Manual de Houdini 3 2012 | Page 254

254 Houdini Help \My Documents\ and \Settings\\Application Files\Chessbase\Engines.UCI. 3.9 Elo ratings 3.9.1 Elo ratings and lists The Elo rating system was invented by Árpád Élö" (1903-1992), a Hungarian-born American physics professor, who spelled his name "Elo" after he left Hungary. So Elo is not an acronym and should not be wirtten ELO. Here's a list of rating categories Playing strength Player category 1000-1600 Average club player 1600-2100 Strong club player 2100-2300 International league player 2300-2450 International Master (IM) 2450-2600 Grandmaster (GM) 2600-2850 Supergrandmaster, world champions, Kasparov The world's strongest chess engines, running on fast hardware, today (2005) have an Elo rating of over 2800. They are a match for the strongest human chess players in the world. The Elo ratings can also be used to evaluate chess engines. This program helps you to do this by producing rating and ranking lists on the bas is of engine tournaments. In fact, it contains a complete Elo management system. GM and IM norms are automatically recognized and titles awarded. The Elo calculation can be used to evaluate human performance, even for historical tournaments that were held long before the rating system was invented. If you have an existing Elo list, you can add a tournament to update the list. Before you start rating tournaments you should create an Elo start list. This gives all players a plausible initial rating. After that, you must maintain the list by evaluating tournaments as they are played. To do this, mark the games of a tournament, rightclick them, then select “Add to Elo list” in the menu that appears. If no Elo list is open, then a file selector appears, allowing you to select a list to add games to. 3.9.2 The Elo start list Da t a ba se Window - Ra t ing Cre a t e Elo St a rt List Unix inventor and computer chess pioneer, Ke n T hom pson, has developed an algorithm which allows one to create an Elo rating list out of an arbitrary set of games. Any database of games can be treated as a gigantic tournament. Each player gets the © ChessBase 2012