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Arimaa >> General Discussion >> WHRE and WHRP ratings
(Message started by: mistre on Apr 6th, 2012, 3:01pm)

Title: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by mistre on Apr 6th, 2012, 3:01pm
Moved this from the WC thread, as it really doesn't belong there....


on 04/05/12 at 15:00:22, omar wrote:
I like the idea of separating postal games from live game in computing the ratings.


Ok, now that we all agree, who is in charge of calculating the WHR ratings?  Is it Woh?

So, if I understand correctly, all that needs to be done is to take out postal games from the WHRE leaving only live H-H event games.

In this way, we can see a true comparison of how good a player is live vs postal (I always wanted to do an analysis on that, but had no pure way to do it).

Adanac - Thanks for posting the WHRP link.  Is there a page on the Arimaa site that takes you there?  If so, I haven't been able to find it...

Finally, it would be really neat if we could have all of our ratings (Gameroom, WHR, WHRE, WHRP) show on our profile page.  Is that possible?

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by Nombril on Apr 6th, 2012, 4:07pm
Hmmm, I guess I'm not convinced about removing postal games from the rankings.  I'd rather remove the 15s/Blitz games!  :P

How does chess and other games handle this, are any postal speed games included in their rankings?

I expect adding another WHRx (L for Live? R for Real time? ) would be also be possible.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by rbarreira on Apr 6th, 2012, 4:59pm
It's a bit strange to remove postal games from the WHRE ranking.

At the same time, I agree it would be nice to have different rankings for different time controls. But removing postal games from the WHRE ranking does not seem like the best way to do that.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 6th, 2012, 5:33pm
I think Omar was right that AutoPostal games have too big a loophole to be included in WHRE ratings, namely that someone can decline any pairing, without penalty, by resigning on the first move.  AutoPostal gives people a way to select their opponents far beyond the ability to decide to join or not join a tournament with visible registrants.  The latter concern seems negligible to me, while the former is to be taken seriously.

As for splitting ratings based on time control, it is quite clear that different people have different relative strengths at faster or slower games.  Despite this fact, I don't think we have enough events to make splitting up WHRE sensible.  The point of WHRE is to eliminate possible rating manipulation by self-selection of opponents, and it achieves that goal even with all time controls lumped together.  Maybe some day when we have more than one event per year at any give time control it would make more sense to divide out the ratings, but at present the accuracy you would be trying to gain by measuring something more specific would be more than lost due to smaller sample size.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by ginrunner on Apr 6th, 2012, 9:21pm
One can pick and choose who the play in the gameroom as well, under any speed. WHRE and WHRP to the best of my knowledge are H-H games. If you exclude one genre  then you can make an argument for exuding any. Fritz may specialize in the postal games whereas I prefer quick games. If you exclude postals his rating is artificially lowered hypothetically.

On a side not, I would prefer if the postal games were on their own rating system actually. I enjoy playing bots that are much better than me and so therefore I lose more often than not. That leads to a decline in rating which then makes it nearly impossible to be paired with people I would like to play postals with. I have to keep an eye on my rating so that it doesn't drop below the minimum that most people would require on the automatch. If I could play without having to worry about ratings I would probably be in the 1700s for gameroom to be honest.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 6th, 2012, 9:31pm

on 04/06/12 at 21:21:24, ginrunner wrote:
On a side not, I would prefer if the postal games were on their own rating system actually. I enjoy playing bots that are much better than me and so therefore I lose more often than not. That leads to a decline in rating which then makes it nearly impossible to be paired with people I would like to play postals with. I have to keep an eye on my rating so that it doesn't drop below the minimum that most people would require on the automatch.

But you aren't signed up for the Postal Mixer?  You are passing up a motherlode of appropriate opponents!

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by ginrunner on Apr 6th, 2012, 10:59pm

on 04/06/12 at 21:31:55, Fritzlein wrote:
But you aren't signed up for the Postal Mixer?  You are passing up a motherlode of appropriate opponents!


I don't think anyone realizes quite how much I despise having to put up money (even if I end up getting it back) to play in a tournament.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by omar on Apr 6th, 2012, 11:25pm
I changed the link on the 'Top Rated Players' page to point to a page about WHR and give links there to the various different WHR ratings.

Including the WHR type ratings in the profile page is little harder since these ratings are provided on woh's server and are not in the Arimaa players database.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by ChrisB on Apr 7th, 2012, 2:04am

on 04/06/12 at 17:33:39, Fritzlein wrote:
I think Omar was right that AutoPostal games have too big a loophole to be included in WHRE ratings, namely that someone can decline any pairing, without penalty, by resigning on the first move.  AutoPostal gives people a way to select their opponents far beyond the ability to decide to join or not join a tournament with visible registrants.  The latter concern seems negligible to me, while the former is to be taken seriously.

It would be great if we could keep autopostal games as event games.  Autopostal is often the best opportunity a new player has to build a rating of event games.

The only good reason I can think of for allowing one to resign on the first move without penalty is to provide a means for one to exit the autopostal process if one forgets to turn autopostal off.  Possible solutions to prevent or deter one from using this allowance as a loophole to minipulate one's rating are:

* Require one to state a reason for resigning, similar to what one currently needs to do to unrate a game.

* Have the identity of the opponent unknown until one accepts the game  Then one could resign without penalty before accepting the game, but loses that allowance after accepting.

* Limit the number of times a player can resign on the first move without penalty.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by mistre on May 21st, 2012, 9:35am
Coming back to this thread:

I still think postal games should be removed from WHRE. WHRP was already used to seed the postal mixer this year.  There is no reason to keep postal games mixed in with live games to seed live events.

