Papers › Estimation of Climbing Route Difficulty using Whole-History Rating

Estimation of Climbing Route Difficulty using Whole-History Rating

15 Jan 2020arXiv:2001.05388links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Dean Scarff

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Existing grading systems for rock climbing routes assign a difficulty grade to a route based on the opinions of a few people. An objective approach to estimating route difficulty on an interval scale was obtained by adapting the Whole-History Rating (WHR) system to rock climbing. WHR's model was fitted to a database of 236,095 ascents recorded by users on an established climbing website. 73% of the ascents used in the dataset were classified as successful. Predictions were on average 85% accurate with 10-fold cross-validation. The results suggest that an empirical rating system is accurate at assessing route difficulty and is viable for revising conventional route grades.

PaperPDFCode

Code

p00ya/climbing_ratings officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections