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Comment by hyperpape

10 hours ago

If you scaled Shin Jinseo to 2800, you would have players with extremely negative ratings. This page shows ratings of European players on a roughly aligned scale: https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/createalleuro3.php?country.... It still has negative numbers on it, and this only contains players who have attended a tournament (though it's more common for beginners to play tournaments in the west, since it's hard to find times to play).

It's not a comparison of the worth of the games (I play both, though I'm better at Go, and prefer it), but the dynamic range of Go is larger.

That said, any cross-game/sport comparisons of this kind are pretty tough to do properly.

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hyperpape

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somenameforme  2 hours ago

I'm unfamiliar with Go ratings, but chess ratings are based on the Elo system which is a simple mathematical prediction system. Borrowing some figures from Wiki [1] we get:

  1.00 +800
  0.99 +677
  0.9 +366
  0.8 +240
  0.7 +149
  0.6 +72
  0.5 0
  0.4 −72
  0.3 −149
  0.2 −240
  0.1 −366
  0.01 −677
  0.00 −800

The second column is your rating minus your opponent's, and the left is your predicted result. So if you are rating 1849 and your opponent is rated 1700 then you'd be expected to score about 70%. To have a 1% expected score against Magnus, you'd need a rating of about 2150.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

  • shwaj  1 hour ago

    I was under the impression that Go also uses Elo, then I did a bit of cursory research and discovers that it varies.

    Two major federations are American Go Association (AGA) and European Go Federation (EGF). EGF uses an Elo-inspired update rule since 2021. AGA uses a quite-different Bayesian system without pairwise update; they provide a paper and a C++ reference impl.

    Asian countries don't bother with such numeric ratings. Instead, rankings are titles which are won through tournament promotion structures (sounds similar to Sumo to me).

    Interesting, because I always thought that it was more "apples to apples", and that the higher upper limits of Go rankings was somehow indicative of the higher "dynamic range" of the game compared to chess. For example, if Elo were applied to basketball, what would the Elo of Lebron James be compared to a playground hooper (leaving aside that 1-on-1 isn't the best part of Lebron's game)... would it be higher or lower than Magnus Carlsen in chess? I don't have an intuition.

  • tasuki  1 hour ago

    It works the same in go. Just, as the parent has said, the dynamic range of go is higher.