Author: Soren Riis
Date: 00:45:35 02/15/99
What happens to a humans playing strength when we so-to-speak double his/hers clock frequence? I suggest the playing strength goes up by roughly 170 rating points!! We know that in programs the rating roughly goes up 70 point when we double the speed. And quite remarkable this seems to be independent of programs. It is a common experience that computers are doing relatively better than humans with short time controls. This suggest to me that the constant (?!) is different for humans. It is a bit difficult to double the speed of a given human brain, so we can do the equivalent by simply doubling the time available for the task. If my suggestion is right we will find that if a computer and a human are equal in say a 10 min game, then the computer will have roughly 100 rating points more in a five minutes game (relative to the human) while the human will have 100 points more than the computer in a 20 minutes game. Consider for example a program which have 2400 on a 90MHz. A normal tournament game is played with say 160 minutes for each player. In a 40 minutes game both the human as well as the computer has 4 times less time. This will benefit the program which now plays with a rating of 2600 (relative to the human). [Because the programs strength goes down 2 times 70, while the humans strength goes down 2 times 170] In a 20 min game it would have rating 2700, while at 5 min it would have 2900. If the program instead was running on 333MHz its playing strength would be roughly 120 points higher and so it would have 3020 in "blitz"-rating. On the other hand in correspondence chess (say with 2 days for a move) a program with 2400 would now (if my suggestion is correct) only have around 2000. In other words a determined human with around 2000 in rating (and tremendous energy and determination) would have a fifty-fifty chance against a 2400 rating program [both human and program are allowed 48 hours (+sleep!) for each move]. Perhaps the 170 rating points (for humans) is a bit to high? Are there any strong evidence that my suggestion is wrong? Is 130 rating point more realistic? Any suggestions? Soren Riis
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