Life-Time Performance and Age-Related Declines

[jts]

Question (perhaps one that JF or TMark can answer): if a young gun plays a game that shows amazing skill and/or promise, does that increase the chances that the kifu will be preserved? Or is the transmission down to us basically random?

[TMark]

Question (perhaps one that JF or TMark can answer): if a young gun plays a game that shows amazing skill and/or promise, does that increase the chances that the kifu will be preserved? Or is the transmission down to us basically random?

It is more a question of whether the game gets published. In the recent past that would depend on newspapers or magazines having the space but today a lot of material is on the web. However, a lot of preliminary games in tournaments don't get published immediately. Sometimes you have to wait for the "Complete" games of somebody to be issued. Also, when it was running, the majority of the Oteai games were not published.

Best wishes.

[ez4u]

At first I thought mef's brainstorming was just nuts. But then I thought there must be something, hmmm...
Anyway it's Christmas so here is a little present for those who like numbers...

Recipe:
1. Take Kombilo game list of all the even games from GoGoD (67000+) and stick it in excel.
2. Stick the text file for JF's name dictionary into excel and parse out the year of birth where ever it appears in the form (yyy[y] following the first parenthesis in the info block.
3. Do a vertical lookup to get the YOB for White and Black and calculate their age at the time the game was played.
4. Delete all weird results: missing YOB, negative ages, games by 3-year olds, games by 100-year olds, etc.
5. Delete all games before 1950 (proxy for the age of modern tournament/komi Go).
Due to the quick and dirty nature of 2 (mainly) and 5, end up with 52000+ games in total.

Next:
a. Calculate the difference in age of the players.
b. Calculate the result of the older player in each game.
c. Bucket the games by decade of age difference: decade0 = players up to 10 years apart in age, decade1 = players 10 to 19 years difference in age, decade2 = players 20-29 years difference in age.
d. Ignore the rest since this covers 86% of games and even a 500-game moving average does not pick up enough "decade3" games to make a nice graph.
e. Calculate 500-game moving averages for each "decadeX", smooth the result and graph it over time.

Voilà!
Note that the compression of the years on the left of the horizontal axis and the expansion of the right side represents the different number of games available by year.

500-game MA Older vs Younger.jpg (106.81 KiB) Viewed 11509 times

[TheBigH]

Isn't it also true that, if you're good enough for long enough, people will try to work out ways to beat you?

[lemmata]

I think there is a general belief in decline of performance as a player ages and these graphs support that. This general trend could be attributed to many things. For example, there is a belief that younger players are "hungrier" for success which leads to higher win/loss ratios. We see this decline in other fields, e.g. mathematics and physical sciences. People in their 50's and older are often satisfied with where they've gotten in their lives and don't have the drive that younger people do.

I would be interested to see "reached 9d", "won first major title", and perhaps "won 5th international title" as milestones, and then compare pros who hadn't reached these heights to these three. I suspect "won it all, not as motivated" is a much bigger factor until a lot later - if you like the ages on the x axis, they are hardly all that close between lee changho and the other two

Good idea! This seems especially relevant for major titles that have a challenger system so that the title holder only has to win 4-3, 3-2, or 2-1 to keep the title. It is natural then for the title-holder's winning percentage to be lower because he would only get to play the strongest challenger. For people like Cho Chikun or Kobayashi Koichi, this may have kept their winning percentages down over the years. I am kind of talking out of my rear, but it's a theory.

[ez4u]

I think there is a general belief in decline of performance as a player ages and these graphs support that. This general trend could be attributed to many things. For example, there is a belief that younger players are "hungrier" for success which leads to higher win/loss ratios. We see this decline in other fields, e.g. mathematics and physical sciences. People in their 50's and older are often satisfied with where they've gotten in their lives and don't have the drive that younger people do.

I would be interested to see "reached 9d", "won first major title", and perhaps "won 5th international title" as milestones, and then compare pros who hadn't reached these heights to these three. I suspect "won it all, not as motivated" is a much bigger factor until a lot later - if you like the ages on the x axis, they are hardly all that close between lee changho and the other two

Good idea! This seems especially relevant for major titles that have a challenger system so that the title holder only has to win 4-3, 3-2, or 2-1 to keep the title. It is natural then for the title-holder's winning percentage to be lower because he would only get to play the strongest challenger. For people like Cho Chikun or Kobayashi Koichi, this may have kept their winning percentages down over the years. I am kind of talking out of my rear, but it's a theory.

This kind of relationship will not support any generalizations. The current work sheet of 52000+ games yields an excel pivot table with 1,380 unique White player names and 1,381 unique Black player names. The number of players with five international titles to their names will fit on what... one hand or two?