If you scaled Shin Jinseo to 2800, you would have players with extremely negative ratings. This page shows ratings of European players on a roughly aligned scale: https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/createalleuro3.php?country.... It still has negative numbers on it, and this only contains players who have attended a tournament (though it's more common for beginners to play tournaments in the west, since it's hard to find times to play).

It's not a comparison of the worth of the games (I play both, though I'm better at Go, and prefer it), but the dynamic range of Go is larger.

That said, any cross-game/sport comparisons of this kind are pretty tough to do properly.

This is a bit of a digression, but: It's an interesting question what (if anything) that larger dynamic range means.

One thing you'll hear people say sometimes -- I've said it myself -- is that this shows that in some sense go is a "deeper" game than chess; there's more to know and understand, more variety of possible human skill.

That might well be true. It certainly feels a more elegant game, and involves longer tactical sequences, and so forth. But this may be misleading.

Consider the game of treblechess. To play a game of treblechess, you play three games of ordinary chess and look at the overall result.

Suppose that when we play ordinary chess, I win with probability W, lose with probability L, and draw with probability D = 1-(W+L). And suppose separate games are independent of one another (which might not be true in reality, but never mind). What happens when we play treblechess?

I win 3/0 with probability W^3. I win 2.5/0.5 with probability 3W^2D, because that happens when I draw any one of our three games and win both of the other two. I win 2/1 with probability 3(W^2L+WD^2), because that happens when I win two and lose one or win one and draw two, and for each of those there are three choices for which game is which. So I win at treblechess with probability W^3 + 3(W^2(1-W)+WD^2).

I can draw by getting one each of WDL (probability 6WDL) or by drawing all three (probability D^3).

Suppose that when we play chess I win 40% of the time, draw 50% of the time, and lose 10% of the time. Then our Elo difference is about 107 points. In triplechess, I will win 65.2% of the time, draw 24.5% of the time, and lose 10.3% of the time. Our Elo difference is about 214 points.

If in ordinary chess I win 65% of the time, draw 25% of the time and lose 10% of the time -- about the same odds as for treblechess in the last example -- then our chess Elo difference is about 215 points. At treblechess I will win 84% of the time, draw 11% of the time, and lose 5% of the time, and our Elo difference will be about 375 points.

If in ordinary chess I win 15%, draw 75%, lose 10%, then our Elo difference is about 17 points; in treblechess I will win 31%, draw 49%, lose 20% and our Elo difference will be about 41 points.

Treblechess Elo differences are on the order of double ordinary chess Elo differences! Clearly treblechess is a game with twice the depth of ordinary chess!

But it isn't. It's just longer and gives more opportunities for the better player to come out ahead overall.

Go is also a longer game than chess, though of course not in the same way as treblechess is. Perhaps the larger Elo range of go is more because of that than it is because of actual deeper strategy and tactics?

As an amateur (but competent) player of both, when I play go it almost feels like I'm playing multiple smaller games at the same time on the same board. Even if I might be struggling in one area, I can make it up in another. So it's very hard for a lesser opponent to beat me, even if they do gain an advantage in one area. Likewise in reverse when I'm playing a superior opponent. I might get in a nice kill, but next thing I know we're playing a different battle on the other side of the board and I get crushed.

So I think there's truth to what you're saying.

Maybe the depth of a game is related to whether it will scale. Go is played on different board sizes and still works.

If you make a Backgammon board bigger it would just be a slog and no real increase in tactical challenge.

Chess rules dictate a set size of board, which I guess has been refined over time.

If a Go board is made bigger or smaller it just adjusts the problem space, the rules and core of the game remain the same.

Perhaps interesting: Japanese chess, Shogi, is usually played on a 9x9 board, but there are many variants, which are played on bigger boards. Though games take longer and those variants are played rarely. It scales, but I think it's fair to state, that Go scales much better, due to its simplicity (simple != easy).

I’ve thought about this before and come to very similar conclusions. The ELO range between the best and worst players is meaningful, but you can’t just read off the depth of the game from it in the senses we most care about.

I'm unfamiliar with Go ratings, but chess ratings are based on the Elo system which is a simple mathematical prediction system. Borrowing some figures from Wiki [1] we get:

  1.00 +800
  0.99 +677
  0.9 +366
  0.8 +240
  0.7 +149
  0.6 +72
  0.5 0
  0.4 −72
  0.3 −149
  0.2 −240
  0.1 −366
  0.01 −677
  0.00 −800

The second column is your rating minus your opponent's, and the left is your predicted result. So if you are rating 1849 and your opponent is rated 1700 then you'd be expected to score about 70%. To have a 1% expected score against Magnus, you'd need a rating of about 2150.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

I was under the impression that Go also uses Elo, then I did a bit of cursory research and discovers that it varies.

