Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 10:50:47 03/20/02
Go up one level in this thread
On March 20, 2002 at 12:49:54, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote: >On March 20, 2002 at 07:44:18, Sune Fischer wrote: > >>On March 20, 2002 at 05:49:56, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote: >> >>>On March 20, 2002 at 05:47:28, stuart taylor wrote: >>> >>>>The worst would have to be about 0 elo. >>> >>>No. ELO is a relative scale. You can have ELO ratings from -inf to +inf >>>if you want to. >>> >>>-- >>>GCP >> >>Of cause you can't _actually_ reach +-inf, for several reasons. > >It depends on how the rating is calculated. In other words, it depends on >the implementation. The classical way is to give a starting rating to a player >and it is updated with each tournament. That is what you are referring. However, >if you do not have a "starting" rating you can certainly reach -inf. Playing the >first 100 games a losing them all gives an estimated rating of -inf. So if you lose the first game, you have a rating of -Inf and if you win the first you get +Inf, or does something strange happen between 1 and 100 games that will suddenly make it jump from a finite elo to infinite elo? :) >Anyway, inf is a limit so in any case there no problem to say that elo scale >goes from -inf to inf, whatever the reference is. It is not the limit, chess is finite so you can never reach an infinite elo because you simply can't win them all. You can win them all out of a limited set, but a limited set should still not produce an infinity score, there will be some diviation on the result, the smaller the set, the larger the diviation. 1 game must have a diviation so large that the player's rating is virtually undefined, you can set it at -Inf but anything would fit equally well (if not better). >Regards, >Miguel > > >> >>It would take an infinite number of games, which would require an infinite amout >>of time. >>And even the perfect player must be rated below +inf because chess is limited >>yada yada yada random player etc.... >> >>However, it seems a deterministic engine could lose _all_ the games, simply by >>playing another deterministic engine, which just happend to win that particular >>game. >> >>-S.
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