Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 10:46:39 10/11/99
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James Robertson already correctly answered your post, but I thought I would add a bit of fluff in the way of explanation. Imagine a room full of blithering idiots. Perhaps 10,000 of them. We have them all play chess against each other for a few years. The top idiot will have an ELO of perhaps 2500 or better. Now, it may be that you 5 year old sister can beat his pants off. After all, he's a blithering idiot. The point is that ELO calculations are relative to the competition. So ELO calculations are *only* relevant to the pool of players that they compete with. Now, take the SSDF list. The ELO figures defintely show relative strength. But that does not necessarily show how they will play against humans. For instance, one of the top five programs might have a systematic flaw, which when discovered will allow a human to always beat it. The computer programs may never try to exploit this flaw and so the ELO within the SSDF pool remains constant. But if humans discover the flaw, they will exploit it. Now, how can we correspond the SSDF ratings with human ratings? Really, we can't. It may be that there is a direct correspondence of some sort. It may be that the computers are actually stronger or weaker than humans with the same ratings. In any case, it is true that nearly all modern computer programs are formidable opponents.
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