From: Albyn Jones <jones <at> REED <dot> EDU>
Date: 14 dec 1995
Subject: Re: IGS/ISS thread

>I certainly agree that it would be more complicated to count handicap
>games as ranking games. We've been using the Chess ELO system in
>Europe for a number of years now to handle Shogi ranks, which seems to
>be fairly successful. Handicap games are not used to update ELO ranks
>since it was thought it would add too much complexity to the ranking
>system.

the ELO system is essentially an approximation to the MLE's for the
same basic type of model used by the AGA/IGS rating system.  it rates
one player at a time, assuming that all other player's ratings are known,
and uses simple approximations that were designed to be easy to implement
on hand calculators.  neither of these features are necessary now, roughly
50 years later.

>>  Also, in Go, the person who goes first gets a 0.5
>> advantage, where 1.0 == one stone.  None of this makes sense
>> for Shogi.  Although, the person who does has the first move
>> probably does have an advantage.
>
>Not much... it's something like 53% wins for Black in pro games.
>Don't know about amateur games though.
>
>Steve Lamb.
>

which suggests that ignoring color will probably not be a big
problem.

albyn