Saturday, July 31, 2010

Chess ratings - move over Elo‏ (Email from Anthony Goldbloom)

Hi Alberto,

I hope this is of interest.

Jeff Sonas, the creator of the Chessmetrics rating system, launched a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performs better than the official Elo system. Within 24 hours, two teams had already created algorithms that made more accurate predictions than Elo. It's no surprise that Elo has been outdone — after all, the system was invented half a century ago, before we could easily crunch large amounts of historical data.

The competition requires entrants to build their rating systems based on the results of more than 65,000 historical chess games. Entrants then test their algorithms by predicting the results of another 7,809 games.

Regards,
Anthony