Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Well, I guess if you consider something to be a zero-sum game, it’s tough to say whether humans are good or bad at that game. Are we as a species better at chess, or tennis, or underwater hockey, or paper-rock-scissors?


You could use Elo rating[0] range to rank them. Basic idea is that if player A has 100 points more than player B, then you could expect player A to win 64% of the time.

In rock-paper-scissors, everyone wins 50% of the time, so everyone has the same Elo rating, so the Elo range is zero.

For chess, a beginner might have a rating of 400, while the best in the world might have a rating of 2700. So you could imagine a line of 23 people, each of which can beat the one behind them 64% of the time. It seems fair to say that the person at the front of the line, representing the best that humanity has to offer, is much better at chess than the best rock-paper-scissors player is at rock-paper-scissors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system


>In rock-paper-scissors, everyone wins 50% of the time, so everyone has the same Elo rating, so the Elo range is zero.

You would be surprised:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20073703




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: