----
I see a lot of remarks saying "well, let them show the machine, so someone can check it", "It must be manipulated, this is so unlikely", etc.
The FIDE Swiss Dutch rules are on the FIDE website, in the handbook. There is pairings.fide.com which has a list of endorsed pairing software, meaning it was tested by FIDE to follow those rules. Why is nobody doing the checks?
Guess what? I did :)
Took the SwissManager tournament file from chess-results.com, created a TRF / FIDE rating report file, imported it, verified the pairings.
Round 1: differences, which is to be expected:
people show up late, ratings get corrected, mistakes fixed, etc.
Round 2, 3, 4: equal to the pairing in Gibraltar
Round 5: a few differences in the group of people with 1.5 and 1 out of 4, nowhere near Hou.
My educated guess: results of previous rounds were corrected after round 5 was paired
Round 6, 7, 8: equal to pairing in Gibraltar
Round 9: in the lower echelons 2 pairings were adjusted (the black players exchanged),
due to (probably) Israeli not playing Iranian
Round 10: equal to pairing in Gibraltar.
You can design the algorithm in such a way that your priors are mistaken, or bias creeps in (though theoretically that can be self-corrected). But assuming that's not the case, and the algorithm correctly matches up mostly women v. women and men v. men in a skill parity optimization, you have a fair result for the purpose of a tournemant; i.e. skill-based match-ups.
If at that point you have an issue with the match ups for reasons of gender or ethnic parity, I would argue that you should seek to correct the upstream issues, not the algorithm. In other words, try to get more women playing chess - make the sport appeal to them more, make it more inclusive, etc. Rebalancing an algorithm is, in my view, a handicap, whether it's applied to gender disparity or any other disparity. I feel it does a disservice to both parties and doesn't really solve the root issue.
As someone who does statistics for a living and used to play tournament chess, a few of my disorganized opinions/thoughts:
* There's no conclusive evidence that her pairings were tampered with, and the pairings are in line with what seeds someone would be given by a computer. The probability of her playing that many women is very low, but the whole point of randomness is rare events happen (as humans we're very good at detecting patterns in randomness). Her accusations are plausible but not a given.
* I think her goal to break down the barriers of gendered chess is great. The chess world needs more women, and if there were more they would be completely competitive with men. She's fighting a good fight.
* One of the reasons I stopped playing chess is the egos. This one was relatively mild, but purposefully losing games is wrong, even if done in protest. Once you sit down at the chessboard and shake the other person's hand, you're agreeing to a good game. Throwing a game against a woman because you're grumpy she's a woman is not a good thing.
* But, her activist tactic worked, here we are talking about it.
I was curious if the women player's ratings were separated from the Top 100 players rankings and thought that the overall FIDE Top 100 ratings was gender differentiated.
On a perusal of the FIDE rankings over the years I noticed that that is not the case.
Here are the stats for this year (Feb 2017):
--------------------------------------------
Top 100 Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Carlsen, Magnus; 2838
...
100; Artemlev, Vladislav; 2655
101; Cordova, Emilio; 2655
Top 100 Women Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Hou, Yifan; 2651
Here are the stats for the earliest reported year (2000):
---------------------------------------------------------
Top 100 Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Kasparov, Garry; 2849
...
32; Polgar, Judith; 2656
...
100; Fominyih, Alexander; 2594
Top 100 Women Players:
Rank; Name; FIDE Rating
1; Polgar, Judith; 2656
So even though there is a separate Women Players ranking provided, the Top 100 Players is not gender differentiated.
It just happens that this year, Hou, Yifan, the current top women player is ranked lower than the bottom of the Top 100 players ranking hence the top 100 payers (this year) is all men.
What does that mean? Does that mean that women players do not get a chance to play among men? Are there less opportunities for mixed events?
If so, yes that should definitely be changed.
Only one woman has ever qualified for the world championships (Judit Polgar in 2005). Hou Yifan is the best female player in the world, but she's ranked 105th overall. The second highest ranked female player is 303rd.
Gendered tournaments aren't ideal, but the alternative is worse. Most countries do a dismal job of promoting female participation in chess, with China being a notable exception. Western women just aren't being encouraged to take up the game and aren't made to feel welcome when they try.
So, for example, when have a group of 10 men and 10 women, and you randomly pair them up in a tournament, it is normal and possible for a woman to be playing against 5 women in a row. It's not an aberration because small numbers won't necessarily even out. However, when you get a group of 1000 men and 1000 women, and start paring them up for tournament matches, it would still be possible for a woman to end up playing against 5 woman in a row, but on the whole when taking all 500 matches she plays, it should approach 50, the aberration would be if she had played against 500 women in a row. That would be an indication of something suspicious.
