English Chess Forum

After a chock-full 24 hours since this was brought to my attention yesterday (giving and grading an exam, correcting book galleys, overdue revision to a talk I'm giving on Tuesday, fixing a math issue in a delayed post on the Gödel's Lost letter blog, and a 4-hour bicycle trip this afternoon), I loo...

... << various points >> Ken I am a retired mathematician, who has not worked in academia. I have doubts about the FIDE rating system when applied to a large number of players and also the English Chess Federation (ECF) grading system, especially the ability to predict scores, which casts doubts on...

Hello, Justin---Oh for those days... The quote is something I recall being attributed to Anand in an article during the year after "Toiletgate", that is 2006--07. Unfortunately I did not save a copy of the page, and now I cannot find it via Google. It may have been on ChessBase.com. My role is only ...

To answer Clive Blackburn and Roger de Coverley on this page (58): just like the sources I use (including ChessBase, TWIC, and OpeningMaster), the data set is heavily skewed toward recent years. The calibration in my 2011 papers used 2006--2009 as the master; now I am adding 2010--2013. I mentioned ...

I'm a bit sceptical about being able to use a hidden camera and program a computer to parse the photograph. Maybe if you could get an overhead view from something like a demo board. In clothing you'll be getting views from lots of subtly different, often not very clear, angles. Can't imagine not ge...

Apologies again for not quoting individually while keeping one-on-many replies compact: The FIDE/ACP document does not fix a recipe---it lays out criteria one must satisfy. I claim mine does so, but even in my Tallinn talk I acknowledged that someone else could come up with a better one, even saying...

Roger, count me among your "anyone"---the games in my datasets come from various sources. E.g. OpeningMaster has many more games by sub-2000 players than ChessBase Big not to mention TWIC, and I am grateful for efforts like CANbase and would like to know of more. In cases like the recent incident wi...

In reply to Mr. de Coverly, I would very much like to see someone do an independent assessment of sources and numbers of games and "biases", including looking at actual issues of TWIC and other sources. Also please bear in mind the distinction between screening tests (which carry no z-scores) and fu...

I've just registered for this forum, and can answer various questions about my model. A few things in recent pages: 1. The 20-year estimate for a 1M-to-1 false positive (using 4.75 sigma as criterion) is based on about 200,000 tested games per year, not 50,000, because the unit of testing is player-...