{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/trueskill-through-time-revisiting-the-history","title":"TrueSkill Through Time: Revisiting the History of Chess","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2017-12-03","proceeding":"NIPS 2007 12","authors":["Pierre Dangauthier","Ralf Herbrich","Tom Minka","Thore Graepel"],"abstract":"We extend the Bayesian skill rating system TrueSkill to infer entire time\r\nseries of skills of players by smoothing through time instead of filtering.\r\nThe skill of each participating player, say, every year is represented by a\r\nlatent skill variable which is affected by the relevant game outcomes that\r\nyear, and coupled with the skill variables of the previous and subsequent\r\nyear. Inference in the resulting factor graph is carried out by approximate\r\nmessage passing (EP) along the time series of skills. As before the system\r\ntracks the uncertainty about player skills, explicitly models draws, can deal\r\nwith any number of competing entities and can infer individual skills from\r\nteam results. We extend the system to estimate player-specific draw margins. Based on these models we present an analysis of the skill curves of\r\nimportant players in the history of chess over the past 150 years. Results\r\ninclude plots of players’ lifetime skill development as well as the ability to\r\ncompare the skills of different players across time. Our results indicate that\r\na) the overall playing strength has increased over the past 150 years, and\r\nb) that modelling a player’s ability to force a draw provides significantly\r\nbetter predictive power.","url_abs":"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221619020_TrueSkill_Through_Time_Revisiting_the_History_of_Chess","url_pdf":"http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3331-trueskill-through-time-revisiting-the-history-of-chess.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"trueskill-through-time-revisiting-the-history","repo_url":"https://github.com/ankurdave/ttt-scala","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"trueskill-through-time-revisiting-the-history","repo_url":"https://github.com/lucasmaystre/ChessAnalysis","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series","task_name":"Time Series Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}