Elo Chess Rating System Topped By Proposed Replacements 102
databuff writes "About six weeks ago, Slashdot reported a competition to find a chess rating algorithm that performed better than the official Elo rating system. The competition has just reached the halfway mark and the best entries have outperformed Elo by over 8 per cent. The leader is a Portuguese physicist, followed by an Israeli mathematician and then a pair of American computer scientists."
Not surprising at all (Score:5, Insightful)
This is entirely unsurprising. The Elo system was, in a sense, designed to be easily calculable in a time before things like computers or databases or data mining were especially common (after all, it was adopted by US Chess Federation in 1960!), and it hasn't been revised much if at all since then. Of course statisticians using modern methods and number crunching capabilities and huge databases of both game results and game moves are going to be able to beat it by a lot - this isn't like the Netflix prize, where a bunch of teams were competing to improve something that had been in active development up until that very year.
Re:what now? (Score:4, Insightful)