European Go Database / Wishlist

Sub-page of EuropeanGoDatabase

Wishes, requests, FAQ... and similar for the European Go Database.

Table of contents

Ratings calculator

  • IanDavis: I would like to request a ratings calculator for those of us who can't wait to find out what our rating will be next month.
    • DJ: Hi Ian, I've forwarded your wish to Paolo and Aldo... I'll keep you posted on the development.
    • Flatline: Hi Ian. As you know, EGD has changed its nature a couple of weeks ago (today is April 19th, 2009). Now tournaments results are uploaded directly by organizers, and all ratings are immediately updated. I hope this answers to your question.
      However, I'm also thinking about a GoR calculator to add to EGD for on-the-fly simulations. I'll release it soon.
      • IanDavis I am extremely impressed by what I have seen so far. Real Time updates, GoR changes per player, head to head information, EGD appears to have everything you could want.
        • Flatline: Thank you Ian, I'm touched :-)

International tournaments

  • tapir: What is the point in adding data from e.g. the KPMC to the EGD?
    • Phelan: It was added to the [ext] European official ratings, and imported from there. Perhaps Ales Cieply can better answer that.
    • Herman: I assume that the point is that European players participate in the KPMC, thus adding those results improves the accurracy of their ratings.
    • tapir: Doesn't it add dozens of players from everywhere (that is without much games in the database = inaccurate rating) to the database? I thought the EGD is somehow an official outlet of the European official ratings... Am I wrong?
      • IanDavis It is useful to store such information, some federations may use this when choosing whether to promote a player based on their WAGC performance.
        • tapir: I won't argue against storing such information, but I don't see the point in keeping pro-ratings, worldwide amateur ratings according to WMSG, WAGC results only.

Relation between EGD and EGF

  • tapir: Ales Cieply or Marco Silles according to him ([ext] http://gocafe.blogspot.com/2008/08/ales-cieply-gibt-egf-rating-ab.html), he'll maintain the GoR in future? I don't understand the relation between GoR and EGD at all...
    • Ian?: The EGD is an accessible frontend to the tournaments used to calculate GoR
    • Phelan: It seems that the European Go Ratings will be maintained at the EGD starting from April. Note on [ext] http://gemma.ujf.cas.cz/~cieply/GO/gor.html "The EGF ratings are moving to the European Go Database. We intend to complete the move by the next (April) update. A new system for results submission is already functional."
    • tapir: Deshis knowing German might be interested in this: [ext] http://gocafe.blogspot.com/2009/03/egf-rating-verschmilzt-mit-egd.html - merging of GoR and EGD - with an online access and semi.automatized result processing + the old issue FIGG/AGI, with the AGI maintaining the EGD while not officially EGF member.
    • Phelan: Deshis not knowing German might also be interested in it, and use babelfish to get the gist of the article. ;) Thanks for posting it here.
    • Flatline: I have to give an answer to this question:
      > I don't understand the relation between GoR and EGD at all....
      Starting from April 3rd, 2009, EGD has become the official repository of european tournaments, and every time a tournament is added, the GoR is automatically recalculated at once. No human intervention is needed any more.
      Of course there is a human supervisor, let's call him the "Ratings Manager".
      Today, this person is Aleš Cieply.

Changing personal info

  • tapir: I moved. How can I change city and country entry in EGD?
    • Phelan: I used to ask the person in charge of updating our country's results to send an email to Ales. I don't know if there is a better way to do this in the current system, though.
    • tapir: I thought the whole point of the update was not to depend on Ales for everything... so this is a feature request :)
    • Flatline: Well, the whole point of the update concerns several aspects. One of them is definetly not to depend on the Ratings Manager for everything, another one (not less important) is to have a real-time update of results and ratings.
      Anyways: club and country are updated every time a player takes part in a tournament, with the new data declared by the tournament organizers. Of course, when a change occurs, it would be nice not to wait for the next tournament and submit the change at once. The new backend features allow this, but at the moment this function is restricted to the Ratings Manager. Maybe it will be opened to all people allowed to submit results, when we are sure that everything works fine. At the moment, we are still testing the new functionalities: they have been released a couple of weeks ago :-)
    • tapir: Oh, my tournament organizer just forgot about it, it seems. Now, what should I do? Email to secretary@agi.go.it (that is you, flatline?) with player id and current location?
      • Flatline: Yes, it's me behind that address :-)
        The right person for these issues is the Ratings Manager, who at the moment is still Aleš Cieply. Anyways, writing to me will work fine as well :-)
        • tapir: Adding Ales' email address to the page here or to the egd page may be helpful. The SL page doesn't reflect the current situation anyway.

