40 ms·

Chess’s Cheating Crisis

179 points by Thomashuet 6y ago

tetris11 6y ago
One way to get around the cameras and the invigilator in the room for a live chess match is to have a small wireless vibrating device somewhere on your body that can encode information such as coordinates and move difficulty. Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
- Just1689 6y ago
  When I played (at a national level) people would have a laptop connected and playing in another room. They would play the enemies moves on the computer as the player and playing in the tournament would play the moves made by the computer. I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    How could the top players be better than any chess engine? It seems like even in 2000 any off the shelf chess engine could beat any human. But I guess not... It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time. EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
    - nurettin 6y ago
      Super GMs often catch cheaters by creating a stale board in the late mid-game and watch opponents make pointless moves many times in a row. It becomes pretty obvious at that moment.
      - kaszanka 6y ago
        As someone who only knows the very basics of chess, what do you mean by "stale board"? Searching for that term didn't turn up any interesting results.
        beaconstudios 6y ago
        I think they mean a closed position without many meaningful moves available. Often times real players make small incremental positional improvements and probe weaknesses, and engines take completely different lines.
        jsjohnst 6y ago
        I’m not sure, maybe OP means a board where you would customarily ask for a draw as there is no way for you to win and the opponent could only get a stalemate at best.
        erfgh 6y ago
        He means that a real GM would know that the position is a draw and would offer a draw and stop playing. The cheater doesn't know so he has the engine keep playing forever.
        nurettin 6y ago
        By a stale board I mean a board state where there are no sensible moves in order to create an advantage. i.e. there are no good pawn moves, no good knight or bishop re-positions, castles mostly stuck and the engine pretty much shows no point difference.
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      There's a "no news" zone between a discovery and proliferation. In 1997, deep blue become superhuman.. proving the point. The average consumer engine was still like average tournament player with really weird moves. It took another decade before superhuman engines became widely available to normal people. That decade gap is where we often mispredict the future. Once a point is proven, we expect instant impact. Reality takes time. It took 15-20 years after superhuman chess engines were invented before they really impacted chess. Cheating is one impact, but novelty is another one. "Computer moves" are learned by GMs and played in world class tournaments. Contributing novelties is a mark of influence in chess. Even computer strategies are starting to appear in human tournaments.
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        Friendly reminder your GTX 1080 is more powerful than "Deeper blue" (not deep blue beat Kasparov, but deeper blue, which was a heavy upgrade) so unless you're better then Kasparov any kid could beat you through cheating.
        junar 6y ago
        A more realistic setup is Stockfish on a 4+ core CPU desktop, or maybe on a modern smartphone. GPU chess engines aren't as useful to the majority of machines without a high-end card.
      - pashamur 6y ago
        There was also the little fact that Kasparov was not playing his top chess in the 1997 match - the loss in the sixth game was considered very bizarre at the time (him going for the Caro-Kann, while not having much experience in that opening) His rematch against Deep Junior (the 2003 computer) ended in a 3-3 tie, so humans were actually able to hold off computer for quite a bit longer than 1997...
    - pacbard 6y ago
      The difference between a super GM and stockfish is that a super GM will play moves the "feel natural" to a human given the current position on the board. A chess engine won't care about what is natural and will maximize the position 15-20 positions down the line. For this reason, they will make sometimes a weird move given the current position that will result in an advantage a lot of moves downstream. One of the main reasons that Petrosian "got caught" was other GMs (see Hikaru's YouTube video on this) pointing out how unnatural some of his moves felt to them and considering the speed at which he supposedly calculated them.
      - pashamur 6y ago
        That is true of traditional chess engines, but no longer true for neural net (self-taught) engines that learn the rules of chess by simulating millions of games against itself. I've played an early version of one of those (its playing strength is roughly proportional to the amount of training it has done) and it was quite human-like in its behavior, even dropping pieces and making very human-like mistakes. Look up AlphaZero and the open source port LeelaChess :) Once those become commercially available, it's going to be very hard to detect engine usage.
    - bjourne 6y ago
      > EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true. There is an interesting section in Hofstaeder's Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 where he speculates that, despite the rapid progress of technology, computers might never be able to play chess at a human level!
- lemagedurage 6y ago
  The invigilator could do a body check, scan for electronics, like they do in airport security.
  - BuildTheRobots 6y ago
    If people are determined to cheat, cheat they will. Bluetooth controlled vibrating butplugs are an off the shelf product at this point; not sure if most scanners will show internal objects.
    - 0-_-0 6y ago
      And thus the term "chess playing buttplug" is used for the very first time in history...
