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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."
To be fair that owning represents a difference of 0.000629 in the RMSE between the two of them - hardly the sound thrashing those snooty mathematicians rightly deserve.
The french computer scientist Remi Coulom, well-known for the pioneering computer go program Crazy Stone, has published some very interesting research on this issue. He claims not only to beat Elo, but also Glicko, Microsoft's TrueSkill and decayed-history approaches.
I was going to see if I could implement his ideas for the competition, since he's not going to participate himself. But it doesn't look like I have time for it.
Here's the paper in case anyone wants to give it a try. I suspect the approach is a bit more solid than the ad-hoc approaches of the quants.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Many rating systems seem to assume transitive dominance structures. If you are playing rock/paper/scissors no rating would be sufficient to predict the outcome of a tournament. Many games (using Batttlenet, true skill..) propably are not interested in finding nontransitive structures since players want to be the best and fans want to know who is the best which is kind of pointless with r/p/s.