37
votes
How is Alpha Zero "more human"?
Page 5 in the paper has your answer:
... AlphaZero compensates for the lower number of evaluations by using its deep neural network to costs much more selectively on the most promising variations - ...
- 22.7k
28
votes
Accepted
Why have engines not increased top rated chess players' Elo?
I think they certainly have increased their ELO, but more importantly, their overall chess strength. ELO is only a rating relative to others in the pool so it may tend to go up more slowly if everyone ...
- 32.7k
26
votes
How do FIDE rated players perform on lichess?
I went through the list of LiChess classical top 200 players and collected the FIDE ratings of LiChess classical ratings of anyone who I could verify on FIDE's website as actually having a FIDE rating:...
- 4,378
25
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
The answer is "No".
If you have a defined fixed set of resources - CPUs, memory, cache, etc. - and you allow one engine to have full use of them then that engine is going to be able to ...
- 100k
24
votes
Why is Magnus Carlsen's Elo rating not higher, given that his win rate is so high?
A 99% win rate is winning 99% of games played. Carlsen does not win nearly that many games, since at top level most games are drawn.
Carlsen's overall record in life is +1262 =1289 -454, which means ...
- 29k
24
votes
Wrong Elo calculation in August 2023 rating list
The first thing to note is that FIDE make the rating calculations not Chess Stack Exchange. We can try and explain their calculations but we cannot change them or influence them in any way.
Here is ...
- 100k
23
votes
Accepted
Are Elo Ratings Zero-Sum?
Between most players, Elo ratings are zero-sum.
The formula for updating an Elo rating looks like this. Suppose player 1 and player 2 are playing a game. First, their ratings are used to generate a ...
- 348
22
votes
Accepted
Elo loss for resign vs checkmate
No difference whatsoever. As with tournament results, ELO (or Glicko, or any other chess rating system) counts all losses the same, all draws the same, and all wins the same. Doesn't matter if you ...
- 8,314
21
votes
Accepted
Are Elo ratings adjusted after each match, or after each tournament?
Neither
Elo-ratings are not ajusted for calculation after each game, they are not adjusted after each tournament either. They are adjusted each month.
For all games played during one month, each ...
- 16.7k
20
votes
Are chess players getting better, given the same rating?
How would say a 1700 rated player of say 50 years ago who is no longer .around go against a 1700 player of today?
Speaking as a player who was around 50 years ago and was rated the equivalent of 1800 ...
- 100k
19
votes
How is Alpha Zero "more human"?
Most strong engines emphasize looking very deeply, at the expense of having a superficial evaluation function. In the AlphaZero paper, they say that Stockfish looks at 70 million positions per second.
...
- 28.7k
19
votes
Accepted
Is Elo conserved?
After a game, the new rating for a player is updated according to the formula:
r' = r + K · (s - E[S])
...where r is the elo rating, K is a "constant" factor, s is the score (i.e. 1 for win,...
- 1,304
19
votes
Why not use computers to evaluate strength of players?
Elo is a system to summarize past results into a meaningful number that informs about the (relative) strength of a player. Since the only objectives a player has during a game of chess are getting a ...
- 17k
16
votes
Why have engines not increased top rated chess players' Elo?
The question is apparently based on a misunderstanding of how ELO ratings work. There is absolutely no mechanism by which the overall increase in players' strength would lead to increase in their ELO. ...
- 1,912
16
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
No, an ensemble of chess engines won't beat the best one. The reason is simply because of hardware.
Let's take the strongest CPU engines right now to keep things simple. These are Stockfish, Komodo, ...
- 29k
16
votes
Are chess players getting better, given the same rating?
Everybody seems to agree that "ELO inflation" is real (I found an article from 20 years ago claiming this exists)...except scientists. Here is a 2011 paper that vehemently denies the ...
- 17.3k
16
votes
Why is Magnus Carlsen's Elo rating not higher, given that his win rate is so high?
assuming this implies conservatively a win rate of 99%
There are a number of wrong assumptions in your question. First, at elite levels where players don't often lose it is draw rates that are high. ...
- 100k
15
votes
What would be the elo of a computer program that plays at random?
Right at the bottom of the Computer Chess Rating List for the 40/4 time control is Brutus RND, an engine that simply selects random legal moves.
http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/cgi/...
- 251
14
votes
Are Elo Ratings Zero-Sum?
Are Elo ratings a zero-sum system in chess?
No, they are not zero sum. There are two reasons for this. First of all, when a player first gets a rating then that is a pure plus. There is no ...
- 100k
13
votes
How is Alpha Zero "more human"?
AlphaZero already seems to play like a regular "centaur" -> correspodence GM with an engine assistance.
As an FM I'd get much more enjoyment of playing AlphaZero vs a regular engine.
One comparison ...
- 1,009
13
votes
Accepted
How is it possible for a player without 2500 ELO to obtain the GM title?
A couple different ways:
Winning a tournament like the World Junior or World Senior, which automatically confers a GM title to the winner
Having a rating over 2500 after any game. This is to ...
- 7,594
13
votes
Is it possible to estimate my ELO without joining an organization or anything?
Puzzles are a notoriously bad estimator for ELO. (Tried myself, wild fluctuations.) You could run whole games by you through an engine (moar input => moar output) and check the accuracy of your ...
- 17.3k
13
votes
Is Elo conserved?
It depends.
If they play games at the same rate (i.e nobody plays 2 more games than anyone else) and nobody's rating goes up to 2400 (or 2300 if they are all juniors) and nobody dies or moves away (...
- 100k
12
votes
Accepted
Elo disadvantage due to one pawn move in Indian Chess
Revised stockfish to skip searching double pawn push. Each engine is using 2 threads at TC 1m+1s. It got 4 draws in 20 games.
Test 1
sf_no_pawnpush4 is not aware that its opponent can play a double ...
- 4,155
11
votes
Accepted
Why does the FIDE rating table go beyond 400?
Why are they there in the first place if they cannot be used?
They were there in the first place because they were used. The 400 point rule came later.
What use are those entries?
They provide ...
- 100k
11
votes
Lichess vs Chess.com ELO system and player strength
Lichess recently added a concise explanation to its site:
Chess rating systems
Important points:
Chess.com uses the Glicko-1 algorithm with an initial rating of 1200.
Lichess uses the Glicko-2 ...
- 5,949
11
votes
Accepted
Why, in online chess, is it that the shorter the time control, the higher the world leading elo is?
I think the key of this is number of played games.
Nihalsarin2004 9440 bullet games
konevlad 1113 blitz games
Zhigalko_Sergei 257 rapid games
Biranidun 84 clasic games
- 134
11
votes
Accepted
What are FIDE really hoping to achieve by the proposed rating changes from January 2024?
The justification is that lower rated player are outperforming their rating when playing higher-rated players. When a 1000-ish player played an 1800-ish player, the rating system expects the lower-...
- 20.3k
10
votes
Accepted
Where can I find a rarity table of chess player ratings?
According to the list downloaded here, there are currently 261782 players with a FIDE rating. I wrote a small program to analyze it, and here are the results:
-------------------------
Rating Number ...
- 25k
10
votes
Should I join a chess club?
You should try it. Over the board chess is a very different experience, the social aspect is a lot of fun and the level of concentration required very different from online. Also there is no better ...
- 28.7k
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