- wolf550e 6y ago
  play in a Faraday cage
  - koolba 6y ago
    As electronic devices become smaller and more integrated, I bet “Faraday Cage Match” is going to be a real thing.
  - ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
    You can't even play online then
    - gambiting 6y ago
      I mean, ethernet cables exist.
      - worstenbrood 6y ago
        My god, did we hit the spot where people think everything is wireless ...
      - ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
        then you can cheat with an ethernet cable as well...
  - matsemann 6y ago
    While not a Faraday cage, for some high-ranked tournaments (like the WC title) they are now subjected to a scan almost like at an airport before entering a sealed room.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      The rules state that the playing space includes a bathroom, a place to smoke, and the halls between. There are limits to what you are allowed to have in the playing space.
  - 6y ago
- tomcooks 6y ago
  > Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though Trivial with the Stockfish open source chess engine
- DeusExMachina 6y ago
  It would probably be simpler to add a second camera at the back of the player, showing is screen and surroundings.
  - jml7c5 6y ago
    This would not detect the vibrating device that parent described.
- brbsix 6y ago
  It would be easy enough to have a remote friend watching a mirror of your screen. Use an inductive loop earpiece hidden inside your ear hooked up to a phone and they could read out your next moves. I suppose you could write a program using CV to decode the opponents moves on screen and translate them into chess software in lieu of a friend performing the same task, but that's a bit overkill.
  - Hyolobrika 6y ago
    Would you need to use computer vision or could you just decode the state of the DOM if on a chess website or monitor the telnet connection if on FICS?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smnc 6y ago
A similar thing has been happening in online contract bridge. https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheating-scandal/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-kibitzer/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...
- viraptor 6y ago
  Wait... You can log in to your own online bridge game and see all the hands? Did anyone expect this to not result in blatant cheating? I'm surprised it's an option at all.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Well, people could already cheat trivially by communicating with their partners, which would change the game just as much as being able to see all the cards at anything above the beginner level. It was already completely reliant on the honour system. Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.
  - smnc 6y ago
    It is possible to disable kibitzing for a table (or a tournament, or a team match etc.), but kibitzing is a feature. It's often both educational and entertaining to kibitz high profile players and participate in the play commentary and banter. The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner. So the whole thing is built on an honor system.
nurettin 6y ago
Chess drama is the best drama. Anyway it was sad to see armenians disqualified. They are a great team and they absolutely need not cheat. And probably did not. Not sure why petrosian kept looking down in that video, though.
- cglace 6y ago
  He said he uses a touchpad instead of a mouse and would look down at the touchpad.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Mmm, maybe it's me but I look at the pointer on the screen, not at the touchpad. I move my index finger and the pointer moves. If I'd be looking at the touchpad I would have to check where I moved the pointer to. Gaze down, gaze up, repeat every few pixels. Och. I do sometimes look at the keyboard though.
    - cglace 6y ago
      Yeah, I’m not saying I buy it. It’s a very bizarre situation.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    it would be more believable if he said he was reading news or watching porn on his phone.
stabbles 6y ago
Too bad lichess.org isn't mentioned; unlike chess dot com it's free, open source and blazingly fast.
- yewenjie 6y ago
  And has an interesting tech-stack. Edit: Links. 1. https://lichess.org/source https://lichess.org/source 2. https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila
  - loxs 6y ago
    Link please? I mean, to something explaining what is interesting and how is it used. I can find the repo on my own but it's not immediately insightful
    - overlordalex 6y ago
      From https://lichess.org/source https://lichess.org/source > Lichess is written in Scala 2.13, and relies on the Play 2.8 framework. scalatags is used for templating. Pure chess logic is contained in the scalachess submodule. The server is fully asynchronous, making heavy use of Scala Futures and Akka streams. WebSocket connections are handled by a separate server that communicates using redis. Lichess talks to Stockfish deployed in an AI cluster of donated servers. It uses MongoDB to store more than 1.7 billion games, which are indexed by elasticsearch. HTTP requests and WebSocket connections can be proxied by nginx. The web client is written in TypeScript and snabbdom, using Sass to generate CSS. The blog uses a free open content plan from prismic.io. All rated games are published in a free PGN database. Browser testing done with Browserstack. Proxy detection done with IP2Proxy database. Please help us translate Lichess with Crowdin.
  - paldepind2 6y ago
    Indeed. It really made my day when I discovered that Lichess uses an open source library that I made (Snabbdom).
- salmaanp 6y ago
3np 6y ago
> Sarah Longson, a former British ladies’ champion Athletic sports aside, does anyone know the motivation between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?