It is common practice that WHR is used if a player does not have at least 5 WHRE games, so there is no reason to worry about lack of games messing up the ratings.



Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by ChrisB on May 22nd, 2012, 9:48am

on 05/21/12 at 09:35:36, mistre wrote:
There is no reason to keep postal games mixed in with live games to seed live events.

I agree!  I favor that more than I favor keeping autopostal games as event games, which I advocated for in my above April 6 post.

So, if there is a conflict between (a) having only live games used to seed live events and (b) keeping autopostal games as event games, I would favor (a) and concede on (b).  To have both (a) and (b), it would probably be best to add WHR categories.  (For example add WHRLE, live event games, and use that to seed live events; use the existing WHRP to seed postal events; use the existing WHRE as the first less-than-five-games backup and the existing WHRH as the second backup.)

Title: The
Post by ChrisB on May 22nd, 2012, 10:37am

on 04/06/12 at 16:07:05, Nombril wrote:
Hmmm, I guess I'm not convinced about removing postal games from the rankings.  I'd rather remove the 15s/Blitz games!  :P

How does chess and other games handle this, are any postal speed games included in their rankings?

I expect adding another WHRx (L for Live? R for Real time? ) would be also be possible.


I would favor separate categories for blitz, slower live/realtime, and postal.

When I played chess on the Internet Chess Club several years ago, they categorized rating classes by effectively the maximum time allowed to do the first 40 moves.  I believe less than 3 minutes was bullet, 3 to less than 15 minutes was blitz and 15 minutes or more was standard.  I don't recall any category for postal games though.

We could use that same type of classification to separate out the faster games, using first 40 moves in 15, 20, 25 or 30 minutes as the cutpoint, depending on the consensus of the community. (To simplify, we could just consider the two time control parameters: time per move and initial reserve, disregarding factors such as percent of unused move time that gets added to the reserve.) The lower cutpoints would exclude most 30 second per move games from the faster category while the the higher cutpoints would include those games.  (For example the value for the upcoming June 2 swiss tournament [time control 30s/5m/100/5m/2h] is 25 minutes.)

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by Fritzlein on Jul 17th, 2012, 5:39pm

on 04/07/12 at 02:04:59, ChrisB wrote:
It would be great if we could keep autopostal games as event games.  Autopostal is often the best opportunity a new player has to build a rating of event games.

True, but what do you think of this seeding for the 2013 World Championship:
1      chessandgo
2      hanzack
3      Fritzlein
4      Thiagor
5      Alfons
6      Adanac

Should Adanac, with his awesome record in World Championships, be seeded behind two players who have no World Championship experience and who have built their ratings with AutoPostal games?

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by ChrisB on Jul 18th, 2012, 12:27am

on 07/17/12 at 17:39:52, Fritzlein wrote:
True, but what do you think of this seeding for the 2013 World Championship:
1      chessandgo
2      hanzack
3      Fritzlein
4      Thiagor
5      Alfons
6      Adanac

Should Adanac, with his awesome record in World Championships, be seeded behind two players who have no World Championship experience and who have built their ratings with AutoPostal games?


Hmm, good point.

My current thinkling is that AutoPostal (and Postal Mixer) games are only needed for world championship purposes if BOTH of the following are true:

    A. participation is limited to the highest rated players

    B. new players don't have many other opportunities to achieve a high rating

For the 2013 World Championship, it certainly looks like "A" will not be true.  The consensus seems to be to have a large number of participants with no rating restriction.  This is different from 2012 where limiting participation to the highest rated players was considered.

In addition "B" is becoming less true.  In the last few months there was a free weekend tournament and Round 1 of the Ironman tournament.  In fact, Thiagor's high rating is more from doing very well in those two events than from AutoPostal.

One nice property of the Whole History Ratings is that one could get a pretty high rating from playing only a few games.  For example, rabbits is #12 on the postal ratings after playing only four games (3 wins and 1 loss).

So, the way things are going, I do not think that AutoPostal games will need to be considered as event games for world championship purposes.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by hyperpape on Jul 19th, 2012, 9:25am
I find the new system to be a PITA. Essentially it forces a bunch of complexity on me, while not giving me a big part of what I want.

Complexity: when I click on the WHR rating (which I naturally do, since the gameroom ratings are a bit silly), I am offered three options, none of which is clearly best, all of which require some thought.

When I click on WHR, what I want is to see is ratings.

If I am insane enough to want other views of the data (which I am, so don't take that as an insult), then I'd like for them to be available. The system succeeds somewhat on this point.

Completeness: The system offers no way to see WHR ratings that incorporate all players, human and bots. All the current options exclude some: you can either exclude bots, exclude players who don't do postal games, or exclude players who don't do

My suggestion: Make the default be the old WHR ratings, including more or less everything. Show that, and give links above to choose alternate views.

For various purposes, you can use those alternate rankings, but a casual browser should not be required to think about them.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by Hippo on Feb 7th, 2018, 6:19pm
Did WHR pages stop working?


on 02/14/18 at 16:14:32, woh wrote:
They have been moved to a new location:

human vs human (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whrh.htm)
postal (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whrp.htm)
events (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whre.htm)


Thanks, good to know.

Title: Re: WHRE and WHRP ratings
Post by woh on Feb 14th, 2018, 4:14pm
They have been moved to a new location:

human vs human (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whrh.htm)
postal (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whrp.htm)
events (http://users.skynet.be/fb692500/whr/whre.htm)



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