Slashdot Mirror
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")."
I'll know it's working if it ranks me up near the top. Yeah, that'll be what decides it. If gives me any of that "below average" stuff I'll know it's utter crap.
More seriously, FINALLY, an idea concerning X-Box 360 that I actually like.
So why is this news? The Microsoft engineers came up with a reasonably obvious method of ranking people, got a trademark on a stupid name, and now this standard rating method is getting free advertising space on Slashdot, and the methedology behind it is sound enough that nobody calls them on it. They didn't do anything. They're just measuring the skill of a player as a standard deviation up or down from where they are for matching players.