Aren’t ELO scores conserved? The sum of the ELO scores for a fixed population will be unchanged? The video puts stockfish’s ELO at 2708.4, worse than some human grandmasters, which also suggests to me that he didn’t run the ELO algorithm to convergence and stockfish should be stealing more score from other weaker players. EDIT ChatGPT 5 thinks the ELOs you suggested for random are reasonable for other reasons. I’m still skeptical but want to point that out.
NB: If you think he underestimates stockfish Elo, then you should think he underestimate Random Elo, because the algorithm finds Elo gaps not absolute Elo.
Not if the ELO algorithm isn’t run to completion. It takes a long time to make large gaps in ELO, like between stockfish and Random, if you don’t have a lot of intermediate players. It’s hard for ELO to different between +1000 ELO and +2000 ELO—both mean “wins virtually all the time”.
Aren’t ELO scores conserved? The sum of the ELO scores for a fixed population will be unchanged?
The video puts stockfish’s ELO at 2708.4, worse than some human grandmasters, which also suggests to me that he didn’t run the ELO algorithm to convergence and stockfish should be stealing more score from other weaker players.
EDIT ChatGPT 5 thinks the ELOs you suggested for random are reasonable for other reasons. I’m still skeptical but want to point that out.
Good point, I should look into this more.
NB: If you think he underestimates stockfish Elo, then you should think he underestimate Random Elo, because the algorithm finds Elo gaps not absolute Elo.
Not if the ELO algorithm isn’t run to completion. It takes a long time to make large gaps in ELO, like between stockfish and Random, if you don’t have a lot of intermediate players. It’s hard for ELO to different between +1000 ELO and +2000 ELO—both mean “wins virtually all the time”.