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."
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.
Whoah there partner, we don't want a full-scale fight between all professions - some of those guys are pretty buff. Pick off the mathematicians and physicists first because the law of the playground must be respected - the small, weak, bifocaled, or curiously gifted with numbers should be taken down first. Then nap time.
A friend called my on my telephone line and told me out of the blue that the Elo rating system had been bested. I was so stunned I almost turned to stone. I said, "Dude, don't bring me down!". But the news slowly sunk in, and now I can't get it out of my head. But I'll tell you what, the jury is still out. I think there's gonna be a showdown, and then Elo will be back on top.
This is entirely unsurprising. The Elo system was, in a sense, designed to be easily calculable in a time before things like computers or databases or data mining were especially common (after all, it was adopted by US Chess Federation in 1960!), and it hasn't been revised much if at all since then. Of course statisticians using modern methods and number crunching capabilities and huge databases of both game results and game moves are going to be able to beat it by a lot - this isn't like the Netflix prize, where a bunch of teams were competing to improve something that had been in active development up until that very year.