Author: Mike Hood
Date: 15:35:35 02/22/02
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On February 22, 2002 at 15:22:00, José Carlos wrote: >On February 22, 2002 at 15:13:25, William H Rogers wrote: > >>Now I am currious. Is Crafty really rated that high or was its opponents not >>rated low enough? This is not a slur to Dr Hyatts Crafty, we all know that it >>plays great chess, but maybe instead of raising a players rating, they should >>consider lowering an opponents rating as to not exceed the possible max(i.e. >>3300). I think that would bring a much more resonable response to all players, >>except of course, those whose ratings were forced to be lower. >>Food for thought anyway. >>Bill > > The answer is that ELO is only a _relative_ measure of results. ELO tells you >"how player A performs compared to a given pool of players". There's no up or >low limit, it's just a comparison. <<--snip-->> True, in theory ELO ratings are in a limited pool of players, but that's not how ELO ratings are used in practice. They're presented as ratings comparing a pool of all chess players on Earth. I don't think this causes problems, because everybody plays somebody who plays against somebody else, so even if I only play in my town's division four league, there are probably only five or six links separating me from Gary Kasparov. There are only problems in the case of chess players who are artificially separated from the pool, such as prisoners (Claude Bloodgood) or hermits (Bobby Fischer). Since this pool is a pool of all the chess players in the world, maybe it would be a sensible step to arbitrarily define the ELO of perfect chess and calibrate the rest of the pool against this rating. Let's call perfect chess 3300, or whatever. It doesn't really matter, as long as the ELO rating system doesn't have an inflationary feature built into the algorithm and leads to higher ratings for the world's best players from decade to decade.
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