Who is the Master?

Abstract

Abstract. There has been debates for years on how to rate chess players living and playing at different periods (see Keene and Divinsky (1989)). Some attempts were made to rank them not on the results of games played, but on the moves played in these games, evaluating these moves with computer programs. However, the previous attempts were subject to different criticisms, regarding the strengths of the programs used, the number of games evaluated, and other methodological problems.In the current study, 26,000 games (over 2 millions of positions) played at regular time control by all world champions since Wilhelm Steinitz have been analyzed using an extremely strong program running on a cluster of 640 processors. Using this much larger database, the indicators presented in previous studies (along with some new, similar, ones) have been correlated with the outcome of the games. The results of these correlations show that the interpretation of the strength of players based on the similarity of their moves with the ones played by the computer is not as straightforward as it might seem. Then, to overcome these difficulties, a new Markovian interpretation of the game of chess is proposed, which enables to create, using the same database, Markovian matrices for each year a player was active. By using classical linear algebra methods on these matrices, the outcome of games between any players can be predicted, and this prediction is shown to be at least as good as the classical ELO prediction for players who actually played against each others.

Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run

“…The data were assembled originally in ref. 53 and are based on the commercially available chess database Chessbase and other online sources commonly used in the chess community (the data are available at http://www.alliot.fr/CHESS/ficga.html.en ). The main dataset comprises 25,072 games with more than 1.6 million configurations, which were played by (or against) the world champions of chess since 1859.…”

“…Evaluations of configurations and quality of moves were carried out with the use of S tockfish 8, an open-source program that computes, for a given configuration of the pieces on the chessboard, the best possible move (details are in ref. 53 ). With an estimated Elo-rating exceeding 3,200 points, this engine provides a relevant benchmark even for the best players in history (incumbent World Champion Magnus Carlsen had an Elo-number of 2,872 in January 2020; https://ratings.fide.com/toparc.phtml?cod=577 ; last accessed 17 March 2020).…”

On the Causes and Consequences of Deviations from Rational Behavior

“…These include, in particular, gender differences in patience (Gerdes et al, 2011), gender effects in competitiveness (Backus et al, 2016), gender and attractiveness (Dreber et al, 2013), self-selection and productivity in tournaments (Bertoni et al, 2015;Linnemmer and Visser, 2016), consequences of political ideology (Frank and Krabel, 2013), collusion (Moul and Nye, 2009), cheating (Barnes and Hernandez-Castro, 2015;Haworth et al, 2015) and indoor air quality (Künn et al, 2019). Recent work used chess data to compare the relative performance and strength of chess players in different time periods (Guid and Bratko, 2011;Alliot, 2017). Anderson and Green (2018) use chess data at the game level to investigate the role of personal peak performance in the past in terms of ratings, as reference points for performance.…”