Chess Futures - An Innovative Approach to Chess Ratings

The world of chess has long relied on rating systems to quantify player skill and facilitate
fair competition. However, the traditional Elo rating system, although widely used and
respected, has its limitations.

I have written a paper that proposes an innovative approach to chess ratings
called Chess Futures, which utilizes three measures to triangulate a more accurate and
responsive chess rating. Each measure carries equal weight and aims to capture different
aspects of player performance. The first measure incorporates a normal distribution, similar
to FIDE Elo but independent of it. The second measure employs stochastic modeling to
account for the inherent uncertainty in chess outcomes. Finally, the third measure
introduces a tournament performance rating (TPR) that reflects a player's growth over time.

Chess Futures represents a significant departure from traditional rating systems, offering a
reimagined approach to chess rating that addresses the shortcomings of existing
methodologies

My paper is here -> chessclubliveblog.blogspot.com/2023/09/chess-futures-innovative-approach-to.html

eek!

Are there... are there artificial line breaks in this post..?

"This scholarly paper ..."

I appreciate the effort, but I'm under the impression that the paper does not effectively argue for its claims. I suspect the use of chatgpt might be partly to blame: it makes it look like it makes sense but, if you look closely, the logical inferences it proposes are not as clear as they should be. How does the system handles new players, for example? It seems like the paper is just stating how this proposal is better but without explaining how. Finally, if you want someone to take this even halfway seriously, you can't have this joke as references:

8. References

8.1 Wikipedia - Several references were used from Wikipedia.

8.2 Google Scholar - This provided a search platform to cross-reference other scholarly papers on the subject matter.

8.3 Chess Club Live - The intellectual property owners of Chess Futures

8.4 Chess Futures - The Chess Futures website

8.5 ChatGPT - Open AI language provided the template for the paper and the headings and various content based on very detailed prompts provided by the author of the paper.

This made me realize something: can new books and articles be trusted after the release of ChatGPT? I can see how easy it would be to generate articles on how to improve at chess.

At least 8.5 is there, and its contribution articulated. So you one can add that to the way they receive the paper text body as a proposition.

I have not looked at the paper, and share the same concerns about chatGPT being about formatting language more than producing content, I would blame the lack of characterization of its database, which would be as necessary as any course code of the data massager, and dialogue or prose generator. Specially on topic which are new things of research with scientific or reproducible intent. It can't generate precise sources out of thin air. If it looks smart in certain areas, it might be because of the community of humans that ended up discussing rigorously and sufficiently arriving at some common understandings and clear writing of it would have spread and be frequent in its learning database. Ask it to create new reproducible methods with new possible meaning and interpretations, and you would only get hypotheses that best fit its programming limits in term of probability space over what ever ambient space of linguistic elements they have been developped (ok long sentence, I have my own chatGPT in my mind, it likes to guess too).

My concerns are about what i read here in the op. Not against augmenting the dimensionality of a measure meant to adress the foggy concept of strenght beyond a savant one numerical averaging of win rate under some population distribution assumption. Or even without that last part (glicko).

I made a long post. which I am putting elsewhere (kind of like blogs on lichess might do to other sites). I am developping there. and might get back here.. some other times when some dust of mine settles.. (i mean pruning my verbage for punchline extraction).

I go dimension or measure of 3. one by one.
lichess.org/forum/team-dboings-musings/3-component-or-dimension-measure-thread-overflow

Believe it or not, i intended below to be the short version. but then i have this quota of verbage to pour, in order to feel like i made something self-contained, to some extent. maybe a bad plan of writing in general..

1) is same problem as ELO (pop. dist. assumption, propagating departure from it in reality to all individuals in unknown ways, some might have relation to what seems to not be satisfying with ELO).

2) is already done by glicko. but without 1).

3) is research.. and possibly some machine source of hypotheses that might be taking into account all the existing "noise" about what goes on in certain co-horts of the pools of concerns (both players and game pools).

Conclusion, from op, transparent sharing, that** has to be mentioned, and supported. The third only is new, and is a development on the K factor intent. There are many other avenues of modelling of population sub-species (watchamagonnacallthat), or corhorts, with some know characteristics or mechanism of "rating" change not due to "uncertainty" that is not due to those factors (as in 2nd component).
But scientific data (non rating source of information, about chess behavior other than whole game win rate) about individual players and understanding of such non-"random" evolution are needed. I would say.. at least to have not just one thing floating up in the air to put all our belief into for generations to come again, and the fear of not having such simple truth. Anyone really think that chess strength can be reduce to 1 or 3 numbers?

also. how many numbers to represent the 3 measures? 1? I gave 1 up and 1 down in the op post. 1 up for orginal transparency about the reasoning skeleton. 1 down for presenting it as a new things, or a mature thing. I put a thinking mark, for the 3rd component, as a research direction. not yet a rating measure to be adopted for generations that really need a trustworth rating system to measure indidivual players true strenght, not about game pairing band similarity or game difficulty fairness during tournament (which has its own way of finding the winner gladiator, does not need rating).

** I think we need some hygiene about machine learning tools blends with our own communications, while waiting for legitimate organizations (representative of the many, not the few) to impose some rigor on publications (including web-site) human content, and machine programming assumptions, including the databases maximal disclosure (in how they can help interpret the machine output).

I read the paper and would make the general point that there is far too much repetition! If you repeat something X times you are forcing the reader to check that you're saying the same thing each time - this is very tiresome!

I would also like to point out that the original purpose of the Elo system - and the main reason for its successful adoption - was to create 'fair' pairings for mainly titled players with simple arithmetic enabling players to immediately mentally calculate rating changes post games. The latter fell by the wayside with 'enhancements' but clearly Chess Futures takes a mighty leap into complexity. Additionally the measure of whether Chess Futures is better or worst should be in terms of whether pairings are fairer or not, in comparison to the Elo systems.

The paper proposes pairings should be fairer without any empirical evidence - i.e. more theory than research.

@jeffsonadam said in #5:
> Finally, if you want someone to take this even halfway seriously, you can't have this joke as references:
>
> 8. References
>
> 8.1 Wikipedia - Several references were used from Wikipedia.
>
> 8.2 Google Scholar - This provided a search platform to cross-reference other scholarly papers on the subject matter.
>
> 8.3 Chess Club Live - The intellectual property owners of Chess Futures
>
> 8.4 Chess Futures - The Chess Futures website
>
> 8.5 ChatGPT - Open AI language provided the template for the paper and the headings and various content based on very detailed prompts provided by the author of the paper.

I didn't see their blog that much down. But if what you shared is really from their blog then they have got some serious work to do. Never seen references like that before.