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17. July 2006, 03:59:38

Peón Libre

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Subject: Re:

Thad, grenv: I thought of that, and I see two problems.

First, if we're attempting to answer alanback's original question, I think we have to have some requirement of experience in all five games. Otherwise our newly crowned Champion-Of-All-Five-Positive-Gammon-Games will be, depending on whether we count provisional BKR in individual games, either 02i (who has provisional BKRs in three games and is unrated in the other two) or sergey82 (who has a very high established BKR in Backgammon but has not played the other four games). Would you declare someone the winner of a pentathlon if he had only participated in one or three of the five events?

Second (and perhaps more important), it is meaningless to directly compare a BKR from one game to a BKR from another game. Even though we all started with BKRs of 1300, the rating distributions tend to drift upward over time, and this does not necessarily happen at the same rate for all games. As of a few minutes ago, the median ratings on the lists of established BKR were 2044 for Backgammon, 1714 for Nackgammon, 1703 for Backgammon Race, 1677 for Crowded Backgammon, and 2029 for Hyper Backgammon. This suggests, for example, that a BKR of 1700 in Crowded Backgammon is better than a BKR of 2000 in Backgammon. Any comparison of BKR weighted by number of games played will be biased in favor of those who play mostly Backgammon and Hyper Backgammon.

I claim that linear combinations of BKRs can be meaningfully compared only if the weighting is the same for each player.