Scientist Figures on Kaggle Top-10 List With Chess Study

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012

Hi everyone,

Do you know about Kaggle and why a chess study figures on its list? It is a global leader in predictive modelling competitions. The company has conducted several competitions with major governments, enterprises, and academic clients. More than 33,000 data scientists have contributed to their competitions. 

Celebrating their second birthday, Kaggle has released a ranking of its top data scientists and, quite delightfully, chess has mention on that list. 

Tim Salimans is sixth on the list of top-10 data scientists released by Kaggle. He is a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate in econometrics at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He triumphed in the World Chess Federation (FIDE)-sponsored Deloitte/FIDE Chess Rating Challenge on Kaggle. The task was to predict the outcomes of chess games, thus developing a better ratings system. Saliman’s trick was to create a modified version of the method used by Microsoft to rate Xbox players, a variant that ended up being better than standard ranking algorithm. You can read the full list here.

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