch). If you watch the ratings, you will get a feel for the >>difference in playing only humans and humans + computers... > >Hello Bob, >Interesting as it is, I think that to get a real feel for Crafty's strength on >ICC you need to change Crafty's formula to "Formula=rated". As long as Crafty >and most other computer accounts use 4 lines of formula to protect their ratings >against various attacks the ratings will forever be inflated. Just one opinion >of course. I believe that an "anything goes" attitude is the only way to get a >true rating. >Jim Walker This _is_ a true rating for the rating pool of players in the range 2800-3600. formula=rated will definitely lower the rating, the main reason is 'cheating'. An 1800 player will use a computer, and win a fair number of games and for every win by crafty, it will get zero rating points. Every loss will subtract 32. The only way to go is down. I really don't want to play in that 'pool' of mass cheating, which is a serious problem. Players rated 2800 and above are rarely cheaters, because they are mainly GM/IM players. And the cheaters that do make it up there get looked at very carefully and get caught anyway...
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