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If you scaled Shin Jinseo to 2800, you would have players with extremely negative ratings. This page shows ratings of European players on a roughly aligned scal

If you scaled Shin Jinseo to 2800, you would have players with extremely negative ratings. This page shows ratings of European players on a roughly aligned scale: https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/createalleuro3.php?country=**&dgob=false https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/createalleuro3.php?country.... It still has negative numbers on it, and this only contains players who have attended a tournament (though it's more common for beginners to play tournaments in the west, since it's hard to find times to play). It's not a comparison of the worth of the games (I play both, though I'm better at Go, and prefer it), but the dynamic range of Go is larger. That said, any cross-game/sport comparisons of this kind are pretty tough to do properly.

somenameforme 29d ago
I'm unfamiliar with Go ratings, but chess ratings are based on the Elo system which is a simple mathematical prediction system. Borrowing some figures from Wiki [1] we get: 1.00 +800 0.99 +677 0.9 +366 0.8 +240 0.7 +149 0.6 +72 0.5 0 0.4 −72 0.3 −149 0.2 −240 0.1 −366 0.01 −677 0.00 −800 The second column is your rating minus your opponent's, and the left is your predicted result. So if you are rating 1849 and your opponent is rated 1700 then you'd be expected to score about 70%. To have a 1% expected score against Magnus, you'd need a rating of about 2150. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
- shwaj 29d ago
  I was under the impression that Go also uses Elo, then I did a bit of cursory research and discovers that it varies. Two major federations are American Go Association (AGA) and European Go Federation (EGF). EGF uses an Elo-inspired update rule since 2021. AGA uses a quite-different Bayesian system without pairwise update; they provide a paper and a C++ reference impl. Asian countries don't bother with such numeric ratings. Instead, rankings are titles which are won through tournament promotion structures (sounds similar to Sumo to me). Interesting, because I always thought that it was more "apples to apples", and that the higher upper limits of Go rankings was somehow indicative of the higher "dynamic range" of the game compared to chess. For example, if Elo were applied to basketball, what would the Elo of Lebron James be compared to a playground hooper (leaving aside that 1-on-1 isn't the best part of Lebron's game)... would it be higher or lower than Magnus Carlsen in chess? I don't have an intuition.
  - qnpnpmqppnp 29d ago
    While it's not official, GoRatings (https://www.goratings.org/en/ https://www.goratings.org/en/) ranks all players based on a variation of the Elo system (note that it is international, even if in practice you'd have to scroll quite far to find a few lonely Western persons).
  - KK7NIL 28d ago
    AGA and EGF are very minor federations in the Go world, all the professionals are in Asia where the game is far bigger.
- tasuki 29d ago
  It works the same in go. Just, as the parent has said, the dynamic range of go is higher.
gjm11 28d ago
This is a bit of a digression, but: It's an interesting question what (if anything) that larger dynamic range means. One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense go is a "deeper" game than chess; there's more to know and understand, more variety of possible human skill. That might well be true. It certainly feels a more elegant game, and involves longer tactical sequences, and so forth. But this may be misleading. Consider the game of treblechess. To play a game of treblechess, you play three games of ordinary chess and look at the overall result. Suppose that when we play ordinary chess, I win with probability W, lose with probability L, and draw with probability D = 1-(W+L). And suppose separate games are independent of one another (which might not be true in reality, but never mind). What happens when we play treblechess? I win 3/0 with probability W^3. I win 2.5/0.5 with probability 3W^2D, because that happens when I draw any one of our three games and win both of the other two. I win 2/1 with probability 3(W^2L+WD^2), because that happens when I win two and lose one or win one and draw two, and for each of those there are three choices for which game is which. So I win at treblechess with probability W^3 + 3(W^2(1-W)+WD^2). I can draw by getting one each of WDL (probability 6WDL) or by drawing all three (probability D^3). Suppose that when we play chess I win 40% of the time, draw 50% of the time, and lose 10% of the time. Then our Elo difference is about 107 points. In triplechess, I will win 65.2% of the time, draw 24.5% of the time, and lose 10.3% of the time. Our Elo difference is about 214 points. If in ordinary chess I win 65% of the time, draw 25% of the time and lose 10% of the time -- about the same odds as for treblechess in the last example -- then our chess Elo difference is about 215 points. At treblechess I will win 84% of the time, draw 11% of the time, and lose 5% of the time, and our Elo difference will be about 375 points. If in ordinary chess I win 15%, draw 75%, lose 10%, then our Elo difference is about 17 points; in treblechess I will win 31%, draw 49%, lose 20% and our Elo difference will be about 41 points. Treblechess Elo differences are on the order of double ordinary chess Elo differences! Clearly treblechess is a game with twice the depth of ordinary chess! But it isn't. It's just longer and gives more opportunities for the better player to come out ahead overall. Go is also a longer game than chess, though of course not in the same way as treblechess is. Perhaps the larger Elo range of go is more because of that than it is because of actual deeper strategy and tactics?
- Nifty3929 28d ago

