Author: Ricardo Gibert
Date: 23:44:24 07/28/00
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On July 28, 2000 at 12:02:21, Ratko V Tomic wrote: >> There is no substitute for an objective assessment using a >> large number games against a _variety_ of players. > >You make valid points about bias due to playing styles and >holes in the knowledge/skill. But that still doesn't invalidate >the point, you were supposedly arguing against, that from the >small number of games a good human player will extract much better >judgment about the player's strength than the mechanical rating >calculator. > >After all, in your game example, you knew after a single >game what the weaknesses and strengths of your opponent were and >you rated his strengths in different phases. Yet the mechanical >rating calculation from a single game (or even a handfiul of games) >is useless. I only knew about his endgame weakness, because I was lucky. I could have easily lost sooner and not discovered the reason why he was only an A-player. Iwould have come away with a completely different and inaccurate assessment of his ability. You can't calculate strength from one game, because it is not possible nor can a GM judge strength from one game. That is not possible either. Remember that GMs disagree all the time. What happens if one GM assesses a player as 2300 and an another GM says the same player is only 1900? Which GM is right. It just isn't scientific. It is not objective. You can't go by one game and if you do many games, the GMs won't do any better than the rating system anyway. > >Similarly, if you analyze and think through a game against some new >program, even after a single serious game you will have a fairly >good sense on how strong it may be. At least against you. But the >exactly same caveat 'strength only against you' applies to the rating >calculator, too. The key difference is that after a single or a few games >you'll be able to predict the future scores of the program 'against >you' much better than the mechanical rating calculator. You have >extracted much more info out of a small number of games than the >rating calculator which counts only the final score. > >In conclusion, it is either out of malice or the blissful >ignorance (or even malicious ignorance) that some folks ridicule >Thorsten (and others) for making claims about the program >strengths which would clearly be unfounded if one were merely >calculating the ratings from the same small number of games.
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