Bot's rank fluctuations

General Go Discussion
39

I probably should have ended the quote earlier. The part that caught my attention was “A player may even “farm” volatility by alternating between very strong and very weak performances.”. I suspect bots might be getting stuck in that state unintentionally.

As for volatility, some examples (forgive the formatting, this is lazy copying from API responses)

Amaranthus:
      "rating": 654.3335047147162,
      "deviation": 106.13085933437775,
      "volatility": 0.14985121352502478
amybot-beginner:
      "rating": 702.9264869436303,
      "deviation": 120.30072207472728,
      "volatility": 0.14956478949217464
Agapanthus:
      "rating": 683.5510487010632,
      "deviation": 124.64858866549983,
      "volatility": 0.14992895438082404
Bergamot:
      "rating": 1193.7818539780046,
      "deviation": 125.35935900289866,
      "volatility": 0.14889168227845906
Bouvardia:
      "rating": 947.4232850715038,
      "deviation": 105.5460271608031,
      "volatility": 0.1477592289088039
GnuGo:
      "rating": 1121.6080666015412,
      "deviation": 102.37309600063944,
      "volatility": 0.1498847340390198
amybot-ddk:
      "rating": 1214.876649476943,
      "deviation": 102.38469307938327,
      "volatility": 0.14983984938287886
noob_bot_3:
      "rating": 1157.8434900953864,
      "deviation": 108.84725612333311,
      "volatility": 0.14944262392954683
gnugo-nixbot:
      "rating": 1161.3397078895166,
      "deviation": 67.29046961715564,
      "volatility": 0.06969841932492986
DangoApp:
      "rating": 1767.956549896383,
      "deviation": 89.83800466809697,
      "volatility": 0.05999973671298351
Carnation:
      "rating": 1036.2448819591905,
      "deviation": 102.31072582122572,
      "volatility": 0.14995001037040748
noob_bot_2:
      "rating": 1234.5564007400521,
      "deviation": 81.13759744484666,
      "volatility": 0.09804240715906964
Fuego:
      "rating": 1337.6866550899074,
      "deviation": 78.58105233021269,
      "volatility": 0.07400563359272345
fuego-nixbot:
      "rating": 1314.4244083848046,
      "deviation": 66.84123609141945,
      "volatility": 0.062262770338260436
noob_bot_1:
      "rating": 1500.6746287879837,
      "deviation": 63.48835496572388,
      "volatility": 0.05834678165542589
amybot-sdk:
      "rating": 1667.8994139181582,
      "deviation": 83.13775408491934,
      "volatility": 0.08087270747871336

These numbers are weird. I find it suspicious how many bots are just shy of 0.15, and that there’s an apparent difficulty cutoff where that stops happening. But I think more detailed analysis should be left to someone who can query the database directly. One thing I can’t do with the REST API is see how many humans appear to have their volatility pegged, for example. I’d also be curious to see what the distributions of deviation and volatility look like across all users, and if there’s any interesting patterns in the relationships between rating, deviation, volatility, number of ranked games played per day, and so on.

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