- paganel 6y ago
  > between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess? Because with few exceptions (the Polgar sisters) they didn't manage to compete on the same level as men. Judit Polgar was the highest-ranking women ever (no. 8, in 2005), but 15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
  - dagw 6y ago
    15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight. I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.
  - aglionby 6y ago
    It isn't fair (in the statistical sense) to make a comparison on the basis of rank between an over- and under-represented group. Interesting read here https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
- kriops 6y ago
  The classes are open (people can enter regardless of gender), and female-only. The latter exist primarily as a means for recriuting more women to the sport, as far as I know.
- cglace 6y ago
  They say it’s to encourage female participation.
- kace91 6y ago
  I vaguely remember some studies about women underperforming when they perceive their opponent as a man (even playing online). A quick google search might get you some articles on the matter, or the papers themselves.
dalbasal 6y ago
“Paranoia has become the culture” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did. Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated. Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
- noneeeed 6y ago
  I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Isnt that even with doping you need to work incredibly hard and make the most of you talents? (since everybody is doing this, it just raises the bar throughout, doesnt it)
    - nix23 6y ago
      >hard and make the most of you talents? True, but if your just 0.2% better because of doping your still on the winning side.
    - gadders 6y ago
      They are necessary but not sufficient.
ben509 6y ago
> Perhaps thinking of Lance Armstrong, he added: “I was a big fan of a certain cyclist and a part of me understands the pressure to succeed at all costs. ..." Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing. There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#USADA_reasoned_decision,_UCI_and_IOC_sanctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US... [2]: http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/ http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  So did Festina, and so did practically every other cycling team in the EPO-nuts 90s. Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
- umvi 6y ago
  "Doping" sounds bad like he's taking drugs, but isn't doping just putting your own blood back inside of you to get higher red blood cell counts? How is that much different from living on top of a mountain for a few months and then coming down on race day with elevated red blood cell counts? Is the latter cheating as well? Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
  - lakis 6y ago
    If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing. But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race. Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?
bluGill 6y ago
> “In his games there were abnormalities, sequences that he played godlike, but there were blunders as well,” The is the secret to successful cheating: knowing where to use the engine and where to go on your own. It is easy to run engine evaluation after the fact and see if your moves always match up with the engine. However when sometimes they do an sometimes they don't it is hard to know if you just happened to stumble on the best move. Particularly since most everyone regularly studies with an engine and so the best players sometimes will pick out the types of lines the engine will prefer without help. Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  Yes, but its not a strategy to win every game. It will make you play at slightly higher level. Also there are moves that if you don't understand will look odd - computer like. That is also how suspicion can be raised. Anecdotally i remember other cheating story. In online FPS like Counter Strike some top level players have been caught using aim enhancer (aimbot) that move a mouse towards a target. But they had it set to only move mouse 1px. Otherwise it was too obvious, but 1px adjustment at top level is a great competitive edge. And still people get caught. And people still cheat. Its infinite cycle.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    It is enough to go from top 500 class to number 1 though. Obviously you need to be good first, but once you are that good you can sometimes quickly figure out the computers plan by looking. Remember the tree of possible moves in any games quickly gets far too wide for a computer (much less human) to search, but if you are given one move you can often see a plan that you didn't think of. (this plan might not be what the computer saw!)
aaron695 6y ago
I'd expect to see Chess engines that allows settings such that it will chose a move only a human at rank X could chose. And make easy mistakes a computer could beat, but a human couldn't. Along with randomisations. So it can pass a Turing test.
- alcover 6y ago
  Exactly. Cheater of real rank R would set target rank R' = R+delta. Once officially at R', set R'' = R'+delta. And so on by modest increments.
motohagiography 6y ago
The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational not to cheat to find an edge. People cheat for the same reason they do anything: because it's worth it. You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
- specialist 6y ago
  "The system is broken when honest people have to cheat to compete."
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    "... when honest people would have to cheat to compete, but they don't (by definition), instead leaving, dropping the average culture even more."
QueensGambit 6y ago
I have mostly played in face-to-face tournaments. The first time I played in an online tournament, I was ahead of my opponent. Then, he started inquiring my whereabouts during my moves. I replied out of politeness and lost by timing out. I didn't mind losing this way, but the way he left without saying a word. Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.
bjourne 6y ago
I had a math exam a long while ago. One of those three hour long and the professor had me seated by myself in the math library. So I asked: - There's tons of math books here. How can you know I won't cheat? - Bjourne, do you intend to cheat? - No, of course not. - Alright. Good luck on your exam!
