Chess One wrote:

Dear Wlod, I take the liberty of cross posting this
to chess misc since i'm not sure all ratings afficionados
and mathematicals fellows or even Englishmen read
chess.politics.

Thank you, Phil (I meant misc anyway but ended on
*.politics accidentally). First of all thank you for encouragement,
and to Jerzy for remembering.

For myself I would like to see 2 things happen:-

1) you example a series of games played
among a group of players rated every
100 points between 1500 and 2000,

I'll try. If there was more iinterest in my Ockham
approach then I would write a simulation in perl
(less work) ot in C++ (more work), so that one could
answer many questions. The pseudo-random constructions
would provide a possibility of simulating massive data.


I hope that some of the participants of rgc*
will see the harmony of the proposed system:
a predictable, simple, elegant rating function plus
the rating lists.

You may also turn your attention to my treatment
of the relevance factor. For instance, the players
new to the list would tend to establish their rating
to much extent by playing first among themselves
(their games with the established members would
hgave less relevance). This is fair. Playing new
players is like lottery. It's better to reduce such
fluctuations of the established ratings. (There is
more to it).

2) i was intrigued by the back-of-envelope British
system of yore, and should like to see a comparison
of that system with this [since, at least, in that
system you could calculate your own resulting rating on-the-fly.]

Phil Innes

You can do use the back-of-envolope to compute
the Ockham rating too. In the simpplest case you need
know only the ratings of the two players. In the case
of the more subtle function, you need to get their
current activity coefficients (from the Internet site of
the rating agent), but the computation is still simple.
(The activity coeffcient of the players would be continuously
computed by the rating agent or rather by their computer).

Regards,

Wlod

PS. Where can I read about the "Brittish
system of yore"?

PPS. The topic of rating or of comparing and
voting and ordering is quite extensive. Perhaps
I'll write how it's done in economy and other
applications (years ago I have rediscovered
their best approach); in chess it would apply
the best to any group of players who played
each other a lot (enough to establish direct
pairwise comparisons). Indeed, for the method
of the pairwise comparisons you need the
pairwise comparisons :-) Such comparisons
are absent in a large group of players.