Deloitte sponsors competition to better predict chess outcomes

Kaggle has announced that Deloitte is sponsoring an international competition aimed at using data analytics to find the most accurate rating system to predict chess outcomes.

Anthony Goldbloom, CEO, Kaggle, said, “The ELO rating system has been applied to everything from chess to computer games and world soccer ranking. This competition could change all that.”

Anthony Viel, National Partner, Deloitte Analytics, sees the Deloitte sponsorship as an exciting opportunity to develop the ancient game of chess, while enabling greater accuracy in forecasting chess rating systems using crowd-source data mining.

“The Kaggle relationship is a great fit for Deloitte as the sponsorship reflects our strategy that highlights the insight that analytics and data can provide to clients.

“For our clients, we typically solve business problems that are in fact quite similar to the more academic challenge reflected in this chess rating competition: learning from the past to pick winners in the future: a challenge common to many areas of business ranging from mergers and acquisitions, evaluating default risk for a group of debtors, optimising portfolios of bonds, stocks and options or deciding where to place a store, outlet or depot,” added Viel.

Deloitte’s $10,000 competition prize will be awarded to the team that submits the most accurate predictions and the winning team will travel to Athens to present their findings to FIDE and may just be immortalised in chess history with the revised rating system being named after them.

The two mental disciplines of chess and data mining are attracting some serious competition - already the teams are far outclassing the ELO, and the front runners are currently the duo who won the Netflix data mining prize.