Tournament classes rationale

  • tapir: Is someone who gets no sleep / drink too much on Go Congresses really a worse player? Or: What is the rationale behind weight differences in A, B, C class tournaments?
    • Classes differ by time controls. A are serious; long time limits, C quick, dirty :)
      • tapir: We should add this somewhere...

Rank resets

  • tapir: The EGD policy to cope with fast-improving players is to reset the rating if a players declares a rank two stones above his old one. Incidently some associations (e.g. Switzerland) try to prevent players declaring a rank two stones stronger then last time, thus effectively disabling the policy. Any thoughts about this? Doesn't this lead to overall rank deflation?
    • IanDavis: I strongly suspect that this may be the case. Especially in the cases where a large group of new or young players join the organisation. In fact I have produced graphs which I believe show this effect.
      • tapir: Will you share this graphs?
        • IanDavis: They are available on GoDiscussions forum actually. What I did was to make a histogram for active go players each year. I took bins 50 rating points wide, and mapped the change in the number of players in these bins per year per country. My impression is that the promotion system used in a paticular country appears to influence the form or shape of the histogram. However there is less data than you would want to be able to make firm conclusions over this. The EGD actually has a similiar statistics function, but its bins are far too wide (500 rating points) to show anything interesting.
          • tapir: I opened an account there to use the search function and finally found the graphs ([ext] http://www.godiscussions.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4075). Imho these graphs (normalized rating distribution etc.) show more about the population and the influx of new players than about deflation.
            • IanDavis: Possibly, but I believe that since influx of new players happened at the same time (Hikaru No Go) the differences between countries are interesting.
    • mgoetze: Yes. Another interesting statistic to consider is the GoR gains/losses of players from one country attending a tournament in another country. For instance, Finnish players at the LOGC 2003 gained 86 GoR points on average. I wrote about this problem in more Detail back in 2004 on the German Go Federation Forum ( [ext] http://www.dgob.de/yabbse/index.php?topic=1054.msg117798#msg117798 ).
      • tapir: Any further study of this effect? In recent years for different countries?

Tournament waiting list

  • LovroF? : Would it be possible to put something on the front page of EGD like tournament waiting list. List of tournaments wich were sent to EGD but not yet approved by supervisers.
    • Flatline : That's not useful, IMHO, since usually tournaments stay in waiting list for not more than some hours. Furthermore, the RM can have his good reasons to leave them in stand-by, so I'd prefer not to put pressure on him.

Showing only EGF ranked players

  • tapir: I'd like to have an option to not display a) the inactive players b) the players with "0" EGF rank. Instead of b) it would be possible to just change the sorting - starting with 1, with the 0 added at the end.
    • Herman: This is the option "EGF Ranked" in "Players filter" at the Find player page. The same list can also be found through [ext] http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/EGF_rating_system.php (the official rating lists).
      • tapir: Asking silly questions has the merit that step by step this becomes a genuine FAQ. I missed the option though :)

International tournaments, revisited

  • tapir: I want to restate my case about the inclusion of international tournaments and all players there with an example. Just look at this - Han Sang-hun is 13th in the korean pro rating:
 15213374	Oh	Chimin	 DE	Ber	7d	2785	11	3
 14237795	Han	Sang-hun KR	xxx	3p	2782	2
    • Herman: I think that the inclusion of such results can be useful. At events like the WMSG or WAGC, half the players there are European, so they will play many matches against each other. Korean players like Han Sang-hun are not actually ever put in the official EGF rating list (which only lists players from EGF member countries), and are thus more of an artefact. I do think that it would be good if the Find Player page filtered to something like "Players from EGF member countries only" by default to avoid listing only player like Han Sang-hun. (Also, I think the EGF assumption of 1p = 7d = 2700 is flawed, especially for Korean and Chinese professionals, but that is another matter).
      • tapir: Of course performance in worldwide events is important. But EGD becomes instantly a worldwide rank/rating database - despite lack in data for them. Aligning two rating systems (1p = 7d) can only work if there is some exchange between them.
        • Herman: GoGoD includes the ProGoR ratings that Ales Cieply once calculated, applying the EGF rating formula to the professional games in the GoGoD database. It would be interesting to see how they match up with the EGF ratinsgs, but as you said, that requires some exchange between them. The WMSG provides some exchange between amateurs and professional, as do a few other tournaments (eg: Ing Cup), but such games are rather limited.

