Kaggle introduces new Chess rating competition

Kaggle, home of the statistics and predictive modeling competitions, is introducing its latest contest Elo Versus The Rest of The World.  The competition is being organized by Jeff Sonas who is a chess-metrics afficionado himself.  Jeff describes his history with rating chess players and why he wanted to start such a competition with Kaggle.

This looks to be a really interesting modeling competition with already more than 40 submissions in the leaderboard.  The interesting note about this competition is that the Elo rating system itself is going to be making an appearance on the leaderboard.  This means that if no one beats the Elo system than there is no declared winner.  Although it looks like someone has beaten Elo at its game already.  Elo will be on the leaderboard as a benchmark to make sure that the competition is proving its worth.

I hope to get a chance to make an appearance on the leaderboard.  I am involved in Kaggle's INFORMS 2010 Data Mining contest.  I'm barely hanging on to the top 10 in that competition.  There are some pretty good models to compete against in that group.