uPWarrior wrote:... games should get more important (or "heavier") the farther from the expected outcome one gets. The 5th win in a 5win streak should increase one's rating more than a win after a win-lose-win-lose scenario.
Bayes' Theorem describes exactly how much you should change a probability in response to new evidence, which is why the word "Bayesian" keeps showing up in these rating discussions. if you want to join the Bayesian Conspiracy with shapenaji, Redundant, and me, read this: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
If you search for the phrase "In front of you is a bookbag", you'll see an example relevant to this discussion, although it won't make much sense unless you've read the prior examples.
In the terms used there, every game you win is a few decibels of evidence that you're under-ranked, and every loss is an equal amount of evidence that you're over-ranked (the amount of evidence should be scaled for the strength difference, of course).
People find a lot more patterns in random data than is actually there. The whole point of the rating system is to figure out if your 5 recent wins are enough evidence of improvement to counteract your average prior performance. I'd expect WHR (which is a Bayesian system) to do much better at making sense of such runs than systems that just add on an arbitrary bonus for runs (is WLWWWWLW really worse than LLWWWWWW? I think it depends a lot on time elapsed between the games). WHR assumes your strength changes over time. I'm not aware of another system that does.
