I thought I had escaped this sort of nitpicking by deleting
rec.games.chess.politics from my newsgroup list.
I can't speak for the 0000 rating because I don't know how USCF treats a
0/18 result. I believe they give 400 points below the average opponents'
ratings but I'm not sure. Mathematically, someone who loses all their games
should have a rating of zero, but there may be sound reasons for awarding
some other rating.
How can you say that a player who knows only how the pieces moves is of 1000
strength? When I was rated 969 back in the late sixties I knew far more than
how to move the pieces. Over the years I've played dozens of opponents,
adults and children, in the 900-1300 range. I assure you they are much more
savvy than you say they are.
"Kenneth Sloan" wrote in message
...
Taylor Kingston wrote:
...
If this is indeed just a plagiarization of Reinfeld's "Complete Chess
Course," it's designed to start with a complete beginner, i.e. someone
with an Elo rating of effectively zero.
Complete beginners do not have Elo ratings of "effectively zero".
Different implementations of Elo-based rating systems make different
assumptions - but I would say that, on balance, it is fair to say that
an adult beginner (knows only how the pieces move) of average
intelligence can be said to have and Elo rating of approximately 1000.
This is very different from 0000.
In fact, 0000 is not a "special" number on the Elo scale. The only
number which is at all special is 2000 - the dividing line between
club players and "national class" players. Elo-based systems which treat
0000 as "special" are arguably broken.
The USCF system currently has no such rating as 0000, and there is
no sense in which a beginner can be said to have a USCF rating of
0000.
FIDE's lowest rating is currently a moving target - but it's not
0000 (to the best of my knowledge), and 0000 has no special meaning.
You certainly can't say "this player is a beginner, so his rating is
'effectively zero', and therefore we can compute his expected
score against a 1000 player by considering them to be 1000 points
different". If you want to do such a calculation (which is the
only truly appropriate computation to perform on Elo ratings, then
1000 is a far better estimate than 0000.
--
Kenneth Sloan
Computer and Information Sciences +1-205-932-2213
University of Alabama at Birmingham FAX +1-205-934-5473
Birmingham, AL 35294-1170 http://www.cis.uab.edu/sloan/