Crate bbt

BBT is an implementation of a skill-rating system similar to Elo, Glicko or TrueSkill. It follows Algorithm 1 from the paper A Bayesian Approximation Method for Online Ranking.

Usage

As a first step, you need to instantiate a Rater:

let rater = bbt::Rater::new(25.0/6.0);

The new() function takes one parameter, β. This parameter describes how much randomness (variance in outcomes) your game has. For example, a game like Hearthstone is much more luck-based than chess and should have a higher variance; you may need to experiment to see which value has the highest predictive power.

Two-player games (e.g. Chess)

BBT has a convenience function for two-player games that returns the new ratings for the two players after a game. In the example, p1 wins against p2:

let rater = bbt::Rater::default();

let p1 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p2 = bbt::Rating::default();

let (new_p1, new_p2) = rater.duel(p1, p2, bbt::Outcome::Win);

The bbt::Outcome enum can take on the values Win, Loss and Draw.

Multiplayer games

Games with more than two players will have to use the general update_ratings method. It takes a vector of teams and a vector of ranks, with each team being a vector of player ratings. If no error occurs, the method returns a vector of the same form as the input with updated ratings.

Example 1: Racing Game

In a racing game without teams, each player is represented as a “team” of one, and since there are usually no ties in a racing game, the list of ranks contains no duplicates:

let rater = bbt::Rater::default();

let p1 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p2 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p3 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p4 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p5 = bbt::Rating::default();
let p6 = bbt::Rating::default();

let new_ratings = rater.update_ratings(vec![vec![p1], vec![p2], vec![p3],
                                            vec![p4], vec![p5], vec![p6]],
                                       vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]).unwrap();

In the example, the first player places first, the second player second, and so on.

Example 2: Tied Teams

Let’s say you have a hypothetical game with four teams and two players per team.

Team 1	Team 2	Team 3	Team 4
Alice	Charlie	Eve	Gabe
Bob	Dave	Fred	Henry

If Team 1 wins, and Team 2 and 3 draw for second place and Team 4 loses, you can call the update_ratings function as follows:

let rater = bbt::Rater::default();

let alice   = bbt::Rating::default();
let bob     = bbt::Rating::default();
let charlie = bbt::Rating::default();
let dave    = bbt::Rating::default();
let eve     = bbt::Rating::default();
let fred    = bbt::Rating::default();
let gabe    = bbt::Rating::default();
let henry   = bbt::Rating::default();

let new_ratings = rater.update_ratings(vec![vec![alice, bob],
                                            vec![charlie, dave],
                                            vec![eve, fred],
                                            vec![gabe, henry]],
                                       vec![1, 2, 2, 4]).unwrap();

The second vector assigns a rank to the teams given in the first vector. Team 1 placed first, teams 2 and 3 tie for second place and team 4 comes in fourth.

Rating scale

The default rating scale follows TrueSkill’s convention of ranks from 0 to 50. You should be able to use a different scale by specifying the middle of that scale in Rating::new(). For example, to use a more traditional scale of 0 to 3000, you can initialize ratings with Rating::new(1500.0, 1500.0/3.0). You’ll also need to adjust the β-value of the Rater instance accordingly: Rater::new(1500.0/6.0).

Structs

Rater

Rater is used to calculate rating updates given the β-parameter.

Rating

Rating represents the skill of a player.

Enums

Outcome

Outcome represents the outcome of a head-to-head duel between two players.