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Subject: Re: What ELO is perfect chess?

Author: José Carlos

Date: 19:15:19 02/22/02

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On February 22, 2002 at 18:35:35, Mike Hood wrote:

>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.

  You're right on the fact that FIDE ELO has a pool of all chess players in the
world, but you forgot to finish the sentence with the words "in a given moment
of time". FIDE list of 01/01/2002 contains a pool of "all chess players on earth
on 01/01/2002", but that list doesn't contain information about how to compare
to the FIDE list of 01/01/2000, for example. That's the key point...
  And remember human players strength change every day...

  José C.



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