Related papers: Anyone for chess? Analysing chess ratings above hi…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
AI research in chess has been primarily focused on producing stronger agents that can maximize the probability of winning. However, there is another aspect to chess that has largely gone unexamined: its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, there…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
The strength of chess engines together with the availability of numerous chess games have attracted the attention of chess players, data scientists, and researchers during the last decades. State-of-the-art engines now provide an…
Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to…
The presence or absence of winner-loser effects is a widely discussed phenomenon across both sports and psychology research. Investigation of such effects is often hampered by the limited availability of data. Online chess has exploded in…
We introduce a novel metric to quantify the fragility of chess positions using the interaction graph of pieces. This fragility score $F$ captures the tension within a position and serves as a strong indicator of tipping points in a game. In…
This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…
We establish a general formula for the distribution of the score in table tennis. We use this formula to derive the probability distribution (and hence the expectation and variance) of the number of rallies necessary to achieve any given…
The Elo system for rating chess players, also used in other games and sports, was adopted by the World Chess Federation over four decades ago. Although not without controversy, it is accepted as generally reliable and provides a method for…
Accurately estimating human skill levels is crucial for designing effective human-AI interactions so that AI can provide appropriate challenges or guidance. In games where AI players have beaten top human professionals, strength estimation…
Chess engines passed human strength years ago, but they still don't play like humans. A grandmaster under clock pressure blunders in ways a club player on a hot streak never would. Conventional engines capture none of this. This paper…
Chess, a deterministic game with perfect information, has long served as a benchmark for studying strategic decision-making and artificial intelligence. Traditional chess engines or tools for analysis primarily focus on calculating optimal…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
We consider the problem of estimating `preference' or `strength' parameters in three-way comparison experiments, each composed of a series of paired comparisons, but where only the single `preferred' or `strongest' candidate is known in…
We investigate a pool of international chess title holders born between 1901 and 1943. Using Elo ratings we compute for every player his expected score in a game with a randomly selected player from the pool. We use this figure as player's…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…
This paper presents a novel approach to analyze human decision-making that involves comparing the behavior of professional chess players relative to a computational benchmark of cognitively bounded rationality. This benchmark is constructed…
Chess has long been a testbed for AI's quest to match human intelligence, and in recent years, chess AI systems have surpassed the strongest humans at the game. However, these systems are not human-aligned; they are unable to match the…