An anonymous reader cites the Atlantic's report. In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created the first viral site: FaceMash, not Facebook. A college freshman at the time, he hacked Harvard University's online dorm directory, amassed a vast collection of student mugshots, and used them to help Harvard students seize their classmates by charm, both literally and figuratively. We have created a website where you can directly evaluate. The site quickly gained attention for its wicked prank, as told in the opening scene of The Social Network, and Harvard University shut down internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash, and in turn set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world's dominant social media empire, was reportedly the Elo system, a formula for ranking chess players above all else.
Essentially, Elo ratings predict the outcome of a chess match by assigning every player a variable number based purely on their performance. Winning against slightly higher-ranked players will increase your rating a little, but winning against much higher-ranked players will increase your rating by a large amount (and conversely, their rating will decrease by a large amount). The higher the rating, the more matches you need to win. At least, that's how Elo is designed. Apart from FaceMash and Zuckerberg, people have introduced Elo ratings for many sports such as soccer, football, and basketball, as well as various fields such as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it's probably been eroticized. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become a universal tool for evaluating everything. In other words, Elo ratings have the highest Elo ratings when it comes to preferred ways of evaluating things. […]
Elo ratings have essentially nothing to do with chess. They are based on one-on-one, zero-sum competition, a simple formula that works the same way in almost all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adopted this formula to rank national soccer teams. The project was so successful that FIFA eventually adopted the Elo system for its official rankings. Shortly thereafter, statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank his NFL teams outside of the official league standings. Things really started to take off after a new version of Nate Silver's 538, owned by ESPN, was launched in his 2014 year and Elo ratings for various sports began. It turns out that some sports are more difficult than others. Neal Payne, a sportswriter specializing in statistics who worked at 538, said NBA basketball in particular has exposed some of the system's flaws. For example, I've consistently underestimated heavyweight teams because most of the regular season is meaningless, and neither team may be trying that hard to win any given game. The main reason is that I had a hard time explaining the fact that there is. This system assumed uniform motivation across all teams and all games. After all, almost everything can be framed as a one-on-one zero-sum game. Arpad Emmerich Elo, the creator of the Elo rating system, understood the limitations of his invention. “This is a measurement tool, not a reward or punishment device,” he once said. “It's a way to compare performance and assess relative strength, not a carrot to be waved in front of a rabbit or candy to be given to a child for good behavior.”
