Author: Thorsten Czub
Date: 15:50:13 02/28/98
Go up one level in this thread
>I think this shows up a common misconception about Elo's rating system. >This produces a rating "spread" (not absolute values) that can be used >to >directly compute the probability of any two players beating each other >based only on their Elo-computed ratings. It has *nothing* to do with >the corresponding FIDE rating a program might earn. Right. PROBABILITY !! Exactly ! The numbers do not tell us anything about chess. They tell us something about the chances about WHO WOULD MAYBE WIN IF they would play against each other. But this does not tell us about chess at all. > You might play two >programs against each other and after 1000 games end up with ratings >exactly 200 apart. You might then enter them in human tournaments to >play 1000 games each, and when you finish you might find they are only >50 rating points apart. Because you are using *two different player >pools* to compute those ratings. Elo's statistical analysis depends on >significant numbers of the "pool" playing each other, and it doesn't >take >into account the bizarre way computers do things. EXACTLY !! Sorry that my english is not that fine like yours. And that my examples are not rational but from different field of life. But my conclusions are the same Bob has. Computerchess is mainly mechanics and not biochemics. It fits totally different. >But even worse, the only important thing in the Elo system is the >"spread" >between two players, not the absolute values of their ratings. That's >where >we get off into no-mans-land statistically. IE Fritz 5 is 2585 (or so) >on the >SSDF list, while Hiarcs is 2535 (or so). I'd claim that both are 200 >rating >points too high, if you compare those numbers to human numbers. But the >spread might remain constant no matter what, and would continue to >predict >the same win/loss ratio... And if we find out that the difference of the fritz result to the hiarcs result is not a function of the spread alone but also of the METHODS that do the test connected to the way HOW a program gets his results...
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