Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? # for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “#”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? # to your account

Tiny documentation error with explanation of beta parameter #11

Closed
rsimmons opened this issue Dec 29, 2015 · 5 comments
Closed

Tiny documentation error with explanation of beta parameter #11

rsimmons opened this issue Dec 29, 2015 · 5 comments

Comments

@rsimmons
Copy link
Contributor

The documentation describes beta as "the distance which guarantees about 75.6% chance of winning". I think the correct percentage should be 76.025% (rounded however you wish). While the difference is trivial, it might confuse other people.

I was curious where the 75.6 magic number came from so derived what it should be, using the formula for computing win probability (mentioned in another issue). If you consider a match of two players, with the player sigmas and draw margins being 0, and the difference in rating means equal to beta, the win probability simplifies to cdf(1/sqrt(2)), which is about 0.76025.

@sublee
Copy link
Owner

sublee commented Dec 30, 2015

Thank you for the report. I agree on your opinion.

Should we describe Beta as 76.025% (Φ(1/√2))? Or approximately 80%? Which do you prefer?

@sublee
Copy link
Owner

sublee commented Dec 30, 2015

Which win probability formula you used? If you used the last one, should the simple formula be Φ(1/√(2β)) instead of Φ(1/√2)?

Φ(delta of μ÷√(players×β²+sum of σ))
→ Φ(β÷√(2β²+0))
→ Φ(1÷√(2β))

@rsimmons
Copy link
Contributor Author

I think there's a mistake in that simplification: Φ(β÷√(2β²+0)) has √(2β²) in the inside denominator, which simplifies to β√2, so we get Φ(β÷(β√2)) → Φ(1/√2).

I would probably describe beta as "the distance which guarantees about 76% (specifically Φ(1/√2)) chance of winning".

Also, thanks so much for your work on this project. When I discovered the TrueSkill site/papers I was excited to use it but the thought of implementing it from scratch made my heart sink a little :)

@sublee
Copy link
Owner

sublee commented Dec 30, 2015

Oh, you're right. I had a mistake. Thank you for letting me know.

Would you give me a pull request to add you to the contributor list? If you don't care about the contributor list, I'll update the document myself.

@sublee
Copy link
Owner

sublee commented Dec 31, 2015

I released TrueSkill-0.4.4 with your patch. http://trueskill.org/#version-0-4-4

# for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? # to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants