Slashdot Mirror
Elo Chess Rating System Topped By Proposed Replacements
databuff writes "About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo by over 8 per cent. The leader is a Portuguese physicist, followed by an Israeli mathematician and then a pair of American computer scientists."
This is chess rating algorithm. The goal is to predict given a matchup between two players with known histories how they will likely fare in a game or series of games against each other. Elo is the standard rating system and has been for some time. These algorithms are improvements on that. So they predict better who will win. They have nothing to do with playing actual chess. So the Turk is irrelevant to this discussion (aside from the not minor issue that the operator has been dead for some time.)
Glicko isn't designed to take advantage of all the information that's available in this competition. To calculate your new Glicko rating, you just need the Glicko ratings of both players + the result. I bet all serious contenders in the competition use the whole history somehow. (I talked with one who uses a decayed history scheme; he beats Glicko).
As to the leaderboard, it's really not so clear. Almost certainly, some of the contenders are accidentally overfitting to the leaderboard test data.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Yeah, and his name is Él(Lowercase O-double acute), not Elo, but I understand that "hungarian umlauts" causes significant cognitive stress :)
Even for Slashdot it seems...
Actually he was born Él Árpád Imre but changed his name to a more Americanized Arpad Emrick Elo.
His post is chock full o' snippets ELO songs.
Careful, those physicists have arsenals of powerful lasers at their disposal...
"But do they have sharks on which to mount them?"
We must avoid them teaming to Biologists at all costs!