Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 15:09:45 08/02/98
Go up one level in this thread
On August 02, 1998 at 14:32:55, Don Dailey wrote: >I think the effects of inflation or deflation would balance out >in the long run. But if rapidly improving players tended to >prefer high K values then the pool would tend to inflate. If you allowed people to select their own K, within one week you'd have cases where some over-rated bozo helped his accurately-rated bozo friend get an inflated rating by setting his own K low, his friend's K high, and just playing chess. If you give people more ways to manipulate the system, they'll do it like crazy. > I think >the right way to control inflation or deflation is to pick out >a few active players who have well established Fide ratings and >make very minor adjustments over a period of time to keep these >in line. A GM can be 3000 one day and 2650 the next day. You get some guy who eeks himself up a hundred points by playing 3 0 against over-rated people, and the same guy drops 250 points in a "just let me win one game against this stupid computer so I can disconnect and go to bed" death-match. So pinning the ratings of others on a few of these guys would be like trying to measure financial health in the US by making an index composed of the likes of Iomega, Netscape, and Amazon.com. > For instance when anyone wins, they can be given slightly >less points (like a fraction of a point) until the the pool was >normalized if you wanted to deflate the rating pool. How do >they determine the ratings anyway? Did they start with ratings >of known players? There is bound to be inflation or deflation >over time anyway, in any system that is open like this. They use new players as a balancing mechanism. The goal is to keep the average rating at some value. They do this by fudging the ratings of new players while they are in the provisional period. If the average rating is a bit above the desired value, someone who plays their first game against a 1600 and wins might find themselves with a rating of 1990 rather than the expected 2000, but if the average rating is below the desired value, they might end up at 2010. This sounds like it wouldn't work but it does, the average rating on ICC is pretty stable. For some reason though, we have gotten a lot of expansion at the high end. It used to be that 2600 was an incredible rating, achievable only by grandmasters after a heck of a lot of eeking (playing down a huge amount). Now a rating of 2600 will put you at 165th on the server, amongst active players. bruce
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