

Move over Elo - crowdsourcing a new chess rating system - datageek
http://kaggle.com/chess

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jaboody
As someone who has played competitive chess for many years, I am impressed
with just how robust and reliable the elo rating system has proven to be.

A 100 point difference between two players suggests that the stronger player
will score 66% ((1 _#wins + 0.5_ #draws + 0*#losses)/#totalgames) and a 200
point difference will predict the stronger player will score 75%.

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Perceval
I bet a modification of PageRank would be a fun place to start.

I've been participating in a website that uses directed acyclic graphs to rank
NFL teams (<http://beatpaths.com>), but lately I've been thinking about
PageRank after reading a paper on it:
<http://www.ncsu.edu/crsc/reports/ftp/pdf/crsc-tr06-19.pdf>

You could probably make similar adjustments to PageRank to make it suitable
for chess.

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ulvund
I tried modifications for PageRank for rating soccer teams, and I will say it
provided a questionable rating and not very good predictions compared to other
rating methods.

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Tycho
I've been playing on FICS recently. I've always been an average player - good
enough to beat my friends but usually lose against anyone who has 'studied'
the game. However I decided to try a new strategy: knock them out of their
opening book at the earliest opportunity. Spectacular results so far: beat a
player rated 300 Elo above me in 9 moves! Probably a fluke though, but still
it generally seems to give me a much better chance (I don't have the patience
to learn the opening theory).

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nanijoe
You were most assuredly playing against below average players. Most of the
early part of a chess game is spent trying to establish an 'opening line' and
can transform several times depending on what moves both players make. So, you
as white could set out trying to play the English and find your self ending up
with the QGD.

If you don't learn the theory behind the openings (whether by reading or by
observation) you will remain a below average player for a long time

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adamt
Everybody's submitted solutions to this seemed to have an RMSE of 0.794 to
0.808 which seemed a bit odd to all converge in such a narrow range.

I don't think my solution is that clever, but it's gone straight to the top of
the leader-board with a 0.70 RMSE.

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jasonb05
what was your methodology or general strategy?

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lkozma
Elo system is really cool, when I was a kid, I thought the name Élő (the
inventor's name) is meant literally, as it means "live" in Hungarian, so I
thought it is just something that is being constantly updated, which it is in
fact.

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oconnor0
I think that one of the interesting areas for Elo-type ratings is in online
video games. Especially where teams are involved. How do you rate a single
player based on what they did in a team game?

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roryokane
I just read a blog post today about Starcraft 2’s rating system:
[http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/7/24/analyzing-
starcraft-2s-...](http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/7/24/analyzing-
starcraft-2s-ranking-system.html). It seems like Microsoft’s TrueSkill system
described there might be very applicable to this chess-ranking problem.

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datageek
at 50 years old - it's probably due for an upgrade!

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jacquesm
Instead of being upgraded the ELO system is actually being applied to other
sports because of its solid statistical basis.

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ulvund
It is solid and it is easily computable

