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Subject: Re: A question of rating schemes

Author: Peter Fendrich

Date: 05:55:10 06/19/02

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On June 19, 2002 at 07:18:25, GuyHaworth wrote:

>
>There are ELO rating lists for:
>
>  people    (on the basis of human-human games ... FIDE-managed), and
>  computers (on the basis of computer-computer games)
>
>There are apparently some intrinsic problems with rating schemes, maybe
>particularly ELO which was the first, and I am looking for more information on
>this.
>
>Each list would be equally valid if N ELO points were subtracted from all
>participants ... so the absolute numbers mean nothing.  Ok, that would be easy
>to fix if there were rated people-computer games.  So ....
>
>... is there an ELO list purely on the basis of computer-human games.
>
>I have also heard that there is an 'inflation effect' with ELO.  What is this -
>and has anyone an 'ELO game simulator' to demonstrate this?  I would expect that
>there are more games played in SSDF to rate the engines than contribute to the
>FIDE human ELO ratings:  is this correct?  If so, I'd expect the inflation
>effect in the SSDF list to be greater.
>
>Would it be good to get the Kramnik-DeepFritz computer rated in SSDF as well as
>having its match rating against Kramnik?  Presumably ChessBase are able to rate
>it against Fritz engines in SSDF.
>
>Finally, are there better rating schemes than ELO - or are they just different.
>
>g

We have two completely different pools of players with different behaviour.
Almost all the computers are in this sense very similar, based on (more or
less)the same standard algorithm's. Furthermove is the number of computer games
far more than human games.
SSDF does calibrate between these pools and it gives you _some_ feeling about
the level of the computers compared to humans but you can never interchange
these ratings and mixing the two lists.

Ther are in theorety better rating schemes known today but in practice I don't
think it will matter much which one you select. Selecting a new rating scheme
for computers only that is not comparable to the human ELO would probably twist
the debate even more than it is today... I think that calibrating the computer
rating list to human level is the best one can do.

Regards,
Peter





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