Details on XBox TrueSkill Ranking System 50
rupert0 writes "A research paper on the Microsoft website gives an insight into the way that gamers will be ranked on the new-style Xbox Live. The paper outlines some existing ranking systems, as well." From the article: "The TrueSkill(TM) ranking system is a skill-based ranking system designed to overcome the limitations of existing ranking systems, and to ensure that interesting matches can be reliably arranged within a league. It uses a technique called Bayesian inference for ranking players. Rather than assuming a single fixed skill for each player, the system characterises its belief using a bell-curve belief distribution (also referred to as Gaussian) which is uniquely described by its mean (speak [mju:]) ("peak point") and standard deviation (speak [sigma])("spread")."
Re:Crikey (Score:1, Insightful)
1) A lot of nerds enjoy video games.
2) The 360 debuts in 14 days.
3) Due to the impending release there is a lot of news, speculation, and hype.
Given the above, it is prefectly reasonable for there to be a mass amount of 360 articles. The same shit happened with the DS and PSP and will happen for the PS3 and Revolution as their release dates approach.
Don't like it? Then fuck off.
Re:Crikey (Score:2)
Re:Crikey (Score:2)
The bell curve (Score:3, Insightful)
*I do realize that's not the upshot of the paper. Still, I think all this emphasis on Gaussian distributions for dividing people according to "skill" (read IQ, test scores, etc.) is a bit over done. Convenient, but overdone.
Re:The bell curve (Score:2)
Re:The bell curve (Score:1)
RTFSummary (Score:2)
Ah, what wouldn't one do for an FP...
The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:2)
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:5, Informative)
But it is necessary that your very first game is more likely to have some major asskicking, and you may be on the giving end or the receiving end depending on your prior, unrecorded experience.
Most importantly... (Score:5, Interesting)
...one must not be able to rank up [wikipedia.org] with simple tactics.
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:3, Insightful)
#1- buy the game on the release date, and go on Live right away. You will be on an even playing field with the other players. I've done this quite a few times, and many of the best games I've played have been on day 1. Nobody knows the 'secrets' yet. Nobody knows where to hide, or what the shortcuts are (on a racing game) it's fair, and you can learn along with everyone else.
#2- Play the single-player mode all the way through. DO T
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:2)
Most of the time in online games people aren't playing to test other peoples skill and have a challenge. They simply want "more points". If they were in it for the sport they wouldn't stalk players [e.g. repeatedly kill the same guy, go after them when it's illogical [e.g. you're in danger] etc], spawn camp [e.g. hide at their spawn point with
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:1)
The whole point behind the TrueSkill system to is allow to accurately match up people by skill level, and that obviously includes people of low skill. You're so-called "solution" is really just ignoring the problem! No
Re:The proof of the pudding is in the tasting (Score:2)
Buying the game on day 1 does not mean that you have to be good.
Playing in the morning does not mean that you have to be good.
(those were two of my three suggestions)
Playing the game through on single player means you have to have enough skill to get through the single player game, in order to learn the controls and have at least a few hours with the game.
If you really think that I was saying that the only way to have a good gam
It has to be an improvement. (Score:5, Interesting)
That is, the cheaters and glitchers bubble to the top, the people looking for a fair and fun game drop to the bottom and eventually give up and stop playing.
Re:It has to be an improvement. (Score:2)
Re:It has to be an improvement. (Score:1)
Bayesian inference (Score:1)
The submitter didn't really have to give Bayesian a magical aura...We geeks who remember the first Bayesian spam filters already know it's magical.
Microsoft Invented Mathematics? (Score:2, Funny)
What's next. Embrace, extend and extinguish calculus? I can just hear the boardroom conversation when the mathematicians try to claim precenent.
Ballmer: "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Carl Friedrich Gauss!"
Re:Microsoft Invented Mathematics? (Score:1)
I swear, the first thing some /.ers think when they see anything related to MS is "FUD" or "EEE" or "world domination". Just like that Avalanche research paper. *sigh*
Re:Microsoft Invented Mathematics? (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft Invented Mathematics? (Score:2)
A Bayesian slight of hand? (Score:5, Interesting)
Typically the Elo system works on a iterative mechanism that updates after a match... that is to say that you have a prior rank, you play your game, and you have a post-match rank (not technical terms mind you) usually its R[player,after]=Rank[player,before]+("speed factor")(Result(0/1) - WinExpectancy(yourrank,theirrank). For Chess the logit function is used with some additional scaling factor (1/(1+exp(-(yours-theirs)/400)).
