The Ethics of Playing Provisional Players

[joooom]

@espoojaram

There are few things that make me as bitter and emotional as having to make extensive effort to “debunk” arguments that I perceive as being illogical, and that’s likely to cloud my judgement and make me veer into rhetorical fallacies and a smug tone without realizing in the moment.

Fair enough, and I appreciate that you recognize this.

@espoojaram

In the meantime, you have brought up the idea that the volatility of the ranking may reflect actual fluctuations in the player’s ability, and thus momentarily make the matchmaking more accurate.

I don’t think I have brought up this idea, at least not intentionally. What I brought up was nearly the opposite: the idea that there is really no such thing as a true/ideal/correct rank or measure of a player’s ability, and that volatility in ranking represents (in part) this underlying fact and not any momentary variation in playing ability. In the thread you linked, I’m arguing against the “cultural perception that a player’s ‘true strength’ is pretty stable over time”. I’m saying that the informal perception of a stable “true strength” is fine, but most attempts to capture that formally and mathematically will be flawed because the concept of a “true strength” is flawed, or at least needs a relatively wide margin to be in any way accurate as a predictive measure.

For example, take some imaginary ranking system and consider one player who may be really good at reading and higher ranked than another who is really good at positional judgement. Maybe they play each other, and the weaker player ends up winning because their fuseki happened to give an advantage that reading couldn’t overcome. Maybe they play a few times and the same outcome (the “weaker” player winning) happens each time. However, the “stronger” player still regularly beats other players at the same rank as that weaker player (under this hypothetical ranking system), just not that specific player. Which player’s “true” strength is higher? Was this a violation of the ranking system?

(I do realize that a ranking system is generally probabilistic model, so the higher ranked player in this example is higher ranked because they win a certain percent of games against a certain rank on average, but I hope this example shows how various factors can cause problems when a rating system continuously updates with every new data point)

This may seem contrived, but this kind of mismatch of skill areas happens all the time in ranked games. It gets even worse when you consider the fact that a player may stumble upon moves that their opponent is ill-adapted to handle, not out of skill, but out of pure luck. Even though Go is a highly strategy-based game, human nature is still a confounding factor. That’s part of what makes the game fun.

@espoojaram

as my understanding (whether right or wrong) of the ranking system comes from having thought about it a lot and having looked at a lot of other evidence, but your inductive reasoning made a lot of sense nonetheless.

Glad to have that cleared up – hopefully further discussions of rank should be easier, and I apologize for my mistaken assumption.

If it helps, a lot of my comment was building up to point out what I saw as a problem in this sequence of comments:

@ArsenLapin1

Your argument appears to rely on the fact that in a teaching game, a player should always only ever play moves that give them the best chance of winning. That sounds extremely imperative, and indeed I would probably stop playing on OGS if there was such a requirement. Sometimes I want to try strategies that are different than the strategies I’m most used to. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. Sometimes I want to try sequences that are different than the strategies I’m most used to. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. Sometimes I want to try moves that rely more on strategy and less on reading. Of course this results in suboptimal moves. And sometimes I want to try moves that rely more on reading, and less on basic principles, and that results in suboptimal moves too

@espoojaram

I said you arguably might be taking ranked games not seriously enough (for the system to work “properly”).

@espoojaram

Since you’re deliberately playing ranked games where you’re not actually doing your best to win, thus lowering your chance of winning and in practice making it more similar to that of a weaker player, yes, you are muddying the accuracy of the ranking system.

The main thing I wanted to convey after looking at this conversation was that ArsenLapin’s comment describes a pretty standard outlook and approach to Go, and doesn’t affect the ranking system nearly as much as ranked teaching games or general volatility would. And, even if it did affect it to some degree, it wouldn’t matter, since the ranking system is mostly a matchmaking tool.

As a side note, looking back I must say I’m surprised that it was my comment on the properties of a rank graph that caused so much potential for inflammation, and leads me to believe it may have been lumped in with the comment next to mine which actually mentioned a player’s rank and used it as justification for a number of statements. So, just to be sure, the earlier comment about lower ranks failing to execute a proper teaching game (and using them as a form of vanity) was not mine.