On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Don Dailey <dailey....@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Álvaro Begué <alvaro.be...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> A few years ago I had a conversation with John Tromp about this >> measure of depth, and he pointed out that "who has bigger feet" has as >> many levels as there are players, but doesn't make for a very >> interesting game. > > That's not as logical as it sounds. If you could measure ELO ratings with > infinite precision, you would have as many ratings as people too. We are > not interested in how many different foot sizes, but the range of possible > values in some context that has real meaning. With ELO we don't care > about how many different ELO ratings there are, we care about the range of > values and the context is how much 1 ELO point is worth in terms of winning > probability.
No, the point is that a player with slightly larger feet than another player will win with unbelievable consistency, while this is not true of small ELO differences. > Even with foot size, if you measure the day to day variation, you could > probably classify them into just a few types. For example there are > finite number of shoe sizes and only 6 or 7 different shoe sizes fit 95% of > the population (assuming adults only.) OK, let's play "who has a higher Social Security Number", then. _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list Computer-go@dvandva.org http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
