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Details on XBox TrueSkill Ranking System
rupert0 writes "A research paper on the Microsoft website gives an insight into the way that gamers will be ranked on the new-style Xbox Live. The paper outlines some existing ranking systems, as well." From the article: "The TrueSkill(TM) ranking system is a skill-based ranking system designed to overcome the limitations of existing ranking systems, and to ensure that interesting matches can be reliably arranged within a league. It uses a technique called Bayesian inference for ranking players. Rather than assuming a single fixed skill for each player, the system characterises its belief using a bell-curve belief distribution (also referred to as Gaussian) which is uniquely described by its mean (speak [mju:]) ("peak point") and standard deviation (speak [sigma])("spread")."
say what? (speak [english])
This is all looking pretty complicated. It's interesting what all has to go on the try to keep players playing similarly skilled players. So I guess the next step is to have two human polls and a computer ranking system. Of course, they would only really be shooting to pit #1 against #2 and then just make as much money as possible of the rest of us. And don't even think about a playoff to determine the best players.