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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact about ELO. It's natural to think that it is some kind of initialism, but in fact ELO doesn't stand for anything. It's the name of the guy who invented the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo

So don't say it "E.L.O." (unless you're talking about the band, I guess), say "ee-low"

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It should be Elo rating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Similar to the 'Gini coefficient', named after Corrado Gini, former president of the Italian Genetics and Eugenics Society and author of 'The Scientific Basis of Facism'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Gini

Thanks for this :) I had never heard of Elo until I noticed this morning that the new Chess course in Duolingo gives you an Elo ranking after a few rounds against Oscar. Probably would have skipped right over this story and comments otherwise, but now I have a fun bit of non-tech trivia to share if it ever comes up in small talk someday.

In table-tennis we also use the ELO ranking, because it's pretty fair. If you loose to a good player you don't loose much points, but when you loose to a bad a player you'll loose a lot. Likewise when you win.

I often see it rendered as "Elo" but I've always found it more natural to capitalize as "ELO", but perhaps I should swap to "Elo" given this. Pronouncing "ee-low" is certainly the way it's done in chess/esports though!

It’s also popular in ranking online players in games… really any game where there’s an win/loss ranking..

(also because it's a name, you don't capitalize all three letters)

oh interesting, had no idea, thanks for sharing

What was his ELO rating?

https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/35420/what-was-arp...

2065

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