Elo vs The Rest of the World (Rating System Competition)
Competition to devise new Chess Ratings Systems
Mark Crowther - Friday 13th August 2010
Jeff Sonas has initiated a competition to see if the Elo Rating system can be improved upon. As Elo developed his system around 50 years ago without the benefit of modern technology and the amount of data we have these days he felt it might be time to test it against other approaches. It may turn out that the Elo system is still pretty good, Sonas programmed an "Elo Benchmark" entry and submitted it a week ago. It was #1 briefly (for a few hours) but as more people played with the data and submitted their own tries, it fell farther behind and right now (after only a week) it is #14 out of 80 submissions. The contest runs for three more months. The top ten finishers will receive prizes donated by Chessbase or Amazon gift vouchers, and Sonas will be writing up the results of the contest since people have to share their methodology in order to be eligible for prizes.
Details of the competition http://kaggle.com/chess
TWIC is 30. First issue 17th September 1994.