andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2105 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! Anyway, this got me thinking, what’s my Kasparov number? OK, that’s easy. I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . . . OK, just kidding. What is my Kasparov number, though? Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc., and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. The games don’t have to be in time order, they just all have to be victories. And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i.e., it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were b
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! [sent-1, score-1.409]
2 That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! [sent-2, score-0.344]
3 I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . [sent-5, score-1.018]
4 Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc. [sent-10, score-0.431]
5 , and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. [sent-11, score-0.226]
6 And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i. [sent-13, score-0.365]
7 , it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were both 7 years old). [sent-15, score-0.719]
8 I’d also require the these be official tournament games, but I’ve never played in a tournament so we’ll relax that rule. [sent-16, score-0.885]
9 I beat my dad, who on occasion beat his dad, who was really good. [sent-19, score-1.018]
10 Grandpa Moses probably beat some serious tournament players from time to time (he played at coffeehouses etc. [sent-20, score-1.105]
11 , not tournaments, but I think some competitive players would show up), and one of the people he beat must have had a win against one of the top U. [sent-21, score-0.701]
12 Just take the oldest guy who Kasparov ever lost to, then the oldest American player that guy lost to, . [sent-29, score-0.635]
13 So then my Kasparov number would be 9 (dad, grandpa, the (hypothetical) tournament player my grandpa beat, the top guy he beat, then the next 2 guys in the chain, then the American player who beat the old guy who beat Kasparov). [sent-33, score-2.18]
14 I think Phil played in a tournament once or twice, and he might have won a game against someone who played in tournaments more frequently, . [sent-37, score-0.938]
15 In any case, I have a feeling that my Kasparov number is much much lower than my Muhammed Ali number. [sent-40, score-0.105]
16 If I were to count it though, then I’m pretty sure this guy got into a lot of fights after that, but it would take a long long chain of slugging to get to Michael Spinks or whatever. [sent-42, score-0.377]
17 If my Ali number (or even my Chuck Wepner number) is less than infinity, it must be in the hundreds. [sent-43, score-0.157]
18 Phil reports that the best opponent he ever beat in a tournament had a rating of something like 1562 1800, so maybe we could get to Kasparov that way. [sent-46, score-0.795]
19 Someone who was 1800 when he played Phil might ultimately have reached 1900 and beat someone who at some point reached 2100, etc etc etc. [sent-47, score-1.047]
20 I don’t really have a good sense of whether the Phil path or the Grandpa path would get me faster to that elusive Kasparov victory. [sent-48, score-0.168]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('beat', 0.509), ('kasparov', 0.505), ('tournament', 0.286), ('grandpa', 0.279), ('played', 0.221), ('phil', 0.137), ('guy', 0.123), ('dad', 0.12), ('carlsen', 0.112), ('victory', 0.109), ('number', 0.105), ('tournaments', 0.102), ('player', 0.097), ('ali', 0.096), ('games', 0.092), ('oldest', 0.092), ('players', 0.089), ('person', 0.071), ('reached', 0.064), ('chain', 0.06), ('path', 0.06), ('someone', 0.057), ('count', 0.056), ('steps', 0.054), ('lost', 0.054), ('must', 0.052), ('guys', 0.052), ('require', 0.052), ('win', 0.051), ('anand', 0.051), ('grandmaster', 0.051), ('erdos', 0.051), ('slugging', 0.051), ('magnus', 0.051), ('moses', 0.051), ('beaten', 0.051), ('game', 0.051), ('bacon', 0.048), ('muhammed', 0.048), ('elusive', 0.048), ('asymmetric', 0.048), ('cousin', 0.046), ('ultimately', 0.046), ('got', 0.045), ('etc', 0.043), ('fights', 0.042), ('relax', 0.04), ('vacation', 0.039), ('strongest', 0.039), ('chuck', 0.039)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 2105 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-18-What’s my Kasparov number?