Data access

  • Herman: I would like to be able to experiment with extending the EGD's functionality. Is there any possibility to get remote access to the data in a convenient way, eg SOAP or similar RPC protocol?
    • Flatline: We haven't developed such interfaces yet. However we are willing to do it if this can drive to improve EGD's functionality. At the moment, for instance, we are studying how to integrate EGD and OpenGotha for submitting results. Please share your ideas with me, we shall see what we can do together.
      • Herman: Ok, here's some ideas: (note, some of these can equally well be done with a simple copy of the data, other would be more interesting if up to date)
  1. I would like to generate additional statistics. Eg: Generate a histogram that shows how many games a player played against different ranks since a certain date, and what percentage of those games he won.
  • Flatline: That sounds nice. I think it would be useful to add such histogram in the player's card. If you'd like to take care of it, we can continue this discussion privately.
  1. I would like to be able to experiment with the GoR formula, for example changing the a and con parameters and seeing how that impacts the reliability of predictions down the line, etc. Eg, from a certain period take randomly 90% of games, feed them into GoR to update ratings, then calculate how reliably those ratings predicted the results of the remaining 10%. Things like Jeff Sonas did for the chess Elo ratings (See: [ext] http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=562)
  • Flatline: To do this, you need to have full access to the complete tournaments tables. I can grant it to anybody upon simple request, since the only concern is about bandwidth.
  1. I would like to try and find interesting things. For example, can I find a group of three players, A, B and C, who defeat each other in a circle (A defeats B 60% of games, B defeats C 60% of games, C defeats A 60% of games).
  • Flatline: Help me to better understand your idea: you mean a published toolset of predetermined interesting-things-detection for the general audience, or the pssibility to dig off-line into raw data for specific researchers ?

Comparing populations

  • tapir: I would like to compare populations - say finnish - dutch, london - istanbul (for this the data may be insufficient) by calculating the overall GoR change due to the matches of a certain period. This would permit to spot rating differences and follow their changes over time. The kind of study mgoetze refers to above.

Rating calculation with old events

  • Herman: I recently noticed that ratings are not always recalculated correctly when older events are added. For example, recently the [ext] Dutch Go Competition was added, which dates to march 9 of this year. I noticed that despite a very good result, the rating for [ext] Frederik Spanhoff did not actually seem to change. Now when I look at his GoR evolution, I can see that both this event, and the next one he played (Nijmegen, played march 21) are given as being calculated from a start rating of 2328.688. So apparently, the earlier event (which was entered later) is not taken into account when calculating the rating after the later event. Perhaps this is normal and there is a periodic recalculation, but I was curious about it.
    • Flatline: Good question. As a general rule, EGD recalculates the ratings at once when a tournament is submitted. But for old tournaments, in order to avoid massive waste of time when multiple submissions are made (a recalculation requires about ten seconds per month), EGD keeps track of the submitted tournament, but leaves to the Rating Manager to choose when launch a massive recalculation. Now you have spotted a case when this recalculation has not been launched; you got a point :-) Have a look at [ext] Frederik Spanhoff's card now: everything is ok.
      • Herman: Ok, thanks! Maybe massive recalculation could be automatically triggered late at night under certain conditions?
        • Flatline: Of course it can. But I don't want to spread the idea that EGD is adjourned once a day: EGD is adjourned as soon as the RM completes the confirmation process. The fault you have spotted must be regarded as a little lapse.
        • Flatline: Today (July 9th,2009) I've changed the confirmation workflow, so that now GoR is recalculated at once when a tournament is submitted, even when it is an old one.

This is a copy of the living page "European Go Database / Wishlist" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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