This is an example of the gambler's fallacy.
If so then it probably makes sense that more of one population would match with each other, assuming there are significant statistical differences in the populations. For Chess, this is most certainly the case (top 100 is almost all male iirc).
If 2) matches players of similar ratings against eachother, and she is more similar in rating to women than men, then I don't see what the fuss is all about.
Game pairing in Go for example is usually a random pool (bingo; pick your number from a bowl), after that it is straightforward knockout.
For big fields like the one the article is about the Swiss System is used. Each player gets 1 for a win, half a point for a draw and zero for a loss. Players are mostly paired against those who are on the same score each round. I say "mostly" since there are all sorts of rules to decide the exact pairings. Chess tournaments will use Dutch-Swiss or sometimes Dubov-Swiss
Lots more detail here:
I would think that if opponent was throwing the game I'd double down and try to throw it better than her. So the chess match became a chess match. Who can lose fastest. Then resigning is cowardly.
Kudos to her for competing with the best.
I can understand this behavior when comments are particularly egregious in some obvious way, but in this case please do contribute to the conversation by explaining your take on the commenter's opinion.
> I understand: If I was in her shoes, and I suddenly pulled a draw of six girls one after the other, I would say also, 'What is going on here?'
Maybe in the speaker's culture, using the diminutive term "girls" to refer to professional women in a professional context is considered fine, but it's definitely grating to me. I'd be willing to give that a pass if that were all. But he also said:
> I'm sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit today.
I really think Yifan is in a better position to judge whether she has let herself down than Callaghan is. Together these two comments read, to me, as quite paternalistic and tone deaf. If this is how he's speaking on the record, one has to wonder if his private attitude contributed to Yifan's decision to throw the game.
Not to be pedantic, but Lalith Babu, the Indian Grand Master, is male. I believe the article says Hou Yifan threw the final match against Lalith Babu. She played all the women pairings till she got there.
Not to mention how the winner of that match would feel with such a terrible victory.
* Not sure if pro chess needs more women, men or computers spending their energy on it. I guess stuff like this is its own reward but being good at it comes at a price and competition guarantees that this price will be the highest people can possibly pay. I guess it should be kept legal but I don't see why encourage it.
* Judith Polgar, who ranked #10 among humans and #1 among women, had a crazy dad set out to prove that "any child can be raised to become a genius." Here I use "crazy" in colloquial terms but AFAIK men are more likely to experience mental illness in professional terms.
* Could it be that fewer women are crazy enough to devote their lives to chess than men? Is it really a problem? The societal benefits of chess are not obviously worth the opportunity cost, as someone with a potential as a chess player could probably do something most of us consider more productive.
None of this is in response to TFA (and I wish Hou Yifan success in everything she does), I'm only replying to your point about women being as "good" as men at competing at an inherently unproductive mental activity.
I'm going to go waste some time with my kids.
Hou Yifan, "The Queen of Chess" is ranked #1 among women has a FIDE rating of 2651, which places her below 100th place among men.
https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=women
https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men
That distribution is actually normal, considering how many more men play chess than women. But I haven't heard a good explanation on why so few women play chess in the first place (other than the two reasons I suggested).
https://phys.org/news/2009-01-men-higher-women-chess-biologi...
As for why this discrepancy exists, that's really a very different question, and it's one that I don't know the answer to. There are potentially many factors at play. It could be as innocent as there are many more male players than female, so the odds are much higher for super-high-skill players to emerge in the male population than the female population.
That's caused by IQ distribution differences between males and females. On average men and women have an IQ of 100, but there are more men that are both smarter and dumber than women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Assuming IQ and chess ability are correlated, this would explain the lack of women at the top tiers of chess playing.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...
It looks from the article like there is indeed a women-only circuit.
It's easy to look and say, that group is taller and has bigger muscles so that's an obvious advantage.
It's harder to see mental advantages. Statistically, men have better spatial reasoning and are possibly better at the kind of logic (and intuition) chess requires.
Or maybe it's environmental. One way or another, every single one of the top 100 chess players in the world are men.
(I'm just trying to reason against you, I don't think the fitness Anand was talking about requires crossing the boundary where being male is an advantage.)
I agree with him. One thing I learned when growing up playing sports is that you always do your best when playing. Throwing a fit or protesting by giving up only lets yourself down. Finish the game, and then go protest.
It's also really insulting how he said she let herself down. She lived up to her beliefs and he should acknowledge that. Instead he invalidated her choices.
As for commenting on letting herself down, well he is a TV commentator. You hear this sort of being said by TV commentators in basically every sport.