Introduction: A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! Anyway, this got me thinking, what’s my Kasparov number? OK, that’s easy. I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . . . OK, just kidding. What is my Kasparov number, though? Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc., and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. The games don’t have to be in time order, they just all have to be victories. And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i.e., it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were b
2 0.30635095 1847 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-08-Of parsing and chess
Introduction: Gary Marcus writes , An algorithm that is good at chess won’t help parsing sentences, and one that parses sentences likely won’t be much help playing chess. That is soooo true. I’m excellent at parsing sentences but I’m not so great at chess. And, worse than that, my chess ability seems to be declining from year to year. Which reminds me: I recently read Frank Brady’s much lauded Endgame , a biography of Bobby Fischer. The first few chapters were great, not just the Cinderella story of his steps to the world championship, but also the background on his childhood and the stories of the games and tournaments that he lost along the way. But after Fischer beats Spassky in 1972, the book just dies. Brady has chapter after chapter on Fisher’s life, his paranoia, his girlfriends, his travels. But, really, after the chess is over, it’s just sad and kind of boring. I’d much rather have had twice as much detail on the first part of the life and then had the post-1972 era compr
3 0.29455024 881 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-30-Rickey Henderson and Peter Angelos, together again
Introduction: Today I was reminded of a riddle from junior high: Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with peanut butter? A: Peanut butter that never forgets, or an elephant that sticks to the roof of your mouth. The occasion was a link from Tyler Cowen to a new book by Garry Kasparov and . . . Peter Thiel. Kasparov we all know about. I still remember how he pulled out a victory in the last game of his tournament with Karpov. Just amazing: he had to win the game, a draw would not be enough. Both players knew that Kasparov had to win. And he did it. A feat as impressive as Kirk Gibson’s off-the-bench game-winning home run in the 1987 Series. Peter Theil is a more obscure figure. He’s been featured a couple of times on this blog and comes across as your typical overconfident rich dude. It’s an odd combination, sort of like what you might get if Rickey Henderson and Peter Angelos were to write a book about how to reform baseball. Cowen writes, “How can I not pre-orde
4 0.17121108 2098 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-12-Plaig!
Introduction: This one is no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but . . . wow! Pretty blatant. Maybe someone could endow the Raymond Keene Chair of Cut-and-Paste in the statistics department at George Mason University. Anyway, say what you want about this dude, at least he’s classy. He steals not from Wikipedia but from Gary Kasparov:
5 0.12338843 1903 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-17-Weak identification provides partial information
Introduction: Matt Selove writes: My question is about Bayesian analysis of the linear regression model. It seems to me that in some cases this approach throws out useful information. As an example, imagine you have two basketball players randomly drawn from the pool of NBA players (which provides the prior). You’d like to estimate how many free throws each can make out of 100. You have two pieces of information: - Session 1: Each player shoots 100 shots, and you learn player A’s total minus player B’s total - Session 2: Player A does another session where he shoots 100 shots alone, and you learn his total If we take the regression approach: y_i = number of shots made beta_A = player A’s expected number out of 100 beta_B = player B’s expected number out of 100 x_i = vector of zeros and ones showing which player took shots In the above example, our datapoints are: y_1 (first number reported) = beta_A * 1 + beta_B * (-1) + epsilon_1 y_2 (second number reported) = beta_A * 1 +
6 0.12239386 982 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-30-“There’s at least as much as an 80 percent chance . . .”
7 0.11235615 1473 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-28-Turing chess run update
9 0.098573349 1899 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-14-Turing chess tournament!
10 0.098468333 813 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Scrabble!
11 0.089141168 218 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-20-I think you knew this already
12 0.077431656 1818 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-22-Goal: Rules for Turing chess
13 0.074446566 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
14 0.074425876 1882 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-03-The statistical properties of smart chains (and referral chains more generally)
15 0.074024379 2262 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-23-Win probabilities during a sporting event
16 0.073506601 1260 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-11-Hunger Games survival analysis
17 0.073097259 1638 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-25-Diving chess
18 0.07187289 1044 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-06-The K Foundation burns Cosma’s turkey
19 0.071646705 1239 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-01-A randomized trial of the set-point diet
20 0.071064539 123 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-01-Truth in headlines
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.085), (1, -0.052), (2, -0.003), (3, 0.039), (4, 0.014), (5, 0.005), (6, 0.073), (7, -0.0), (8, 0.041), (9, -0.029), (10, 0.003), (11, -0.005), (12, -0.004), (13, -0.024), (14, -0.018), (15, 0.002), (16, 0.028), (17, -0.039), (18, 0.039), (19, -0.021), (20, -0.038), (21, 0.061), (22, 0.008), (23, 0.059), (24, 0.015), (25, 0.038), (26, -0.028), (27, 0.073), (28, -0.032), (29, -0.111), (30, 0.052), (31, -0.098), (32, -0.017), (33, 0.047), (34, 0.031), (35, -0.018), (36, 0.002), (37, 0.022), (38, 0.014), (39, 0.072), (40, -0.014), (41, -0.004), (42, 0.041), (43, -0.008), (44, -0.002), (45, -0.052), (46, 0.025), (47, 0.04), (48, -0.024), (49, 0.01)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.92516088 2105 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-18-What’s my Kasparov number?