This new system is taking advantage of the Bayesian framework, for those not P(A[i]|B)=P(B|A[i])*P(A[i])/sum(P(B|A[j])*P(A[j])
What's the problem in this... the Elo system can adapt to change in ability of the player over time. A Bayes based system can't. The Bayes estimates converge to what is the true values of the parameters in the model as the number of samples increase to infinity. So an estimate given under frequentist frameworks (MLE, UMVUE, Method of Moments) converge to the same estimate given under Bayes frameworks (mode of the posterior, mean of the posterior). Your estimate can only become more refined with data... if you play enough games, the framework cannot account for any substantial changes in skill. The variance of your stregth or ability rating will decrease. Of course the property of the updating scheme is a nice one to have... I've got to figure there is some usage of approximations... they are very scant in terms of either a prior or a modeled distribution for the event (logit, probit, cloglog, some arbitrary cumulative density function). I'm not going to complain about the normality assumptions in prior or posterior though... I wouldn't know about this situation in particular but the Central Limit Theorem pops up over and over again in statistics (there is a Bayesian CLT but I don't know what that entails). Especially in linear model variants such as this. I see this more as improvement by obfuscation... throw out cute words like "True Skill" and the idea that you have this better system that people will impart its own hopes on it. So, if you want to game the system, just win a lot really early before your variance decreases... looking at the formulae there doesn't seem to be any indication that they are utilizing a conjugate prior (which can help for giving forms for solutions that will not want to eat your pets)... otherwise they'd be staring at a gigantic matrix... and anybody who has dealt with multiple parameters in this situation knows that there will be a correlation structure... which seems to be ignored in the formulae.
Most approaches I have seen thus far (as a second year grad student) in Bayes methods works away from a nice framework... many sound methods and realistic problems require Markov Chain Monte Carlo or similar techniques (which can be a nightmare in a computation sense)... either you have to have something of an incredibly nice form or you need to make use use of approximations to make a system like this work. I don't see how this will be all that appropriate in online gaming... sports I can see since you aren't taking somebody who mastered squash and putting them right into rugby. (Irrelevant to topic at hand-->) I've always had an interest in methods of ranking players/competitors but mainly from a sports angle. I've got a system drawn up in my head, its a matter of seeing if I can get it to work and then having a few hundred breaks work my way in terms of implementation (again, MCMC is probably the best tool in a lot of cases... but its a computational/time killer). The Bayesian framework is great if you have a good sense of piror belief as it can help guide you to a solution... but it is naturally biased (not necessarily from a point of malice) and at times it is used inappropriately.
Re:A Bayesian slight of hand? (Score:5, Informative)
Best wishes,
Ralf Herbrich & Thore Graepel, Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK)
How will I know it's working? (Score:1, Redundant)
More seriously, FINALLY, an idea concerning X-Box 360 that I actually like.
Mu (Score:1)
yes, I know its a spelling error, look at my name!
In modern Greek (Score:1)
At one stage of Greek, possibly the stage where Latin borrowed heavily (and added K, X, Y, and Z to its alphabet), the letter upsilon was pronounced somewhere between "oo" [u] and "ee" [i], perhaps like a Japanese unrounded u [M] or a German rounded i spelt ü [y]. In the latter case, the name of the letter mu would be pronounced [my], and "myoo" [mju]/[mjUw] would be a decent English approximation given the homophony of "Führer" and "furor" in English dialects.
But in modern Greek, words spelle
Starcraft / Chess ratings are best (Score:2)
huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Bayesian Inferrence (Score:3, Informative)
To give a heads up as to what this all is. Bayesian statistics are based on the idea that a probability can be updated based on additional information.
So, perhaps you have a prior of 0.5. There is a 50/50 chance that whoever you're looking at is better than another player.
Ok, so, 0.5 is the prior. Or, perhaps he's one 90% of the games played, so 0.9 is the prior. Now, 50% of games against the 2nd ranked person, he won, but only 20% against the third... and so on. That would be one form of bayesian inferrence.
Other forms? Naive Bayes is a type of, fairly simple machine learning algorithm. There are also graphical models, which are rather advanced bayesian machine learning models.
Re:Bayesian Inferrence (Score:1)
I think the real question is (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, three Xbox 360 articles on the front page? There's astroturfing, and then there's Slashtroturfing. Give it a rest, guys. I mean, who gives a shit?
Gaming is an interesting phenomenon, and I follow the market and read Penny-Arcade--but I don't need to see all this advertising for Microsoft's next attempt to win another market.
Re:I think the real question is (Score:1)
Re:I think the real question is (Score:1)
Accuracy (Score:1)
Re:Accuracy (Score:1)
I've been thinking about this problem (Score:2)
You just put all of the records of how many times each player has killed every other player in a big matrix and compute the eigenvector with the largest positive real eigenvalue. The larger a player's entry is in this eigenvector, the more skilled they are. This method takes into consideration both how many people a player has killed and how many kills those people have and how man
WoW ranks (Score:2, Interesting)
The system has 14 ranks, which get progressively harder as you get higher up. The amount of damage you deal to a person decides how much 'honor' you get. Your honor is added up and your rank improves each week.
Now the problem with this is obviously the more you play, the more honor you get (much like XP).
I
Re:WoW ranks (Score:2)
Re:WoW ranks (Score:2)
Next Up: XBox Live BCS Edition (Score:3, Funny)
TrueSkill(TM) ? (Score:2)