Peak Go Performance Age

[ewan1971]

I believe players are initially guessed to have a rating of 3000

In a very rare occasion, Remi Coulom finally come out and defend his ranking methodology.

"WHR does not really give a start rating to players. That's the big advantage of the WHR approach over incremental algorithms such Taeil Bai's: with WHR, ratings of the past are corrected retroactively based on current games. For incremental rating algorithms, the choice of a good initial rating is very important, but not for WHR.
Players with very few games do get a rating, but it is very uncertain, and does not influence opponents much. And it will be corrected fast if it turns out to be very wrong."

For the full conversation, with most of the questions attacking on how his rank put Japanese pro in high order, can be read here https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments ... _rankings/

That's a fascinating read. So contrary to what you have implied, Remy actually admitted that his system has glaring inadequacies which caused it to rank Japanese player too high, and he has promised to investigate and experiment further to correct this problem.

Thank you for the link!

[Uberdude]

That's a fascinating read. So contrary to what you have implied, Remy[sic] actually admitted that his system has glaring inadequacies which caused it to rank Japanese player too high, and he has promised to investigate and experiment further to correct this problem.

Could you please quote those "glaring inadequacies"? I cannot find Remi saying anything in that thread that I would call that.

[hyperpape]

I believe players are initially guessed to have a rating of 3000

In a very rare occasion, Remi Coulom finally come out and defend his ranking methodology.

"WHR does not really give a start rating to players. That's the big advantage of the WHR approach over incremental algorithms such Taeil Bai's: with WHR, ratings of the past are corrected retroactively based on current games. For incremental rating algorithms, the choice of a good initial rating is very important, but not for WHR.
Players with very few games do get a rating, but it is very uncertain, and does not influence opponents much. And it will be corrected fast if it turns out to be very wrong."

I'm not sure if that's actually contradictory. I said "guess", which indicates low confidence, and you can see that players with just a few games often end up closer to 3000 than their results would intrinsically indicate (https://www.goratings.org/en/players/1711.html: L vs. 2837, L vs. 3012, W vs. 2818, resulting rating 2876).

And of course, the resulting ratings for active players cluster around 3000, though you can eyeball it and tell that the average and median are above 3000. _Something_ makes the ratings stay in that vicinity, as opposed to 1000 or 5000 or 9000.

[tartaric]

One statemement we could establish is the fact that there is always a younger player to crush the top one (e.g. Shin Jinseo who has beaten Ke Jie and Iyama Yuta very recently). And this same fact coincide with another one: the best of the moment which is around 3X and number one since at least 5 years or more (as Lee Chang Ho at the time he was dethroned by Lee Sedol and the same for this last with Ke Jie). With these 2 facts we could thus guess that Shin could be the next strongest one when Ke or maybe Iyama or Park will be number one and turn 3X.

[WindCaliber]

One statemement we could establish is the fact that there is always a younger player to crush the top one (e.g. Shin Jinseo who has beaten Ke Jie and Iyama Yuta very recently). And this same fact coincide with another one: the best of the moment which is around 3X and number one since at least 5 years or more (as Lee Chang Ho at the time he was dethroned by Lee Sedol and the same for this last with Ke Jie). With these 2 facts we could thus guess that Shin could be the next strongest one when Ke or maybe Iyama or Park will be number one and turn 3X.

Ke Jie is 14 years younger than Lee Sedol. Shin Jinseo is 3 years younger than Ke. The comparison is not at all the same.
If anything, it would be a Park Junghwan vs Ke Jie scenario, except with Shin.

Park also suffered a similar lull in late 2012, going 11-for-24 from Oct-Dec, when Shi Yue briefly overtook him as #1. This could be something similar. Looking in the same time period(since Oct), Ke Jie is 10-for 18 with a couple more games left in the year.
We could also just be wildly speculating and be totally off—only one way to find out.

EDIT: Thought this was the Ke Jie thread, so got a bit carried away On topic, I think it's a safe bet to say that the average peak age is in the mid-to-late 20s.

[hyperpape]

The elephant in the room is that for whatever reason, there have been several Chinese players who seem to peak in their late teens/early twenties and either decline significantly (Fan Tingyu) or stay very good but below their peak (Shi Yue). I think John has mentioned the pressure and number of games as possibilities, but I don't think we fully know why. Currently the oldest top Chinese players are Zhou Ruiyang (26), Tuo Jiaxi (26) and Chen Yaoye (27).

This doesn't mean that Ke Jie won't be a player who can be one of the very best for ten years, but we'll have to wait and see.

[pookpooi]

Two big news for shogi world today, but what related to this topic is that Yoshiharu Habu becomes the first person ever to hold 7 lifetime major titles (different from what Iyama Yuta has done, but Habu already did that back in 1996), and he is 47 years old and is also Chess FIDE Master (I'm wondering if this is related to transfer knowledge or not). I'm not familiar with shogi world at all but my personal belief is the peak age should be similar to chess. This year we also have 14-year-old Sota Fujii set record for most consecutive wins. 47+14/2 = 30.5 years (this is not any statistics method, just show how my personal belief work)