You should get in touch with Tru Ninja (userID=10675). He has done some analysis to that extent.

Hey, thanks a lot!
I just looked at his page and he has SO MUCH DATA.
I messaged him, about basically becoming an intern for him and the site, regarding statistics. I am not going to copy his work. I do not plagiarize. I plan on posting my analysis and paper to the site after I finish just so we can all be clear about my intentions.
Thanks, again.
Do you, or does anyone else know or have any ideas about an analysis I can do?
Shout out to goldfinger0303

Yeah, you should definitely get TruNinja's information. One thing he explored in detail I believe was openings, and in particular what the final result of a game will probably be for player A if he does opening A.
One new thing, that I believe hasn't been done but could be interesting, is the effect of opening A on player B. For example, what if E, G, and IT open with a French fear alliance (let's say you define that alliance as Spring 01 containing at least Lon-Eng, Mun-Bur and Ven-Pie, disregarding all other moves). In this situation, what are the outcomes for France and how does that outcome compare to the general outcome pattern?
I think once you have the programming in place to extract data from the data-set that TN used, it should be simple to generate lots of data.

Someone else released some WebDip stats recentlyish. Alderian perhaps?

Thanks.
I have never programmed a day in my life. Do you mean computer programming, because I might need some help with that. That would be interesting to explore, do you think you country (France) would be enough? I can see variables in that situation getting a bit tricky. Would I just ignore all other moves?

You'd have to do this with programming and a data dump, josh. Otherwise you'd be stuck going through the 100,000 games on the site individually.

Programming (once you have the dump) would allow you to screen out stuff such as all gunboat games, all public press games and make your queries much more specifics.

And by programming I don't mean anything hardcore. You can do a lot of this analysis type stuff on Excel, but you have to have advanced knowledge of Excel. There are many other statistical analysis software types out there

O.K.
How does one program and create this data dump?
Is there a page for all of the 100,000 games separated from users?

Btw, thanks Yonni,
I messaged him.

You'd just have to keep going through the Games tab. I don't suggest doing it.

As for the data dump...you'd need kestas' permission to get that, since he controls the site. Send an email to the mods asking for it, or maybe Alderian (userID=13677) since he gets dumps to do the GR

@josh,
Perhaps it's just a matter of adopting old code, but to learn the basics of at least one programming language before you get out of high school is one of *the* most worthwhile investments that you can make in your future, even if you choose a profession that is not immediately related to computer programming. (This is actually a fine example, analyzing data is crucial for economics, biology and social sciences.)

OK, so don't do games tab,
Dumps to do the GR?

Redhouse,
I definitely agree, I that is one of the main reasons why I am working with statistics.
What do you mean by adopting old code, what is an example of a basics of at least one programming language?
Sorry to all, it's probably annoying dealing with someone who has almost no knowledge about these kinds of things.
I appreciate the input.

Re: France. Yeah sure, ignore the other moves. The probability of the English player employing Lon-Eng being anti-French is simply slightly elevated WRT the Lon-Nth opener. And if you want more, just apply the same to another country. What is the resilience of England, for example, against a combination of Mos-StP, Kie-Ber and Bre-Eng.

*adapting

Do you have any suggestions on how to program that?

Alderian does the Ghost Rating, so he gets game data to do that.

josh, for you the best thing right now is to get a good understanding of Excel. It will pay off quickly and its relatively easy to find learning materials for it online.

Do you have any programming suites where you are? MATLAB or FORTRAN or sth?

On Excel, given that you have variables down for each of the opening moves, it would just be an IF(___ AND ___ AND___) type of statement.

Ghost rating, still not sure what that is, but I probably don't need to know.
So
1) contact (insert name of admin) about data dump.
2) Learn about Excel
3) come up with a statistics question

@redhouse
Again I apologize for my lack of knowledge. What is a programming suite? I doubt I have MATLAB or FORTRAN or STH, I do have Excel though.

For Ghost-rating an explanation is provided here:
http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist

And use my statistics question :-)

Excel can do the job, but I would never use Excel for this. STH=something. "or something like that" was what I was trying to suggest. You should ask your computer science teacher what he has. A programming suite is like an environment in which you can program, that understands the commands specific for the programming language of your choice.

@josh - A programming suite is also called a programming environment or IDE. It's basically the environment you develop software in nowadays, but software development has gotten easier (and harder) because of it. A lot of drag and drop capabilities for building forms and watching "events" (button clicks, text changing, mouse moving, etc) so the basics are much easier allowing the programmer to focus on the real work of manipulating the actual data and writing communications protocols or sending data between systems. That kind of thing.

I see, alright thanks. So you would suggest MATLAB or FORTRAN? Can I just download those or? Btw, who can I message (what admin) about these data dumps or all the games in general?

Of course Excel isn't optimal, but its probably what he has easiest access to, redhouse.

I mean, STATA is a much better package, but its 1) hard to learn and 2) he's less likely to have access to it

@Draugnar, I get it now. I am definitely going to need to familiarize myself with one of these suites. Any you would suggest for this kind of analysis?

@josh, I PMed you the mail addresses of kestas, whom I believe has the data.

goldfinger is right, if you use his, or one of my, suggestions, you will probably find it harder to learn how to do the analysis, but once you know how to do it, you will find that all future analyses of the sort will be easier to do. Depending on how much time you take for your project, and how much you want to learn from the experience, you should make a choice of programming language / Excel.

I mean, gold finger's Excel suggestion is easier to learn, my suggestions (and STATA) are easier to use once learned.

@josh - I'm not a stats guy (despite my Six Sigma green belt), so I will defer to one of them. I've heard good things about MATLAB though. And there is some software that comes with most Six Sigma programs that is great for statistical analysis.

@josh I think if you use excel you should be able to manage all the data depending on your question. Have you decided your question?

This is for high school?

I wouldn't go all out and learn to use anything particularly advanced like R or SAS or even STATA, which are all widely statistical software packages in the public- and private-sector. If you are a bit a computer guy, it's not hard to obtain STATA without paying for it, and there is a lot of documentation for it online, but it's definitely not the most efficient way to start. goldfinger and redhouse are definitely right - maybe if you were already practiced in some software, there would be a better option than excel.

Excel should definitely be sufficient for this project, and learning advanced excel functions is a good investment for the future - many institutions are heavily reliant on excel (too much, IMO), so it's basically essential to know in any technical occupation.

I agree, but with the footnote that if you use MATLAB for example, all you need to really know is how to use the READ command and its parameters, and the rest of it is no different than Excel. It's just that once you know how to correctly allocate the data you obtained with READ, it's much more easily manipulable.

@josh - depending on the size of the data, you may want to download Microsoft SQL Server Express. It's free and will handle a lot more data than Excel, and Excel can talk to it to get the data, so you don't have to write fancy SQL queries or anything to do your statistics.

@Draugnar, I get it now. I am definitely going to need to familiarize myself with one of these suites. Any you would suggest for this kind of analysis?

OK. So from what I have heard, I think I am going to download Microsoft SQL Server Express and use Excel for this analysis as I do not have much time to analyze or learn how to use these programs.
I still don't have a question, however. Any suggestions on that regard?