Database of chess games for evaluating ranking systems?

Question

I would like to test my ranking system based on information theory. I need a database of games with outcomes and ranks of the single players. Where can I find this?

Answer 1

There was a Kaggle competition sponsored by the FIDE looking for an alternative to the current ELO system. The link is:

http://www.kaggle.com/c/ChessRatings2

The dataset has over a million actual games covering ~50k players. There's also discussions of the alternative approaches used (the competition itself is now over) and scoreboard of metrics to see how well your ranking system compares.

Answer 2

There is actually a rather large DB of chess games at http://chesstempo.com. I'm not sure how open they are with it, but it could be a good starting point.

Answer 3

You could also try ChessGames.com. There is at least one API for accessing the data: Chess::Games::DotCom on metacapn.