It's well known that men seem to outplay women, in general. The top 100 men in chess highly outrank the top 100 women in chess. But why? Is the reason biological, cultural, etc? A recent study seems to have answered this question. It's only a matter of statistics.
The bell curve for men simply includes more players, hence the long tail is longer, equals stronger players on the high end of the bell curve. It follows that the reverse is also true: meaning that the worst 100 male chess players play much worse than the worst 100 female players.
3 comments:
I find it hard to believe that it is indeed a bell curve. That means there are more 1200 rated players than 1000 rated players if 1200 were the peak of the curve. In my humble opinion, it would be more like a pyramid, or exponential distribution.
Hi,
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NE
I had always thought the distrubtion of chess ratings would fall under the Poisson distribution, with lower ratings occurring more often. I suppose if you think about it everyone has at least a 0 rating. Every non-chess player in the world would fall in that category, with rating 0.
But it really doesn't matter what distribution, the long tail theory still makes sense.
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