

Competition to find a new chess rating system - michael_dorfman
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=6619

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wazoox
Well, ELO has been proved useful in various domains (it's used to evaluate
product quality in the agroalimentary industry for instance), and compared to
various rating systems in different sports. So you can't actually say that "it
has never really been demonstrated that Elo ratings are more accurate than
other approaches would be."

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shadowfox
Dont know. It is _useful_ certainly. But is it more accurate than other
approaches for this problem?

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snippyhollow
This one is already way better [PDF, paper] <http://tiny.cc/trueskill> It is
now used for XBox Live matchmaking <http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/trueskill/>

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ovi256
There's a downside to using such a system for videogames: it is tiring to
constantly have perfectly balanced matches, where you must do your utmost to
win. I've seen comments about this countless times from Starcraft II players
for example.

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adamilardi
The prizes are terrible

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sireat
While prizes are terrible financially speaking, that signed DVD is about as
nice a prize as one of the checks from Knuth.

Unfortunately, it looks like the competition will be ridiculously tough since
good old ELO has been pushed down about 30 spots.

Also, it seems the improvements are not going to be overly dramatic after the
first rush.

Why? Because chess games between human players have some randomness inherent
in them.

