"David Richerby" wrote in message
...
raylopez99 wrote:
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3455

This was the article I was thinking of, per my earlier post, not the
Jeff Sonas article.

That article is, frankly, junk: I'm surprised it was ever accepted for
an academic conference.

They haven't determined the strongest champion of all time: they've
determined which World Champion plays most like a crippled version of
Crafty. That's better than working out which World Champion plays
most like me but not much better. See Soren Riis's rebuttal

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3465



I don't think Riis or you understood the original article. The
researchers addressed in detail the objection that Crafty is not
the ultimate in determining the best move - obviously
we can find some specific positions where the version of
Crafty used in the analysis is wrong, but that is not a
fundamental objection.

There is much very interesting and original work
in the article - perhaps the Chessbase synopsis concentrates
excessively on the findings rather than on the methodology,
since it makes a better story. Certainly there were analyses
that they didn't do which should get done. That's just the normal
way that research advances. In any case, the approaches
investigated in the article are far preferable to the "historical
ELO" or "chessmetics" nonsense, which are *completely*
lacking in rigor of any kind.