wrote:

Just to be a devils advocate, here is a PROOF, based on arguments like
Heisenberg's uncertainly principal, that the rating of a complete
beginner, who only knows the moves, can NEVER be determined.
http://witm.sourceforge.net/ (Web based Mathematica front end)


It's all well and nice to talk about Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle, but this is the real world.

I would say in the "real world" in the context you mean, the
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has little practical relevance. The
effects of it are too small to worry about.

If someone has played 1000 games of chess, the process of measuring
their performance by getting them to play 20 games against opponents of
a known rating, is probably not going to have much effect on their
performance.

I don't have a copy of Professor Elo's paper on the subject, but to
quote from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELO_rating_system

"Élő's central assumption was that the chess performance of each player
in each game is a normally distributed random variable. Although a
player might perform significantly better or worse from one game to the
next, Élő assumed that the mean value of the performances of any given
player changes only slowly over time."

It is *not* true to say the mean performance of a player changes slowly
over time if they have just leaned the moves. Having played 10 games, I
suspect they are significantly better having played only 1 game. As
such, the process of measurement will have a *very* significant effect
on the quantity you are trying to measure.

So unlike Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the effect would be very
pronounced in the real world.

The ELO formula requires that
the player must have SOME number applied to it, although it doesn't
matter WHAT that number is. And since we're talking about "ratings",
we're pretty much talking about ELO (although other formulae exist,
they are much less accepted).

I believe the assumptions Elo made are simply not valid in the case of
an absolute beginner. As such, attaching an ELO number to something
where the assumptions are very wrong is not sensible.

Just because there's a magic rating of 2000 for Masters and 2500 for
GMs, they could easily have been any other numbers.

Agreed.

But a player's
rating can never be "undefined", unless the ELO formula is replaced by
something else that can handle such a starting point.

I can't see how you can measure it. As such, I can't see how it can
possibly be defined unless the formula is modified to say "By
definition, a beginner has an ELO of 100" or similar.

Since the method has no definition and it can't be measured, I doubt
there is much point attaching a value to it.


--
Dave (from the UK)

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http://witm.sourceforge.net/ (Web based Mathematica front end)