Introduction: A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! Anyway, this got me thinking, what’s my Kasparov number? OK, that’s easy. I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . . . OK, just kidding. What is my Kasparov number, though? Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc., and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. The games don’t have to be in time order, they just all have to be victories. And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i.e., it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were b
2 0.87248653 1847 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-08-Of parsing and chess
Introduction: Gary Marcus writes , An algorithm that is good at chess won’t help parsing sentences, and one that parses sentences likely won’t be much help playing chess. That is soooo true. I’m excellent at parsing sentences but I’m not so great at chess. And, worse than that, my chess ability seems to be declining from year to year. Which reminds me: I recently read Frank Brady’s much lauded Endgame , a biography of Bobby Fischer. The first few chapters were great, not just the Cinderella story of his steps to the world championship, but also the background on his childhood and the stories of the games and tournaments that he lost along the way. But after Fischer beats Spassky in 1972, the book just dies. Brady has chapter after chapter on Fisher’s life, his paranoia, his girlfriends, his travels. But, really, after the chess is over, it’s just sad and kind of boring. I’d much rather have had twice as much detail on the first part of the life and then had the post-1972 era compr
3 0.86018372 218 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-20-I think you knew this already
Introduction: I was playing out a chess game from the newspaper and we reminded how the best players use the entire board in their game. In my own games (I’m not very good, I’m guessing my “rating” would be something like 1500?), the action always gets concentrated on one part of the board. Grandmaster games do get focused on particular squares of the board, of course, but, meanwhile, there are implications in other places and the action can suddenly shift.
4 0.84064811 615 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-16-Chess vs. checkers
Introduction: Mark Palko writes : Chess derives most of its complexity through differentiated pieces; with checkers the complexity comes from the interaction between pieces. The result is a series of elegant graph problems where the viable paths change with each move of your opponent. To draw an analogy with chess, imagine if moving your knight could allow your opponent’s bishop to move like a rook. Add to that the potential for traps and manipulation that come with forced capture and you have one of the most remarkable games of all time. . . . It’s not unusual to hear masters of both chess and checkers (draughts) to admit that they prefer the latter. So why does chess get all the respect? Why do you never see a criminal mastermind or a Bond villain playing in a checkers tournament? Part of the problem is that we learn the game as children so we tend to think of it as a children’s game. We focus on how simple the rules are and miss how much complexity and subtlety you can get out of those ru
5 0.84010082 1467 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-23-The pinch-hitter syndrome again
Introduction: Here . (Background here .) P.S. Just a thought: is it possible that one reason for the effectiveness of relief pitchers is that, by the end of the game, the starting players (that is, the hitters who have been playing all game) are getting tired? I’m pretty sure that lots of baseball-statistics experts will know the answer to this.
6 0.79590434 1638 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-25-Diving chess
7 0.78423214 1473 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-28-Turing chess run update
8 0.76531404 1818 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-22-Goal: Rules for Turing chess
9 0.75412232 813 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-Scrabble!
10 0.72353542 881 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-30-Rickey Henderson and Peter Angelos, together again
11 0.70729703 29 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-12-Probability of successive wins in baseball
12 0.69730324 2262 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-23-Win probabilities during a sporting event
13 0.68256587 562 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Statistician cracks Toronto lottery
15 0.65797669 559 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Bidding for the kickoff
16 0.64945215 1242 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-03-Best lottery story ever
17 0.61220777 1731 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-21-If a lottery is encouraging addictive gambling, don’t expand it!
