Author: Peter Fendrich
Date: 07:18:30 02/19/01
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On February 19, 2001 at 00:29:42, Ricardo Gibert wrote: >On February 18, 2001 at 16:14:34, Peter Fendrich wrote: > >> >>In another message Bruce Moreland raised the question >>about how to interpret a match result. >>With a match result between two players, he wanted to >>express things like: >>Player1 is better than Player2 with a certain significance >>level. > >You can't do this with a *match* between the two players. It is possible that >player A can consistently beat Player B in a match, but player B consistently >has the higher rating as acquired against the general population of players. > >An example of how this would effect engine vs engine matches would be as >follows: Program A has an opening book that is optimized to beat program B. Not >surprisingly, program A edges out program B in any match played between the two, >but if program B performs better than program A against other programs, then >clearly program B is the "stronger" program even though program A is able to >"dominate" B. > >When you measure the performance of player A against player B, you are measuring >the ability of player A to "dominate" player B. You are *not* really measuring >the playing strength of A. You do that by measuring its performance against a >*population* of players. It's true enough that it is the internal strength between the two players that is meassured, but it's part of the overall uncertainty in the long run. It's the best you can do with just one match without ny prior knowledge about Pw and Pd. If you have some information about how Pw and Pd are distributed for the two players you could as well include that. Patterns like the one you refer to are, as I mentioned in the message, best captured by observation of the games and we shouldn't rely too much in figures like this. It is however interesting to get some indication of what the match result means on condition that you have no other knowledge or if it's included already. //Peter
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