Elostat

[George Bodkin]

What start rating should be used when running Elostat 2400 or 2650.

Thanks George

[George Tsavdaris]

What start rating should be used when running Elostat 2400 or 2650.

Thanks George

It doesn't matter at all! You can put 0 or 100 or anything as starting ELO.

What matters is the rating difference between 2 opponents and not the rating ratio.
That means:
Player A -> 2780 ELO
Player B -> 2640 ELO

is equivalent to:

Player A -> 780 ELO
Player B -> 640 ELO

as also equivalent to:

Player A -> 180 ELO
Player B -> 40 ELO

[Kirill Kryukov]

What start rating should be used when running Elostat 2400 or 2650.

Thanks George

Although it does not particularly matter what start rating you use with ELOstat, you may still prefer to produce some "conventional" ratings, which means relatively strong engines will have ratings of about 2700+. Several common ways to do it:

1. Take random number, like 2400, as starting ELO. Compute ratings, check if the ratings are familiar, adjust and re-compute if necessary.

2. Take any random engine and fix its ELO to be constant. For example CEGT has been fixing Shredder 9 rating to be always 2750 (I am not sure if they are still doing it).

3. Take selection of several engines and fix their everage ELO to be constant. (Or you can use weighted average if you don't have enough engines with large number of games). This is how we compute CCRL rating lists.

Best,
Kirill

[Norm Pollock]

Also adjust the engine names. For example: "Shredder 10.0 64-bit" and "Shredder 10.0 x64" are considered by elostat to be 2 completely different engines.

On a side note, let me mention that as a user of both CCRL and CEGT, I have noticed that the 2 services often use different names for the same engine/version. If they would use unified names, it would easier for me to use elostat on a merged database.