The history of the top chess players over time

Note: The y-axis is a rating of how well chess players compete against each other. This rating varies over time, from EDO to CMR to ELO, because different data sources cover different periods of time. •••••••••••• Music By ••••••••••••• &Over Matter'' Jay Man - OurMusicBox Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 •••••••••••• Data Sources ••••••••••••• EDO Historical Chess Ratings by Rod Edwards (1809-1920) ChessMetrics Performance Ratings by Jeff Sonas (1910-2005) (mistakenly says 1915 in the video) ELO ratings from the FIDE website (2000-2016) I used cubic interpolation between data points when necessary (EDO and ELO) and applied a 6-month blur to the CMR data to make the lines smoother and easier to follow.