You have made a clear argument with your comment and others have downvoted you because they disagree with you, which is not what the downvote button is for.
Side note: One of my biggest frustrations on HN is seeing a comment downvoted without any counterargument given, as with this one. Would any downvoters care to voice their opinions?
I'm pretty sure they set up female tournaments in order to encourage women to develop interest and skill in the game. But, no good deed unpunished.
Something as complicated as intelligence is not strongly tied to a single genetic marker, so while there may be some variance, it won't be nearly as broad as in something simpler (but still complicated), like height.
There's nothing in science that says women should be worse at it than men, or that there aren't enough good women who play chess, and could crack the top 100. We just don't know is the bottom line and anyone who says differently probably has an agenda.
Separate tournaments were added as way to get more women playing than anything else as the sport has alot of educational value even if it's not the only way to develop those same intellectual "muscles". Hopefully, it will expand to the point where enough good players of both genders come in and we finally see more women at the highest levels. But that may not happen.
Either you demonstrate that the arrogance is specifically targeted towards women and because they are women, or you cannot speak of sexism.
Do you mean that that single example constitutes strong evidence of your claim, or merely that it seems to support an opinion which is strongly held?
If you do think it's a problem, you can only argue that it is based on a judgement of what's productive that is applicable to others. Here I am ready to defend my belief that chess, which I like, is a waste of time.
They're simply saying that the chess community would find greater enjoyment in the sport if more women played. And, more women would experience that same enjoyment if they weren't scared away by the lack of diversity.
There is no "should" here. It would just be nice...
With that clarified, indeed, you "should" not be applying your value system on others. There is nothing inherently wrong with encouraging diversity in a sport, which is the idea which you seem to be promoting. (If you're not, then there's nothing material to be discussed here).
I'd recommend not taking the stand that "women are physically disadvantaged in chess" is a "simple fact." You welcomed citations for reasons why that may or may not be - but much like sociological studies across ethnic differences in accomplishment, studies across gender differences accomplishment for non-physical activity are going to be, shall we say, "muddled."
People may not be able to levy citations that argue against that thesis, but it's still a very difficult thesis to defend both socially and rhetorically. Engaging in dialectics about it is unlikely to be productive, and I think it's probably more fair to take an even ground in the absence of compelling evidence on other side. Extrinsically, yes, women display collective disparity in overall chess accomplishment. But we cannot infer anything about womens' chess ability intrinsically unless we have more women in chess. Specifically, we cannot infer anything physically about the female brain that would demonstrate a disadvantage.
This doesn't mean you're wrong; it just means that it's so emotionally loaded, and so devoid of clear, replicable data that even a debate with citations will probably be disappointing at best, and personally insulting at worst.
That's right. If one said women are better home makers, teachers, and parents, people would either agree with you or say you're being sexist. What is wrong with teaching, parenting or home making? Without taking a position on whether men are better than women at chess, why does it even matter if women are better at some things and men at others? It's so overwhelmingly political and emotional, and why should women be ashamed to be good parents or home makers? Those are no less respectable than any other occupation. However, as you said, you can't even touch this topic without getting in trouble.
>I'd like to point out that if you're designing an algorithm to optimize for raw skill comparison in tournament match-ups, optimizing it to rebalance match-up results to be more mixed essentially voids that first optimization
This is not necessarily the case. For example, if you alphabetized by last name, then obviously people with coincidentally the same last name could appear in any order. But if in twenty cases the men always were listed first (that's what the algorithm spat out), it might seem unfair. You could add the first name (another dimension) but you could also add a preference for mixing. Indeed, perhaps adding first names makes it unfair, as the pool of male first names is more skewed toward men (in the way aaron does not have a female equivalent). Last names likely have no such skew since a person born xx or xy gets the same last name.
So this example shows that the first dimension, which is fair (alphabetical by last name) can remain optimized while adding a second dimension. Because the first dimension doesn't care about what order people with the same last name appear.
Likewise perhaps the first dimension is equally fine with a few different pairings - so at that point optimize the second dimension.
For example, if we assumed that the current state had men having twice as many points as women of equivalent skill, it might take a while for people to climb up right?
More generally, it's not like people's skill are well ordered. If so, what would be the point of the tournaments! It seems like having a bit of mixing of levels in the beginning of the tournament would be more interesting. Especially if it's not single elimination
I would liken competitive chess to an endurance sport like marathon running instead of to something like boxing or sumo wrestling, where physical mass and brute force can be deciding factors.
There's no reason that women can't be as physically or mentally prepared for such as sport as men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5TQSKmS3o