I bet a modification of PageRank would be a fun place to start. I've been participating in a website that uses directed acyclic graphs to rank NFL teams (http:

I bet a modification of PageRank would be a fun place to start. I've been participating in a website that uses directed acyclic graphs to rank NFL teams (http://beatpaths.com http://beatpaths.com), but lately I've been thinking about PageRank after reading a paper on it: http://www.ncsu.edu/crsc/reports/ftp/pdf/crsc-tr06-19.pdf http://www.ncsu.edu/crsc/reports/ftp/pdf/crsc-tr06-19.pdf You could probably make similar adjustments to PageRank to make it suitable for chess.