3 ms·

What (if anything) stops people from cheating in online tournaments (by simply asking a computer for the best next move, given the current board arrangement)?

claudiawerner 8y ago
I believe that the site (popular chess sites anyway) can detect when someone is continually playing the best (or near-best?) move, and often it's hard to just use the chess engine for one move because they can play "strategically" too of course.
bluGill 8y ago
After game analysis. When someone picks the computer best most from a position you can ask how likely it is they came up with that on their own. Expert chess players recognize computer moves fairly accurately in a lot of situations (this is easy to test, just take a bunch of positions, show the last move and ask if it was human or computer). From there human judges look at the game and decide how likely it is someone cheated. Of course if you only cheat once you get away with it as nobody will be sure. However cheating once isn't enough to change a game - in fact it will probably change it for the worse on your side (without knowing what the computer intended you follow a bad line after the otherwise good move). Thus you can look at a series of games and concluded if the player cheated or not. From there you take after the fact adjustments which mostly means recalculate everyone's score as if those games didn't happen. Interestingly enough, chess masters generally will score alpha zero moves as human not computers. It will be interesting to see how online cheating progresses once better AI based chess computers become available.
- dlandis 8y ago
  I see, that’s interesting. Although I also wonder if players cheat in other, more subtle, ways such as to just prevent blunders; not necessarily to choose the best moves.
  - omegaham 8y ago
    Yes, they do. The result is that time controls have shortened accordingly. It's a lot harder to cheat convincingly when you're playing bullet chess, whereas it might be easier to do so when you're playing 10 or 15-minute time controls.
- V-2 8y ago
  There is more to it than that. There are many giveaways than an algorithm can pick up. All intricate details of cheating detection algorithms aren't revealed for obvious reasons. But some of this stuff is fairly well known. For example it's about the time spent on moves. Cheaters will tend to make their moves at a fairly constant pace (because how long it takes them to check the position with the chess engine is constant). They come up with brilliant moves quickly, but take a bit longer for obvious or forced moves that a human would do without thinking. Cheaters generally don't premove, nor do they ever make moves real fast - which humans often do in time trouble. It's for the exact same reason. There's also a thing such as blur rate - how often someone switches away from the game window. And certain other heuristics too (hold alert). Obviously a cheater can avoid triggering some of the alarms, some of them are quite easy to beat (eg. for the blur, just have your chess engine run on a separate device), but in the long run it's difficult for them not to raise various other red flags at the same time. A smart person might figure out how to do it - online cheaters aren't that smart though, and unsurprisingly so, given that online cheating is essentially an exercise in futility. This doesn't mean smart people don't cheat at chess at all. They do; at actual chess tournaments, where there's something at stake, be it prize money or real titles.
bjourne 8y ago
People's honor and integrity. :) There are anti-cheating counter-measures but they would be trivial to defeat for someone who knows a little bit about how computer chess works. For example, Lichess is a free chess site and all the source code is open, except for the anti-cheating heuristics. However, getting a computer to play realistically like a good eight-year old wouldn't be to easy. The computer-generated moves would stand out much more due to the skill differential than, say, if a grand master cheated using a chess engine.
- V-2 8y ago
  They aren't necessarily so trivial. I don't know about Lichess, but (commercial and much better funded) Chess.com employs very advanced, and continuously improved cheating detection mechanisms.

claudiawerner 8y ago

I believe that the site (popular chess sites anyway) can detect when someone is continually playing the best (or near-best?) move, and often it's hard to just use the chess engine for one move because they can play "strategically" too of course.

bluGill 8y ago

After game analysis. When someone picks the computer best most from a position you can ask how likely it is they came up with that on their own. Expert chess players recognize computer moves fairly accurately in a lot of situations (this is easy to test, just take a bunch of positions, show the last move and ask if it was human or computer). From there human judges look at the game and decide how likely it is someone cheated. Of course if you only cheat once you get away with it as nobody will be sure. However cheating once isn't enough to change a game - in fact it will probably change it for the worse on your side (without knowing what the computer intended you follow a bad line after the otherwise good move). Thus you can look at a series of games and concluded if the player cheated or not. From there you take after the fact adjustments which mostly means recalculate everyone's score as if those games didn't happen. Interestingly enough, chess masters generally will score alpha zero moves as human not computers. It will be interesting to see how online cheating progresses once better AI based chess computers become available.

dlandis 8y ago
I see, that’s interesting. Although I also wonder if players cheat in other, more subtle, ways such as to just prevent blunders; not necessarily to choose the best moves.
- omegaham 8y ago
  Yes, they do. The result is that time controls have shortened accordingly. It's a lot harder to cheat convincingly when you're playing bullet chess, whereas it might be easier to do so when you're playing 10 or 15-minute time controls.
V-2 8y ago
There is more to it than that. There are many giveaways than an algorithm can pick up. All intricate details of cheating detection algorithms aren't revealed for obvious reasons. But some of this stuff is fairly well known. For example it's about the time spent on moves. Cheaters will tend to make their moves at a fairly constant pace (because how long it takes them to check the position with the chess engine is constant). They come up with brilliant moves quickly, but take a bit longer for obvious or forced moves that a human would do without thinking. Cheaters generally don't premove, nor do they ever make moves real fast - which humans often do in time trouble. It's for the exact same reason. There's also a thing such as blur rate - how often someone switches away from the game window. And certain other heuristics too (hold alert). Obviously a cheater can avoid triggering some of the alarms, some of them are quite easy to beat (eg. for the blur, just have your chess engine run on a separate device), but in the long run it's difficult for them not to raise various other red flags at the same time. A smart person might figure out how to do it - online cheaters aren't that smart though, and unsurprisingly so, given that online cheating is essentially an exercise in futility. This doesn't mean smart people don't cheat at chess at all. They do; at actual chess tournaments, where there's something at stake, be it prize money or real titles.

bjourne 8y ago

People's honor and integrity. :) There are anti-cheating counter-measures but they would be trivial to defeat for someone who knows a little bit about how computer chess works. For example, Lichess is a free chess site and all the source code is open, except for the anti-cheating heuristics. However, getting a computer to play realistically like a good eight-year old wouldn't be to easy. The computer-generated moves would stand out much more due to the skill differential than, say, if a grand master cheated using a chess engine.

V-2 8y ago
They aren't necessarily so trivial. I don't know about Lichess, but (commercial and much better funded) Chess.com employs very advanced, and continuously improved cheating detection mechanisms.