Dr Glickman, a Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the Harvard University Department of Statistics, presented a highly informative seminar entitled "Rating competitors in games with strength-dependent tie probabilities" to the staff and postgraduate students of Rhodes and Nelson Mandela Universities on the 21st of November 2023.
Rating competitors in games with strength-dependent tie probabilities Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of similar strength in online gaming, and for players to track their own strength over time. Most implemented rating systems assume only win/loss outcomes and treat occurrences of ties as the equivalent to half a win and half a loss. However, in games such as chess, the probability of a tie (draw) is demonstrably higher for stronger players than for weaker players, so that rating systems ignoring this aspect of game results may produce strength estimates that are unreliable. Dr Glickman discussed the develop a new rating system for head-to-head games that explicitly acknowledges a tie as a third outcome, and that the probability of a tie may depend on the strengths of the competitors. The approach relies on time-varying game outcomes following a Bayesian dynamic modelling framework, and that posterior updates within a time period are approximated by one iteration of Newton- Raphson evaluated at the prior mean. The approach was demonstrated on a large dataset of chess games played in International Correspondence Chess Federation tournaments.
Dr Glickman is a Senior Statistician at the Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, a US Veterans Administration Center of Innovation. His research interests are primarily in the areas of statistical models for rating competitors in games and sports, and in statistical methods applied to problems in health services research. Dr Glickman is known for having invented the Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems, both of which have been adopted by many gaming organizations internationally. He currently serves as chair of the US Chess Ratings Committee, and as chair for the American Statistical Association's Committee on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
The Statistics department of Nelson Mandela University hosted the seminar in the Katherine Johnson Building in Gqeberha.