somenameforme 29d ago

I'm unfamiliar with Go ratings, but chess ratings are based on the Elo system which is a simple mathematical prediction system. Borrowing some figures from Wiki [1] we get: 1.00 +800 0.99 +677 0.9 +366 0.8 +240 0.7 +149 0.6 +72 0.5 0 0.4 −72 0.3 −149 0.2 −240 0.1 −366 0.01 −677 0.00 −800 The second column is your rating minus your opponent's, and the left is your predicted result. So if you are rating 1849 and your opponent is rated 1700 then you'd be expected to score about 70%. To have a 1% expected score against Magnus, you'd need a rating of about 2150. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

shwaj 29d ago
I was under the impression that Go also uses Elo, then I did a bit of cursory research and discovers that it varies. Two major federations are American Go Association (AGA) and European Go Federation (EGF). EGF uses an Elo-inspired update rule since 2021. AGA uses a quite-different Bayesian system without pairwise update; they provide a paper and a C++ reference impl. Asian countries don't bother with such numeric ratings. Instead, rankings are titles which are won through tournament promotion structures (sounds similar to Sumo to me). Interesting, because I always thought that it was more "apples to apples", and that the higher upper limits of Go rankings was somehow indicative of the higher "dynamic range" of the game compared to chess. For example, if Elo were applied to basketball, what would the Elo of Lebron James be compared to a playground hooper (leaving aside that 1-on-1 isn't the best part of Lebron's game)... would it be higher or lower than Magnus Carlsen in chess? I don't have an intuition.
- qnpnpmqppnp 29d ago
  While it's not official, GoRatings (https://www.goratings.org/en/ https://www.goratings.org/en/) ranks all players based on a variation of the Elo system (note that it is international, even if in practice you'd have to scroll quite far to find a few lonely Western persons).
- KK7NIL 28d ago
  AGA and EGF are very minor federations in the Go world, all the professionals are in Asia where the game is far bigger.
tasuki 29d ago
It works the same in go. Just, as the parent has said, the dynamic range of go is higher.

gjm11 28d ago

This is a bit of a digression, but: It's an interesting question what (if anything) that larger dynamic range means. One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense go is a "deeper" game than chess; there's more to know and understand, more variety of possible human skill. That might well be true. It certainly feels a more elegant game, and involves longer tactical sequences, and so forth. But this may be misleading. Consider the game of treblechess. To play a game of treblechess, you play three games of ordinary chess and look at the overall result. Suppose that when we play ordinary chess, I win with probability W, lose with probability L, and draw with probability D = 1-(W+L). And suppose separate games are independent of one another (which might not be true in reality, but never mind). What happens when we play treblechess? I win 3/0 with probability W^3. I win 2.5/0.5 with probability 3W^2D, because that happens when I draw any one of our three games and win both of the other two. I win 2/1 with probability 3(W^2L+WD^2), because that happens when I win two and lose one or win one and draw two, and for each of those there are three choices for which game is which. So I win at treblechess with probability W^3 + 3(W^2(1-W)+WD^2). I can draw by getting one each of WDL (probability 6WDL) or by drawing all three (probability D^3). Suppose that when we play chess I win 40% of the time, draw 50% of the time, and lose 10% of the time. Then our Elo difference is about 107 points. In triplechess, I will win 65.2% of the time, draw 24.5% of the time, and lose 10.3% of the time. Our Elo difference is about 214 points. If in ordinary chess I win 65% of the time, draw 25% of the time and lose 10% of the time -- about the same odds as for treblechess in the last example -- then our chess Elo difference is about 215 points. At treblechess I will win 84% of the time, draw 11% of the time, and lose 5% of the time, and our Elo difference will be about 375 points. If in ordinary chess I win 15%, draw 75%, lose 10%, then our Elo difference is about 17 points; in treblechess I will win 31%, draw 49%, lose 20% and our Elo difference will be about 41 points. Treblechess Elo differences are on the order of double ordinary chess Elo differences! Clearly treblechess is a game with twice the depth of ordinary chess! But it isn't. It's just longer and gives more opportunities for the better player to come out ahead overall. Go is also a longer game than chess, though of course not in the same way as treblechess is. Perhaps the larger Elo range of go is more because of that than it is because of actual deeper strategy and tactics?

Nifty3929 28d ago