the list "ids" (dates) don't tell when the update was made, it tells when the games that were rated were <played>: on or before that date.

several dates for which there exist lists were actually published the next day. i happen to have actual upload time for every list, and more often than not the date of publication is different from the list date.

latest example: the lists of october 18th and 19th were published october 20th.

details aside: the simple point is that you have way too little information available to tell others <why> updates are made when they are made. that's what <you> need to admit, the sooner the better.

---

<If what you have admitted is true, then there should exist a correlation between the quicker site updates, and Carlsen's positive results. >

that would simply go to show that studies based on correlating events in order to establish causal relationships are littered with pitfalls that so-called serious scientists fall into all the time.

the method is again flawed if your argument goes like this:

"in p% of the total "quick updates" carlsen's result was positive, and in r% of the total "quick updates" carlsen's result was negative, and p > r, ergo carlsen having positive results causes quicker updates"

what's the most fundamental requirement for a <causal relationship>, bartonlaos? the <cause> needs to be the <reason> that the <effect> can be observed.

if you consider <percentages of the quick updates> you start at the wrong end of things. "if p1 then q". "if p2 then q". you can't make an argument about p1 and p2 by studying the occurences of q, arguing backwards.

23.04.08: 27
26.04.08: 28 (new max)
03.05.08: 29 (new max)
04.05.08: 28
14.05.08: 27
17.05.08: 28
23.05.08: 29
27.05.08: 28
30.05.08: 29
02.06.08: 30 (new max)
09.06.08: 29
04.07.08: 28
08.07.08: 29
02.08.08: 30
06.08.08: 31 (new max)
11.08.08: 30
19.08.08: 32 (new max)
24.08.08: 33 (new max)
26.08.08: 32
28.08.08: 33
29.08.08: 32
30.08.08: 31
03.09.08: 32
04.09.08: 31
05.09.08: 30
07.09.08: 31
16.09.08: 30
18.09.08: 32
04.10.08: 33
17.10.08: 32
19.10.08: 33
02.11.08: 34 (new max)
08.11.08: 33
14.11.08: 32
19.11.08: 33
20.11.08: 32
21.11.08: 31
23.11.08: 32
25.11.08: 31
13.12.08: 30
23.12.08: 31
24.12.08: 32
25.12.08: 31
28.12.08: 32
27.01.09: 31
17.02.09: 32
19.02.09: 33
21.02.09: 32
28.02.09: 31
06.03.09: 30
08.03.09: 29
09.03.09: 30
10.03.09: 29
15.03.09: 30
05.04.09: 29
06.04.09: 28
09.04.09: 29
24.04.09: 30
05.05.09: 31
06.05.09: 32
09.05.09: 31
16.05.09: 32
17.05.09: 31
22.05.09: 30
23.05.09: 31
30.05.09: 30
01.06.09: 32
03.06.09: 31
05.06.09: 30
09.06.09: 31
11.06.09: 32
21.06.09: 31
02.07.09: 30
20.07.09: 29
21.07.09: 30
03.08.09: 31
17.08.09: 32
18.08.09: 33
23.08.09: 32
28.08.09: 33
30.08.09: 32
07.09.09: 31
10.09.09: 30
11.09.09: 31
12.09.09: 32
20.09.09: 31
24.09.09: 32
28.09.09: 33
04.10.09: 34
04.10.09: 35 (new max)
06.10.09: 34
07.10.09: 35
08.10.09: 36 (new max)
10.10.09: 34
28.10.09: 35
30.10.09: 34
14.11.09: 35
15.11.09: 34
21.11.09: 36
22.11.09: 35
24.11.09: 36
01.12.09: 35
09.12.09: 34
11.12.09: 35
12.12.09: 34
22.12.09: 33
23.12.09: 34
28.12.09: 33
30.12.09: 32

I personally stay with my no-inflation hypothesis. I already listed my arguments, but there is one more: shouldn't "only" inlftaion-driven growth be more or less constant, at least in such a short time frame? But we have sudden "jumps" and just as sudden "falls" (with the biggest fall being from 34 to 28).

<<If what you have admitted is true, then there should exist a correlation between the quicker site updates, and Carlsen's positive results. >

that would simply go to show that studies based on correlating events in order to establish causal relationships>

I was invited here to provide evidence of patterns. A positive correlation is an observed pattern. There's no need to go into causation. The pattern exists simply because Magnus is Magnus. When sincere members notice such patterns, don't take feelings to an extreme.

<the method is again flawed if your argument goes like this:> Your set-up for p% would be analyzed using an unpaired t-test, and not using total percentages. This is why you mistakenly thought the previous method was flawed. That's okay, not everyone cares so much about these things.

For any rating system S let p1 and p2 be two player pools of similar composition with time elapsing between their occurrence. If the relative strength of a player P compared to the rest of the pool has remained constant, classical inflation is taking place if and only if the rating of an average P has increased with time.