20 0.58476794 634 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-A.I. is Whatever We Can’t Yet Automate
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.017), (4, 0.012), (5, 0.011), (16, 0.043), (24, 0.056), (36, 0.166), (49, 0.018), (59, 0.015), (61, 0.018), (65, 0.012), (76, 0.024), (85, 0.042), (86, 0.028), (89, 0.111), (98, 0.088), (99, 0.185)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.89539289 2105 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-18-What’s my Kasparov number?
Introduction: A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! Anyway, this got me thinking, what’s my Kasparov number? OK, that’s easy. I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . . . OK, just kidding. What is my Kasparov number, though? Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc., and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. The games don’t have to be in time order, they just all have to be victories. And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i.e., it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were b
2 0.84440124 1797 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-10-“Proposition and experiment”
Introduction: Anna Lena Phillips writes : I. Many people will not, of their own accord, look at a poem. II. Millions of people will, of their own accord, spend lots and lots of time looking at photographs of cats. III. Therefore, earlier this year, I concluded that the best strategy for increasing the number of viewers for poems would be to print them on top of photographs of cats. IV. I happen to like looking at both poems and cats. V. So this is, for me, a win-win situation. VI. Fortunately, my own cat is a patient model, and (if I am to be believed) quite photogenic. VII. The aforementioned cat is Tisko Tansi, small hero. VII. Thus I present to you (albeit in digital rather than physical form) an Endearments broadside, featuring a poem that originally appeared in BlazeVOX spring 2011. VIII. If you want to share a copy of this image, please ask first. If you want a real copy, you can ask about that too. She follows up with an image of a cat, on which is superimposed a short
3 0.82839644 176 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-02-Information is good
Introduction: Washington Post and Slate reporter Anne Applebaum wrote a dismissive column about Wikileaks, saying that they “offer nothing more than raw data.” Applebaum argues that “The notion that the Internet can replace traditional news-gathering has just been revealed to be a myth. . . . without more journalism, more investigation, more work, these documents just don’t matter that much.” Fine. But don’t undervalue the role of mere data! The usual story is that we don’t get to see the raw data underlying newspaper stories. Wikileaks and other crowdsourced data can be extremely useful, whether or not they replace “traditional news-gathering.”
4 0.82502675 551 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-02-Obama and Reagan, sitting in a tree, etc.
Introduction: I saw this picture staring at me from the newsstand the other day: Here’s the accompanying article, by Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy, which echoes some of the points I made a few months ago , following the midterm election: Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse? I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years. Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted
5 0.82186675 2242 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-10-Stan Model of the Week: PK Calculation of IV and Oral Dosing
Introduction: [Update: Revised given comments from Wingfeet, Andrew and germo. Thanks! I'd mistakenly translated the dlnorm priors in the first version --- amazing what a difference the priors make. I also escaped the less-than and greater-than signs in the constraints in the model so they're visible. I also updated to match the thin=2 output of JAGS.] We’re going to be starting a Stan “model of the P” (for some time period P) column, so I thought I’d kick things off with one of my own. I’ve been following the Wingvoet blog , the author of which is identified only by the Blogger handle Wingfeet ; a couple of days ago this lovely post came out: PK calculation of IV and oral dosing in JAGS Wingfeet’s post implemented an answer to question 6 from chapter 6 of problem from Rowland and Tozer’s 2010 book, Clinical Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics , Fourth edition, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. So in the grand tradition of using this blog to procrastinate, I thought I’d t
6 0.82136971 1478 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-31-Watercolor regression
7 0.81254655 1476 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-30-Stan is fast
8 0.77743149 101 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-20-“People with an itch to scratch”
9 0.77568436 1470 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-26-Graphs showing regression uncertainty: the code!
10 0.7691108 1847 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-08-Of parsing and chess
11 0.76750523 370 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Who gets wedding announcements in the Times?
12 0.76666903 619 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-19-If a comment is flagged as spam, it will disappear forever
13 0.76012617 1217 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-17-NSF program “to support analytic and methodological research in support of its surveys”
14 0.75348818 883 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-01-Arrow’s theorem update
16 0.74725795 459 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-09-Solve mazes by starting at the exit
17 0.74638474 1898 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-14-Progress! (on the understanding of the role of randomization in Bayesian inference)
18 0.74579608 1756 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-10-He said he was sorry
19 0.74572301 55 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-27-In Linux, use jags() to call Jags instead of using bugs() to call OpenBugs
20 0.74260223 833 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-31-Untunable Metropolis