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The strength differences between professional levels is...

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 12:54 pm
by pookpooi
most articles say that it is 'believed' to be no more than 2-3 stones without putting any other reference.
according to goratings.org (active) top pro and bottom pro has 1044 different in Elo, in KGS 230 Elo account for 1 stone difference (I got this from deepmind alphago paper), so this would be 4.5 stones, I'll smooth the number down to 4 stones (this is my own bias hehe), which sound reasonable to me, but what do you think of this?

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 1:25 pm
by emeraldemon
Unfortunately I doubt elo difference maps to handicap stones in a uniform way. This is pure speculation, but I would guess that pros are better at using the handicap advantage and carrying an advantage from opening to endgame. So I would imagine four stones is "bigger" for a pro than for a typical KGS player. The only way to know for sure would be to have pro handicap games, which aren't too common these days. Someone who knows the history better might be able to say more from the time period when pros did play with handicap.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 1:33 pm
by RobertJasiek
...undefined.

Because nowadays there are stronger players with lower ranks.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 1:36 pm
by pookpooi
emeraldemon wrote:Unfortunately I doubt elo difference maps to handicap stones in a uniform way. This is pure speculation, but I would guess that pros are better at using the handicap advantage and carrying an advantage from opening to endgame. So I would imagine four stones is "bigger" for a pro than for a typical KGS player. The only way to know for sure would be to have pro handicap games, which aren't too common these days. Someone who knows the history better might be able to say more from the time period when pros did play with handicap.
Can we observe indirectly using high rank player in KGS? If we set 7D KGS player as a bottom pro, the top KGS player right now is around 10D, and of course the real world top pro is obviously stronger than top KGS player, that would put the real world top pro around 11D (or more). 11-7 = 4 can this work?
RobertJasiek wrote:...undefined.

Because nowadays there are stronger players with lower ranks.
What do you mean? I don't talk about professional ranking system at all.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 2:11 pm
by emeraldemon
Why would a bottom pro be 7d kgs?

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 2:18 pm
by pookpooi
emeraldemon wrote:Why would a bottom pro be 7d kgs?
I try to connect those account to real world pro, for example, account user HYang is Huiren Yang, Chinese 1p rank no. 771 out of 836 player in goratings, is around 7D in KGS.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 2:34 pm
by Uberdude
There was also that female pro, I forget her account, who was 6d on KGS.

Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:22 pm
by EdLee
The publication WeiQiTianDi would publish a table of the active pros in China with their ratings based on actual tourney results; I don't know if they still do this (annually ? bi-annually ? ). Maybe someone with access to a recent issue can confirm this.

( I also don't know if Japan and Korea have similar, publicly available rating systems based on current tourney results. )

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 12:56 am
by Elom
Baduk.or.kr seem to have a monthly ranking table of the top 100 Korean pro's, probably based on Dr Bea Teal's ranking system.
It is in Korean, however.

I believe Gogameguru had a link to an explanation of the rating system.

What's interesting is that mamumamu0143's site gives monthly ranking of all Japanese pro's using a different rating system, monthly world rankings using the same ranking system, and then somehow, from somewhere, we can compare it to Dr Bae Teal's quarterly table of the top 100 pro's (all the names are in kanji)

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 5:10 pm
by ez4u
pookpooi wrote:
emeraldemon wrote:Unfortunately I doubt elo difference maps to handicap stones in a uniform way. This is pure speculation, but I would guess that pros are better at using the handicap advantage and carrying an advantage from opening to endgame. So I would imagine four stones is "bigger" for a pro than for a typical KGS player. The only way to know for sure would be to have pro handicap games, which aren't too common these days. Someone who knows the history better might be able to say more from the time period when pros did play with handicap.
Can we observe indirectly using high rank player in KGS? If we set 7D KGS player as a bottom pro, the top KGS player right now is around 10D, and of course the real world top pro is obviously stronger than top KGS player, that would put the real world top pro around 11D (or more). 11-7 = 4 can this work?
RobertJasiek wrote:...undefined.
Because nowadays there are stronger players with lower ranks.
What do you mean? I don't talk about professional ranking system at all.
What do you mean by professional "levels" in this thead's title then? I think I had the same impression as RJ.

