"Kenneth Sloan" wrote in message
...


In any Elo-based system, the only "correct" rating for a player who truly
knows nothing is: -infinity.

This is only true if "knows nothing" equates to "never wins" which you
haven't proven. In fact, if we rated a tournament filled only
with unrated "know-nothings", they'd end up with the rating arbitrarily
assigned to their class by the rating system. No system that I know
of uses -infinity.