Estimation of Climbing Route Difficulty using Whole-History Rating

01/15/2020

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by   Dean Scarff, et al.

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Existing grading systems for rock climbing routes assign a difficulty grade to a route based on the opinions of a few people. An objective approach to estimating route difficulty on an interval scale was obtained by adapting the Whole-History Rating (WHR) system to rock climbing. WHR's model was fitted to a database of 236,095 ascents recorded by users on an established climbing website. 73 Predictions were on average 85 results suggest that an empirical rating system is accurate at assessing route difficulty and is viable for revising conventional route grades.