Two major federations are American Go Association (AGA) and European Go Federation (EGF). EGF uses an Elo-inspired update rule since 2021. AGA uses a quite-different Bayesian system without pairwise update; they provide a paper and a C++ reference impl.

Asian countries don't bother with such numeric ratings. Instead, rankings are titles which are won through tournament promotion structures (sounds similar to Sumo to me).

Interesting, because I always thought that it was more "apples to apples", and that the higher upper limits of Go rankings was somehow indicative of the higher "dynamic range" of the game compared to chess. For example, if Elo were applied to basketball, what would the Elo of Lebron James be compared to a playground hooper (leaving aside that 1-on-1 isn't the best part of Lebron's game)... would it be higher or lower than Magnus Carlsen in chess? I don't have an intuition.

While it's not official, GoRatings (https://www.goratings.org/en/) ranks all players based on a variation of the Elo system (note that it is international, even if in practice you'd have to scroll quite far to find a few lonely Western persons).

AGA and EGF are very minor federations in the Go world, all the professionals are in Asia where the game is far bigger.

It works the same in go. Just, as the parent has said, the dynamic range of go is higher.

>Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap

English is not my first language but for clarity perhaps the title should be:

Go grandmaster Shin with a two-stone handicap defeats AI KataGo

No. It’s not my first language too, but your version sounds odd. Usually you put an action first and only then the details

Trouble is, from the existing title it's not clear who had the handicap. So the poster is right to try and fix it.

It's not clear from the revised title either though. In fact I found it even more confusing. The issue is the ambiguity of the wording "with a two-stone handicap", not where it's located in the sentence.

I would probably phrase it as 'Go grandmaster Shin defeats two-stone-handicapped AI KataGo'

Are there ads on the page? If so, let’s A/B test that along with “Grandmaster Shin Savagely Beats Handicapped Opponent”.

Sir, have you considered a career in social networking engagement?

Edit: 10 years since i made the HN account and I only now notice you can't see the scores of other people's comments. Here's hoping the brilliance of the above comment is appreciated.

Made my day

I only saw the "revised title" and yes, it's still confusing :)

With a two-stone handicap, Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo.

Or

Go grandmaster Shin, playing with a two-stone handicap, defeats AI KataGo.

The problem is that "with a handicap" is in itself ambiguous. People sometimes use it positively, sometimes negatively. That is, you say that Shin had a two-stone handicap, that can in itself be understood as either "Shin was given an advantage of two stones over the AI" (the reality) or "Shin was playing with a disadvantage, giving the AI two extra stones" (the more common reading of "to have a handicap").

Idiomatically a handicap is a disadvantage not an advantage. So if Shin had two extra stones, KataGo had a two stone handicap.

Handicaps can be positive, e.g. in fixed distance racing one way to handicap is to "give" a starting distance to the racers who are slower than the scratch racer; in this system a higher handicap is more of an advantage.

Since the AI was playing scratch (the normal, unmodified play style), it seems odd to say it had a handicap. Rather, the human had a positive handicap of two stones.

Youre just mixing up who has the handicap. The handicap gives starting distance to the slower racer, but its still the faster racer that has the handicap.

Yes, but the title has an ambiguous parse (a shift-reduce conflict):

X defeats (Y with Z)

or

(X defeats Y) with Z

with the latter usually understood as meaning X has Z, as far as I know.

fwiw, as a native speaker, your revised version sounds wrong. I'm terrible at grammer, but i think it's because when you put the "with" early in the sentence, it acts as a preposition modifying the noun, where later in the sentence it acts as an adverbial phrase modifying the verb defeat. The handicap is describing the manner of the defeat and not a trait of the grandmaster, so the with has to go at the end of the sentence.

Or that at least is my guess as to why it sounds wrong.

> I'm terrible at grammer

Also pretty bad at spelling.

lol, you are not wrong.

I don’t think so: the ELO rating difference is what matters, e.g. a 1000 player vs an 800 player has the same win probability as a 2800 vs a 2600.

Depends on what chess rating you're talking about. Online at fast time controls, where many many more games get played at than OTB classical, the top super GMs are rated in the 3400-3600 range.