Author: John Merlino
Date: 12:34:21 02/22/01
Go up one level in this thread
On February 22, 2001 at 10:35:12, Elizabeth Schwartz wrote: >On February 21, 2001 at 21:12:40, John Merlino wrote: > >>Thank you for saying so. However, there were only five personalities that were >>used in the test: Chessmaster, Josh Age 9, Willow, Sonja and Skippy -- basically >>personalities with ratings of approximately 2500, 2000, 1500, 1000 and 500 >>respectively. > >That's good to know! I wish there were one at my level. I'm currently somewhere >between 600 and 900, but I don't know where! BTW Skippy shows up as "643" on my >PII-266 laptop and "Sonja" shows up as 824. I have 10 600-level players, a >707, a 790, and two 800-level. > >I suspect that processor speed doesn't make a huge difference with the beginning >players just because they aren't looking ahead that much anyway and they're >still making dumb mistakes like hanging major pieces. If you're going to hang >your queen for no good reason, it doesn't matter how much you think about other >stuff. > >I don't feel that I have a good sense of what my "real" rating would be, at >least partly because the low-rated players seem erratic. Now that I know that >"skippy" I'm starting to play a lot on WCN but I don't really know how good >those ratings are (or where a good place to *ask* is). I got my first rating at >905 and am dropping steadily. I'm winning maybe one game in four against other >newcomers with high 3-digit ratings. > >At my level, with CM8000, the big temptation is to treat it like a video game >and go for the "high score" by playing tournament games mostly against the lower >rated players. But, it is more educational to play games that I am guaranteed to >lose against the higher-rated players. At this point, CM8000 still has me as >600-something, but when I play the 600-level opponents I get bored and sloppy. >Playing humans on the online servers keeps me honest. > >If "Sonja" is really accurate I think I will spend more time playing her! A few other things I forgot to mention: -- The team tried to get a nice even distribution of ratings, but, as you have noticed, sometimes there are some sizable gaps. ICC is probably the best (anonymous) place to determine your "real" rating, without having to go out and play in real USCF tournaments. -- MANY players get complacent when players "obviously" weaker than them. They feel their win is assured, no matter how poorly they play. The three lowest rated humans (children, admittedly), rated 587, 577 and 553, had a total of +8 =5 -6 against Skippy. This tends to justify the existence of the particularly weak personalities, as they can still give (USCF rated) children a challenge. -- There is also appears to be a very strong psychological factor when playing a computer opponent who moves instantly (Lacey is a great example of this). -- If you play one personality continuously, to the point where you can beat it every game, your rating will never get more than 400 points higher than that opponent's rating. jm
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