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On the Limitations of Elo: Real-World Games Are Transitive, Not Additive (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 27, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Elo rates players with one number, assuming wins form a simple ladder, but it can fail to find that ladder even in the simplest games. A new rating gives each player two numbers, skill and consistency, tested on real bot and human matches.

Abstract · On the Limitations of Elo: Real-World Games, are Transitive, not Additive

Real-world competitive games, such as chess, go, or StarCraft II, rely on Elo models to measure the strength of their players. Since these games are not fully transitive, using Elo implicitly assumes they have a strong transitive component that can correctly be identified and extracted. In this study, we investigate the challenge of identifying the strength of the transitive component in games. First, we show that Elo models can fail to extract this transitive component, even in elementary transitive games. Then, based on this observation, we propose an extension of the Elo score: we end up with a disc ranking system that assigns each player two scores, which we refer to as skill and consistency. Finally, we propose an empirical validation on payoff matrices coming from real-world games played by bots and humans.

Quentin Bertrand, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki, Gauthier Gidel
arXiv:2206.12301 · cs.GT, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jun 21, 2022 · updated Mar 6, 2023
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