My understanding of the existing ratings systems is that they attempt to express the likely winning percentage between different players. This may or may not map to handicap stones. On mamumamu's site in his analysis of komi he writes that we lack sufficient handicap game results between pros to extend the results from komi to handicap stones.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 10:31 pm
by pookpooi
ez4u wrote: What do you mean by professional "levels" in this thead's title then? I think I had the same impression as RJ.

My understanding of the existing ratings systems is that they attempt to express the likely winning percentage between different players. This may or may not map to handicap stones. On mamumamu's site in his analysis of komi he writes that we lack sufficient handicap game results between pros to extend the results from komi to handicap stones.
I'm trying to find the strength difference between active top pro and active bottom pro that is ranked by Elo ranking system (to be specific, Whole History Rating system used by goratings.org), not professional dan system. By professional levels I mean any active pro, not level like 1p - 9p. Sorry if you misunderstood because of my poor English skill. I just copied that sentence from Wikipedia article 'Go Professional' under the topic 'Discrepancies among professionals'

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 11:48 pm
by EdLee
pookpooi wrote:Sorry if you misunderstood because of my poor English skill.
Hi pookpooi, I understood your question; no problem with your English.

A related side question: what are you going to do with this information ?
For example, I don't follow F-1 racing;
but I heard Michael Schumacher was #1 at a time.
Maybe his average time was some small fraction of one second better than his closest competitor. That's an interesting trivia -- not much I can do with it.
Or: why do you seek this information ? (I'm curious.)

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 11:59 pm
by Solomon
You don't have sufficient data (a sample of handicap games between "top" and "bottom" active pros) to test your hypothesis, and you are being vague on some terms. For example, what exactly makes an "active" pro? 1 game a year? 1 game a week? Someone who still plays Go? I also think it's unreasonable to base it off KGS ratings. You don't know what conditions Huiren Yang is playing under or how seriously he plays online. And would he even be considered active? Unless you set up an experiment where you can convince professionals that meet your criteria to play handicap games seriously (good luck convincing Rin Kaiho to play a 3 stone handicap game against Ke Jie based on their ELO scores), all of this is just wild guessing.

Re: The strength differences between professional levels is.

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2016 12:00 am
by RobertJasiek
pookpooi wrote:ranked by Elo ranking system
You mean: "rated by an Elo style rating system". Ranks might then be derived from ratings.

Re:

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2016 1:33 am
by pookpooi
EdLee wrote:why do you seek this information ? (I'm curious.)
It started from when I'd enough money and I want to invest in deep learning start-up, but it's long story you don't wanna hear the whole of it.
The shortcut, every time I read article about Go professional I've to read 'the difference is believed to be no more than 2-3 stones' and I've begin to wonder, how do they get that number? Is that reliable? So with my free time right now that I don't wanna spend it on practicing go, I'm trying to find that answer by myself (with a lot of internet help)
Solomon wrote:For example, what exactly makes an "active" pro? 1 game a year? 1 game a week? Someone who still plays Go?
Goratings.org only rank pro that had play at least one game in the last 1,000 days, that's what I use to define active pro.
Solomon wrote:all of this is just wild guessing.
We don't know how many stone is inside the black box, we can't open it. We've been told (from anonymous) that inside the box is 'believed' to be 2-3 stones. But I don't believe him, and I'm not randomly guess the answer either. Instead, I'm shaking the box to hear what it sounds like, and compare it to another box I made that I put 4 stones in it. When the box is finally open I may be completely wrong, may be there's no stone in it at all, or may be, there are tens of them!
RobertJasiek wrote:You mean: "rated by an Elo style rating system". Ranks might then be derived from ratings.
Thank you, that's exactly what I mean.