No Country for Old Men

GO players have been sent reeling in the last year. First came the AlphaGo program publicly beating one of the best GO players in the world early in the year. At the end of the year, that same program, temporarily disguised, tore through the rest of the GO community, winning 60 of 61 games online against all comers, including the best in the world. (The other game was drawn because of an internet connection failure.) Quote:

“Master” also claimed victories against a number of top Go pros including South Korea’s Park Jung-hwan and Japan’s Iyama Yuta, as well as beating China’s Ke Jie, who is currently ranked world number one, twice.

“When facing it, all traditional tactics are wrong,” commented Ke Jie after his defeat. Ke Jie had stated in December that he is currently not good enough to defeat AlphaGo.

GO had resisted the efforts of programmers for a very long time, unlike Chess, in which the programmers saw incremental improvement until they had surpassed human players. So we've had a long time to get used to this. But GO players are in shock, as AlphaGo seemed to come from nowhere to not only equal them, but surpass them by such a margin as to play at what appears to be a God-like level.

However, [GO master] Gu [Li] struck a different tone on Weibo (a Chinese microblogging site like Twitter), saying, “AlphaGo has completely subverted the control and judgment of us GO players. I can’t help but ask, one day many years later, when you find your previous awareness, cognition and choices are all wrong, will you keep going along the wrong path or reject yourself?” This uncertainty was echoed by GO master Ke Jie [ranked #1 in GO], who said, “After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of GO.” [emphasis added = ed.]

Chess players haven't quite had the same reaction to being surpassed, but then Steinitz only started pulling back the curtain from the deeper truths of the game less than 150 years ago. That and our ever constant search for novelties and cooks probably saved us from such a deep crisis of faith.

Certainty is a shaky foundation upon which to build the edifice of one's self.

HT: Alice Maz, whose tweet alerted me to this.

A new rating system

The Grand Chess Tour has instituted a new rating system, which they call the Universal Rating System (tm). This rating combines all ratings (standard, rapid, blitz) into one rating. Their website explains the idea behind what they're doing and provides some evidence to show that their rating system is more accurate than the current Elo system in use by FIDE.

The people that actually did the work are Mr. Maxime Rischard, Dr. J. Isaac Miller, Dr. Mark Glickman, and Jeff Sonas. I don't recognize Rischard or Miller offhand, but Jeff Sonas and Mark Glickman are familiar names. Sonas did interesting work in the past on establishing good historical ratings, and Glickman created the Glicko rating systems, versions of which are in use by FICS (RIP), Chess.com, LiChess, and the USCF. The new system has a fine pedigree, and is funded by the Grand Chess Tour, the Kasparov Chess Foundation, and the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis.

One good thing is that they've adjusted the ratings so that they resemble the old ratings in terms of scale. Magnus is at 2852, so the scale and magnitude are familiar - at least they haven't created something that looks like the ECF monstrosity!

The new rating list does have some oddities worth remarking upon, however. First of all, Carlsen's lead has been extended over his rivals. Games at faster time controls are included in the URS, though given less weight, and Carlsen has been consistently dominant across all three domains. Caruana slips from a close second in the FIDE standard list to a distant fourth, as he's not comparatively that good at faster time controls. Kramnik and Nakamura are tied for second, and Nepomniachtchi rounds out the top five. You can see their January list here.

In any event, Jeff Sonas has written a (not at all brief) summation of what they've done and why. Check it out, if that's your thing. Personally I will say that the work looks good on the face of it, but I'm not sure the old system really needed that much improvement! One thing the old Elo system had going for it was that one could easily calculate one's ratings after an event, and the basic method was clear cut. Now? No so much. Here's an example:

Rather than inventing a specific formula that can be used to calculate ratings directly, like there is for the Elo system and for performance ratings, we have developed a probability model that analyzes a large domain of possible ratings for each player, with some ratings being more likely than others (based upon the overall population distribution of chess strength). Across those possible ratings, our system then determines how likely the actual results would have been to occur, and ultimately determines the most likely overall set of ratings, for all players at once, in order to best explain the actual results.*

Still, this is work upon which Sinquefield (and others) wish to hang their hats, and he who pays the singer calls the tune. I also suspect that this may be part of a plan by Sinquefield, Pein, Kasparov and others to wrest ratings from FIDE's grasp in an attempt to weaken that organization, and perhaps start something new in its place. It's been tried before, though, and failed, so I wouldn't count on this replacing FIDE's ratings in most people's minds any time soon.

* Incidentally, such a system really would not have been practical in the 1950s when Arpad Elo's system went into first use. Such wonders as the URS are possible because computing power has made both the sorting and calculating tasks needed for such a system relatively easily doable.