#1 falls below 2775 - lower the boundary to 2650

#1 rises above 2850 - rise the boundary to 2750.

Should #1 get over 2800 in the first scenario, get back two 2700 until he falls under 2775 again. Should he get under 2825 in the second scenario, get back to 2700 too until he rises over 2850 again. I hope the "general system" is clear for all rating changes.

1) the "coming of age" of the talented players born in the 80s (a clearly bigger group than the similar group of players born in the 70s and 60s btw)

2) the "resilience" of the players who emerged as "world elite" in the 90s (you know who i'm talking about - gelfand, anand, kramnik, topalov, svidler, ivanchuk, kamsky, adams, morozevich, leko, shirov ...)

3) a very moderate systemic inflation

of the above reasons, reason number 3 is the clearly least significant one, in my opinion. when i have time to study the numbers more closely i might find something that will make me have to revise this opinion, but currently this is what i think anyway.

it's a good day to do such an exercise - it's exactly 2,5 years (or 30 months) since <the first list was published on chess.liverating.org> on april 23rd 2008. (it was not the first top list of course, but let's start there anyway).

list 1: 2008042301 (apr 23rd 2008)
list 2: 2010102301 (oct 23rd 2010)

list 1: 27 entries
list 2: 39 entries

list 1: avg born year - 1977,5
list 2: avg born year - 1980,5

number of players within 100 points of #1
list 1: 27
list 2: 35

the "old" generation, here given the meaning "those born before 1980", had just recently become a "minority" on the top list on list1: they counted 13 out of 27 players. interestingly all of these 13 players can be found also on list 2, with one exception (polgar). let's have a look at the "golden oldies" on these two ("randomly selected") lists:

[name - list 1 rating - list 2 rating]
Anand - 2798,1 - 2802,1
Kramnik - 2788 - 2790,6
Moro - 2774,7 - 2700
Topalov - 2767 - 2777,1
Ivanchuk - 2750,7 - 2764,2
Shirov - 2741,4 - 2734,9
Leko - 2741 - 2716,5
Svidler - 2737,9 - 2724,6
Adams - 2736,7 - 2723,5
Kamsky - 2730,9 - 2725,9
Movsesian - 2725,9 - 2722
Gelfand - 2721,5 - - 2741
Polgar - 2709 - 2685,8

with a couple of notable exceptions (moro and leko), they have basically kept both their rating and their ranking order. it's interesting though that "the best" have gained a couple of points while "the 2nd best" (of their generation) have lost a couple points.

on list 1 basically 1/2 of the players were from the "old generation" - 13/27 or 48%. on list 2 there are still 13 players from the "old generation" (polgar exchanged with almasi), but now they only constitute 13/39 or 1/3 (33,3%) of the top list players.

before turning the attention to the "new faces", let's first notice that list 1 had just been expanded to include most of the great "class of 83": on the official fide list of january 2008 "only" <four players born in 1983 had a rating of 2700+> and equally interesting (maybe), among the top 10 on that fide list <only 2 players> did not belong to the "old generation". on list 2, only 4 players of the "old generation" are still present, the remaining 6 being born in the 80s or in 1990.

here are some live top list stats for a few golden years.

list 1 (2008):
born in 1983: 6
born in 1985: 3
born in 1987: 1
born in 1990: 2

list 2 (2010):
born in 1983: 7 (+1)
born in 1985: 3 (=)
born in 1987: 5 (+4)
born in 1990: 4 (+2)

in 2008 players born in 1983 turned 25, and basically all of those with potential to become "really good" broke 2700 before they were 24-25 (grischuk and ponomariov way earlier). the only new 1983-players on list 2 are jobava and dominguez (ni has dropped way out). of the 1985-players mamedyarov and alekseev remain, while bu dropped out and was "replaced" by navara (who's been in and out).

the talents of 1987 were only 21 years old in 2008, and the super-prodigy radjabov was the only representative back then. 2,5 years later he's been joined by wang yue (10th on list 2), nakamura (15th), wojtaszek (19th) and vitiugov (33rd), young radek of poland being the 2010 sensation in terms of massive rating gain among the best. so, the class of 1987 seems to bloom slightly earlier than that of 1983, and i assume most of those that will play a role in the chess world from that year has "shown themselves" before they were 22-23 - their current age.

the golden class of 1990 already had two representatives in "top 13" back in april 2008, despite the two being only 17 and 18 at the time. currently they are 4 above 2700, in the year they turn 20. maybe everyone with potential born in 1990 will have shown up before they are 21-22?

meanwhile, the old generation that initially learnt to play chess without all the fancy, modern tools seems to prove that talent, experience and hard work make it possible to keep up with the "computer generation" into the 40s - as long as you are serious and dedicated about it.

