Intrinsic chess rating

This paper develops and tests formulas for representing playing strength at chess by the quality of moves played, rather than by the results of games. Intrinsic quality is estimated via evaluations given by computer chess programs run to high depth, ideally so that their playing strength is sufficiently far ahead of the best human players as to be a `relatively omniscient' guide. Several formulas, each having intrinsic skill parameters s for `sensitivity' and c for `consistency', are argued theoretically and tested by regression on large sets of tournament games played by humans of varying strength as measured by the internationally standard Elo rating system. This establishes a correspondence between Elo rating and the parameters. A smooth correspondence is shown between statistical results and the century points on the Elo scale, and ratings are shown to have stayed quite constant over time. That is, there has been little or no `rating inflation'. The theory and empirical results are transferable to other rational-choice settings in which the alternatives have well-defined utilities, but in which complexity and bounded information constrain the perception of the utility values.

Reduction of invasive tests in chagasic patients with a modified self-organizing map

The applicability of AI methods to the Chagas' disease diagnosis is carried out by the use of Kohonen's self-organizing feature maps. Electrodiagnosis indicators calculated from ECG records are used as features in input vectors to train the network. Cross-validation results are used to modify the maps, providing an outstanding improvement to the interpretation of the resulting output. As a result, the map might be used to reduce the need for invasive explorations in chronic Chagas' disease.

Missing the logic of the text: Lord Butler’s report on intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

This article focuses on the final report of Lord Butler’s review of British intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), specifically on its treatment of the accuracy of the use of intelligence on Iraqi WMD in a government dossier published in September 2002 ahead of the 2003 Iraq war. In the report, the demonstration of the accuracy of the “September Dossier” hinges on the insertion of tables that compare side-by-side quotations from this document and from intelligence assessments. The analysis of the textual and visual methods by which the report is written reveals how the logic of the comparative tables is missed in the Butler report: the logic of these tables requires that the comparison between quotations from the two documents should be performed at the level of their details but the Butler report performs its comparison only at a broad and general level.