Seminar series
Date
Thu, 03 Feb 2005
14:00
14:00
Location
Comlab
Speaker
Professor Richard Brent
Organisation
University of Oxford
We consider the problem of computing ratings using the results of games (such as chess) played between a set of n players, and show how this problem can be reduced to computing the positive eigenvectors corresponding to the dominant eigenvalues of certain n by n matrices. There is a close connection with the stationary probability distributions of certain Markov chains. In practice, if n is large, then the matrices involved will be sparse, and the power method may be used to solve the eigenvalue problems efficiently.