> i suspect most people plays always at a certain time of the day, in their > timezone, so currently there might be 3 "cliques": Asia, Europe, and Americas.
there are also two other cliques: blitz and non-blitz. watching a randomly chosen game among very strong players on kgs, most will be blitz. people just don't play slow games that often. one thing about the system that works very well is that over time, everyone's rank stabilizes to exactly where it should be. you could probably game the system with a small group of people for a little while, but your rank would deteriorate rapidly once you started to playing other people. and there's a sense in which it makes absolutely no difference if you have an arbitrarily inflated rank -- it certainly wouldn't make you better in a tournament, for instance. at best it would gain you one or two games against strong players who would crush you. if you want that, just ask them. they're much more likely to offer a teaching game, which is more beneficial overall. likewise, any bot left up for more than a few hours per day which accepts arbitrary challenges is likely to end up at exactly its appropriate rank very quickly. i think that concern about rating inflation gives too much weight to the idea of a rank and not to the ranking system itself. the system itself works very well. similarly, people can sandbag and get a low rank for the purposes of getting extra handicap in a tournament. but again, it would serve very little purpose overall. s. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
