Ratings for chess and other games

Copyright 2015 Miguel A. Ballicora

Ordo is a program designed to calculate ratings of individual chess engines (or players). It has a similar concept than the Elo rating, but with a different model and algorithm. Ordo keeps consistency among ratings because it calculates them considering all results at once. The source code is available under the GPL.

Program can be compile and installed in GNU/Linux with

make

make install

The input should be a file that adheres to the PGN standard. Based on the results in that file, Ordo automatically calculates a ranking . The output can be a plain text file and/or a comma separated value file. The .csv file is an interesting option because it can be opened/imported by most spreadsheet programs. Once imported, the user can choose to format the output externally. The simplest way to use Ordo is typing in the command line:

ordo -p games.pgn

which will take the results from games.pgn and output the text ranking on the screen. If you want to save the results in a file ratings.txt, you can run:

ordo -p games.pgn -o ratings.txt

By default, the average rating of all the individuals is 2300. If you want a different overall average, you can use the switch -a to set it. For instance to have and average of 2500, you can do:

ordo -a 2500 -p games.pgn -o ratings.txt

or if you want the results in .csv format, use the switch -c.

ordo -a 2500 -p games.pgn -c rating.csv

If you want both, you can use:

ordo -a 2500 -p games.pgn -o ratings.txt -c rating.csv

In addition, -A will fix the rating of a given player as a reference anchor for the whole pool of players.

ordo -a 2800 -A "Engine X" -p games.pgn -o ratings.txt

That will calculate the ratings from games.pgn, save it in ratings.txt, and anchor the engine Engine X to a rating of 2800. Names that contain spaces should be surrounded by quote marks as in this example.

If several input files are used, they can be listed after '--'

ordo -a 2800 -A "Engine X" -o ratings.txt -- input1.pgn input2.pgn input3.pgn

Other switches are available and information about them can be obtained by typing

ordo -h

That will list the help. For more information and a manual, please go to Ordo-info.

Adam Hair has extensively tested and suggested valuable ideas.