Elo-like algorithms can definitely have scaling issues between subpopulations that don't frequently play each other. I've seen it in online games where opponents of a particular rank are noticeably weaker at off hours of the day. Essentially, if group A rarely plays group B and is noticeably stronger, then group B is slowly "giving" elo points to group A, but at a lower rate than the internal turnover of players joining and retiring within each group.

Also: Looking at go ratings, and an old conversation on this forum (https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=580) it appears there's roughly equal number of pro's in each country (+/- 25% maybe), around 300ish. If we use a simple model like "professionals should be 3 standard deviations above the general population", then each country should have a professional population proportional to the go playing population. However, it's interesting that this in the same general vicinity as non-bench baseball players (450), an estimate I randomly found of people able to live directly off tennis winnings (200), etc. Also in the vicinity of Dunbar's number. It might be that this is the limit of players the biggest fans can individually keep track of. It might be an organizational limit.

If it's the case that number of professionals is sublinear with population size, we'd expect the training programs to also be sublinear. There's a fixed number of professionals to teach, there's a higher risk of discouragement since a severe bottleneck is ahead.

If we could perfectly predict future strength of each child, none of those bottlenecks would matter. But realistically, players in high population community who would go on to be the best are culled out prematurely because there isn't space further along for them. So a priori we'd expect the quality of the player funnel to be better in large populations than small populations, but not directly proportional to the size difference.

It might just be me attributing additional meanings to the word "strength", but I generally consider strength to be absolute rather than per capita if that makes sense. Kind of "quantity has a quality all its own" sort of thing.

That is not my point but you are right about this: The top 100 does not show the strongest 100 players in the world. I is "a tool mainly between people who regularly appear in international events to know people they're actually more likely to play, so it's more like a list of '100 high-level table tennis players who play often enough internationally"

This is the correct description of any individual sport's ranking. It measures what it can measure.

It is probably more "flawed" in table tennis than in tennis, because of the Chinese selection mechanisms and the ITTF restrictions on national representatives. In tennis, golf or Formula 1, it's definitely skewed towards wealth, since only middle class, upper class or the 0,00001% can cough up the money to even participate.

You see, this debate quickly ramifies. A pro/pop metric will be skewed towards countries with smaller populations, higher wealth, bigger government programs and be affected by ruling on national representation.

It's very unlikely for any ranking to be perfect, but I think goratings and mamumamu are close enough to the *actual* truth. Nothing like the ITT 'rankings', haha.

In addition, I'd say the bottleneck problem is a sign of bad management of large populations. It would be best to split up the pros and make headquarters in each province, but when everything is centralised you're going to miss good kids. Especially in a poor large country like Beijing's section. Unfortunately, humans tend to think bigger is better while taking the same skilled humans evolved for small populations of less than 1000 and applying to. This is something I don't like, the monotomisation of human experience except in the one thing you want, human rights: first it was every using the same few search engine and using the same sites that would appear at the top of any search, then it was everybody using the same social media apps, and things like that. This is just one reason I'm skeptical of large countries as a concept, unless maybe each state has a lot of independence like maybe the US to some degree . . .

And of course, the metric I'm measuring is Strength per Capita, just like GDP per capita. It's a lot more of an objective calulation than strength over something as ambiguous as 'go-playing population'--what defines the difference between someone who is a go--unless you do what I said and rate go-'playingness' on a continuos scalefrom low-passion (a couple of games a year--to high passion (playing every day). In any case one of my major pet peeves is when humans take things that are continuos and rush to treat them as black-and-white and discrete and treat poor justifications for doing so as valid just to pretend they know something they don't.

On the note of over-simplifying things, yes I would like to and should use smaller fractions and analyse each players background, and might do so in my more advanced chart. So maybe Nakamura Sumire will factor 0.2 or something into Korea. However, it would be pretentious of me to deem that one can actually determine what degree of influence each type of exposure or training should be valued at. In addition, things like a top pro playing in a foreign league probably don't count since that's likely inevitable if one gets strong enough. I guess what I've done so far isn't overly-simplistic for my initial purposes, and as far as I can tell I'm not oversimplifying just to pretend the world fits into a black-and-white conception in my head, or encouraging others to do so, which is the real problem, not fake news haha (fake news relies on people first wanting dumbed-down news, but this is never addressed in the mainstream .

My point in comparing countries per capita is to prove the large disparity in effectiveness between different nations in popularising and developing go--and a richer country likely means more development--, which is hidden when you just compare countries in absolute terms. I also deeply despise comparing countries in absolute ways. If a country is five times larger and it's compared absolutely, it's often done in a way that implies the people in the larger country are 1/5th the worth of someone in the smaller country. Koreans have been as good as China at go not because they're genetically 30 times better at go, but because they're many times richer and their mums thought go was great, among other factors. The west would do kindly to tone down their yapping to large third-world countries when their total carbon footprint per capita accumulated over recorded history--the only metric that actually matters--is many times higher.