I very highly doubt that people at our level are using engines to decide their moves - They would have higher ratings if they did. But I can't fathom why someone would waste time on chess.com using an engine to artificially boost their chess.com rating.. lol.. I'm sure there is a very, very small number of weirdos who actually do that, but again they would have ratings higher than 1000.
Justs - You are maybe a bit naive, but that's ok - you're young (I think - you seem so anyway..). A good chess rating is something you can be proud of, but this has been discussed here, and more interestingly, researched by psycologists quite a lot- chess ratings/ability, even those of grandmasters is not correlated to Intelligence/"IQ" levels. I.e.: Chess grandmasters, on average, don't have higher than average IQ, and people with high IQ are not all good at chess.
The point of ratings is to judge people. I suppose your rating indicates your intelligence is too low to comprehend pairing numbers and wall charts. Hopefully you have a good friend that can lead you to your seat and tell you what color to play.
No. The point of ratings is to judge playing strength.
Playing a board game better than X amount of people doesn't make you a better person whatsoever nor gives you the right to call them names or insult them.
The point of judging strength is to rank people and pair them in a tournament.
Mr. Elo was an American and most tournaments in the United States are Swiss style tournaments. In a Swiss tourament, you assign pairing number. After you have assigned everyone a pairing number, you divide them into two groups based on the sequence of pairing numbers. Then you pair the top of the top half with the top of the bottom half, the 2nd highest of the top half with the 2nd highest of the bottom half, etc.. Here is an example:
With four players: 1,2,3,4 you have two groups 1,2, and 3,4. you pair 1 with 3 and 2 with 4.
You need a rating system to do this.
Let's say here are the ratings of these players respectively 1,2,3,4 - 2000, 1800, 1600, 1400 ...
So with more players, you just follow the same pattern.
According to wikipedia, which isn't always a good source, elo ratings were implemented in the United States in 1960. I am not sure if most were Swiss style tournaments at the time or not, but that isn't significant. Many higher level tournaments were by invitation or someone had to qualify and you qualified by basically by rating. Either by doing well in a tournament with high rated players or by winning tournaments, or having a high rating.
So more specifically elo ratings might be to judge playing strength but judging playing strength is still judging.