<and unless someone goes "kasparov 1990" in terms of dominance, i expect the density among world-number-1-minus-100-points to continue to increase on average.>

You're hoping a certain someone will, though, aren't you? :o)

July 1990:
1. Kasparov 2800
2. Karpov 2730
3. Gelfand/Ivanchuk 2680

certainly. and i've undertaken the only massive study i know of that uses <individual yearly rating changes> on a grand scale (essentially all players in the system) to create an estimate of systemic inflation since 1990. unlike the methodically flawed approach that (for some utterly strange reason) assumes the number of <strong players> to be exactly the same in 2010 as in 1990 in order to "prove" huge inflation, i've actually shown how people's ratings have changed.

i've also got data that correlate these rating changes with <age of players> and <activity of players>. as pointed out (directly) by bartonlaos and (indirectly) myself, one should be careful to assume causal effects only due to correlations - or at the minimum keep in mind that we're talking statistical relationships mainly. still, there are a number of broad tendencies waiting to be uncovered, potent to be capable of giving much better explanations to the increase in number of 2600+ or 2700+ players than the narrow-minded "inflation, inflation!" cries that are so common.

you might have read it here or elsewhere already, but based on one series of calculations made by yours truely (or technically, the script i wrote) i came up with a rough estimate of 30-35 points <systemic> inflation from 1990 to 2009.

of course, such an estimate doesn't imply that you can take the ratings of kasparov, karpov, gelfand and ivanchuk from 1990, add 35 points, and conclude that the following would be directly comparable to player ratings in the july 2009 list:

kasparov 2835
karpov 2765
gelfand 2715
ivanchuk 2715

it does however result in much more "reasonable" ratings than the insane 120+ points of inflation since 1990 that sonas' "the rating of number 100" definition/approach leads to; consider

kasparov 2920
karpov 2850
gelfand 2800
ivanchuk 2800

due to the inherent relativity of rating numbers (the close connection between a number and its pool) such exercises don't leave us with a tool for comparing players in 1990 with players in 2009, obviously. but i think it's encouraging that the methodically weak approach results in rather absurd adjusted numbers, while the much more methodically sound approach of mine resulted in something that feels kind of meaningful.

personally i'm quite sure that the two gentlemen gelfand and ivanchuk are more formidable opponents <on average> today (and during the last decade) than when they were 20-21. based on the reasoning in my previous posts, i'd rather think they weren't in a position to get close to their max levels before somewhere between 1994 and 2000, <after> having turned 25. [despite an occasional great event.] and as demonstrated by several (kasparov, anand, gelfand, ivanchuk etc. in recent times) i think your level of performance don't drop much from 30 to 40 if you stay active, work hard and adapt the playing frequency to your "system".

Actually when I speak about the "age shift" I mean two "age shifts" which followed quite closely. The first "age shift" happened with around the advent of Kasparov and is correlated with the "demise" of the "dying generation". As you know, I dubbed most top players during Karpov's championship the "dying generation" because of their ages (most of them 40+, some even 50+). Kasparov in his Candidates still had to do with this generation (Korchnoi in the semifinal, Smyslov in the final). I recently looked up if we ever else had such a "dying generation" phenomenon (based on chessmetrics ratings as something else is not there) - apparently the only time we had one is shortly before the outbreak of WW2.

Now, it's obviously that the players of the "dying generation", while being on top of the world, were far from their absolute top level. So when Kasparov and Co. came (and before him Karpov), they, young blood, easily overtook them - this caused increase in <top> ratings from ~2600-2700 to ~2700-2800, since 1987-1988 also driven by Kasparov's domination even higher. This "age shift" had also a similar effect as the current, second "age shift" - increase in number of strong players - the number of new young top players was somewhat bigger than the number of the "dying generation" members.

The second "age shift" happened because of computers. I cannot exactly date its beginning, but it's still not completed, as your numbers document. Old players still hold their own while more and more young players come. My theory: at some point the number of young players able to reach the necessary level will reach some "critical point" - more is impossible because there are not so many people talented enough. Then the number of strong players stabilizes. Once in a generation we'll get a new "injection of talents", but with each such "injection" the old generation will lose their ratings because of age (I think, the age-skills mapping will be not as now, when we have a "collision" of pre-computer and computer generation). So we get stability. In worst case maybe even another "dying generation" (the most talented players of computer generation reach top and stay there until their 50s, while the younger players will not have the necessary talent, with few Karpov-like exceptions).

alexmagnus, i think there are interesting points about your theory, but i also think there are <more> factors that are relevant - for instance those pertaining to economy and number of events to participate in, and such.

Well, "erratic Ivanchuk"'s rating is changing often. When he is in bad shape, he often gets close to falling below 2700, while in good shape he reached his all-time high of 2787.