yes, obviously @FritzS is right, if an algorithm sorts players by “chance of winning”, then it’s somehow measuring their strength…relative to one another.
I just wanted to make simple and obvius that one thing is glicko which sorts a pool of players by “chance of winning” and another thing is how OGS decides to translate that to kyu/dan.
The first one is pure math. The second you can choose in order to give different meaning to your rankings.
First I appreciate the effort to try and summarize the ideas nicely 
From what I’ve read and understand, there’s no reason to expect the overall to be the average (in any sense) of the other ratings. They’re all separately calculated.
Also there’s more than just one number changing each game. If you play a blitz 9x9 game, your overall, blitz, 9x9, 9x9 blitz should all change with that game (if I understand correctly).
I tried to come with an analogy with a much simpler rating system than ELO or Glicko but still trying to capture some of the points you highlighted
the analogy being here for example Overall rank calculation - #10 by shinuito
Again feel free to pick apart that analogy. I don’t expect it to be perfect, I just wanted to imagine a system whereby your ranks vary and the overall isn’t necessarily an average of the others. Also that one could have your overall rank higher than any of the others (as can happen both in that example and on OGS with glicko - what kind of average does that!)
True. I mean… One can still take the weighted mean, but OGS doesn’t. As @benjito pointed out OGS calculates the overall ratings using glicko, not averaging
About this…
Since the overall rankings are calculated via glicko, then they do change with every game… but then we should also correct and say that each player has 12? OGS numbers… too many details for the simplified explanation that I was trying to make 
(by the way, when you think about it, it makes more sense to use glicko 
, so well done OGS!! )
This is why I said “with enough wins and losses”.
By the way: If they manage to land on earth tomorrow, there is probably a greater chance that we humans are the 60 kyus for them… 
Good discussion.
Ratings systems are, so far, mathematically isolated from each other. But this could change in the future, using completely new AI methods. Consider that a human can look at a single game record and make an estimate about the relative strength of the players. AI may be able to do this in the future, and even more accurately! Such a system would not be limited to just wins and losses only. It’s more like looking at all the sides of the dice with different values to see its strengths and weaknesses. It could go even further than giving simple odds of player A beating player B, but actually make predictions about the play style, margin of victory, and so forth.
already
OGS do analyse every game, I guess moderators may already have access to such ranking to search for bot users.
Right, it’s not such a great leap from there to an AI that can look at game records across servers and make assessments and comparisons. It might be able to say, e.g., that a 5 kyu on one server will have even chances of winning against an 8 kyu on another server, and plot the alignments on a chart.
In the end, are ranks broken or not? At least do they work as intended?
Loving this comment right now after 500 comments!!!
Yes, I’d say everything works perfectly
There’s a problem with annulled games not updating ranks, which means we currently have no way to deal with sand- or airbaggers. This should be fixed with the next update, though.
For the rest, as far as I know, things work fine.
I don’t even think AI (assuming you mean Leela-style ML) is necessary. All you need is enough data points (people who are ranked in multiple systems) and a reasonable statistical model (polynomial regression would be fine I think) and you can compare just about any of the major systems.
The only issue is that we don’t ever have enough up-to-date data (but OGS is trying to do that with account linking)
Not working well for 9x9 handicaps in my little tournament. So far black has been winning everything. My best guess is that handicaps are still using the old ranks.
What about the beginner rank problem?
What is the beginner rank problem?
I want to say it’s this:
They seem to get ranked slower than in the past.
EDIT: better examples in this thread:
There are three similar kinds of problems listed in this Problem Report.
In addition (possibly the same issue experienced differently) there is a report about Humble Rank not working.
This could be due to the optimization to keep the rank more stable than before. This would also cause beginner to rank down slower, to keep their rank “stable”. The ranking adjustment should take the number of games played into account (more than it’s done right now)
That’s the whole point of the confidence interval.
Good to know, thanks