- lapetitejort 6y ago
  For some classes, especially as you get higher in fields, no amount of open books will help you in an exam. If you're able to figure out the material using a book then and there while not knowing it before, you deserve the grade.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    My lowest level graph theory exam at university was "bring anything you think will help you". Including our teacher's book which had all the course contents and then some. Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      I studied mathematics too. Algebra and Number Theory. I believe people should be able to have pretty much any book (not software) at their disposal when doing university level math exams. It is stupid to fail because your overworked brain forgot some formula (did not happen to me, but easily could). And people who did not study beforehand will not be able to cheat their way through, at least not in the time limit needed. This isn't paramedic training where you need to do the right thing in seconds.
  - gnulinux 6y ago
    When I was an undergrad (UC Berkeley) all Math and CS classes beyond basics (like Calculus etc) allowed "cheat sheets" in exams and some were "open book" (i.e. bring whatever the fuck you want (nothing digital of course, just paper, no calculator)). I don't remember an incident when bringing a cheat sheet was useful during the exam, maybe 1 time for a minor thing. Writing out the cheat sheet before the exam definitely helps learning though. If it's something you can look up during the exam, it's not gonna be something professor will ask you. If it's something you need to read, understand and conceptualize during the exam, it's gonna take you long enough that it'll be a significant disadvantage. EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol. I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
dpb002 6y ago
Old, player-who-used-to-be-serious here and my first thought was "Wow, Petrosian is still playing?" Turns out it is someone else...
- georgiecasey 6y ago
  It was confusing. You'd think they'd point that in the article.
- microtherion 6y ago
  My reaction exactly. Wikipedia says that the younger Petrosian was deliberately named after the older.
- anthuswilliams 6y ago
  I'm glad I saw your comment. I thought it was the older chess great and was disappointed to read something like this about him.
mellosouls 6y ago
Why would anybody do this? It's not even like cheating in athletics where you can plausibly claim to be doing it yourself (just using illegal enhancements). Here it is something else doing it for you. Bizarre that anybody would take pride from doing it, especially considering the risk of being found out.
- TheHypnotist 6y ago
  Just imagine the type of person who then pays for cheats in any number of online games. Sometimes they have to jump through hoops (or pay) just to get another account active. It's just a thing that some people do for whatever reason.
- bluGill 6y ago
  At the high level winners can take home > $100,000, but only a few of these events happen every year. If you love chess and want to make it a job you need to win a few tournaments every year (you may have to pay travel expenses to get there). Cheating is the difference between getting a "real job" for many, so there is a reason.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Let computers compete with human beings at the helm as entertainment. Or, keep changing the rules of chess right before the match so no one wouldn’t have time to program the initial conditions.
_wldu 6y ago
What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?
- sslnx 6y ago
  Stockfish is free and open source. https://stockfishchess.org/ https://stockfishchess.org/
- pacbard 6y ago
  Most chess sites provide a "firehose" for current games. It should be pretty easy to pipe a game's pgn file to stockfish. Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line. If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.
- Domenic_S 6y ago
  If you want to just goof around, use any chess program (such as OSX's built-in Chess.app) set at the hardest difficulty, and play the opposite color from your real game. Then copy your opponent's moves to Chess.app, and make the computer's moves in the real game.
georgiecasey 6y ago
I used to cheat on chess.com. It started as a small bit of cheating here and there, just checking every now and then if the move I was going to make was the best. Of course, the computer always had a better move and then I examine the line and told myself I probably would have thought of that! Like a drug, it escalated and I was checking moves all the time. I was never caught but I was ashamed and just stopped playing. Actually, more than ashamed, cheating took all the joy out of it as it felt like a job, switching tabs, and you don't get the dopamine hit when you think of a great line yourself. I uninstalled scid vs pc and opened a lichess account and never cheated on that. Though lichess tells me loads of opponents I've played have been banned for cheating. I never suspect a thing.
- sfblah 6y ago
  I recently quit online chess completely. The last straw was lichess sending me a warning because I pointed out to a guy he was obviously using an engine. The cheating just got tiresome. I’m going to go back to playing over the board with actual people.
- ritchiea 6y ago
  Lichess will flag your account as a cheater w/o notifying you so that your opponents see the flag and avoid games. I know this because a friend of mine who is an average player got flagged that way after a stretch of games he won handily, including one against me where I checked computer analysis and noticed he made zero incorrect moves. A red flag popped up next to his screenname, I asked if he was aware of it and he said he couldn’t see it and got no notification of it. I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    They should pair cheaters with cheaters.
    - thope 6y ago
      this is how it works, there is a whole alternative lichess universe where shadow-banned users play each others.
slingnow 6y ago
If anyone is curious what Petrosian looked like during the match, here is part of the match with GM Nakamura analyzing: https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798 https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798
specialist 6y ago
Idea: Replay games to detect cheating. Create a fleet of chess programs, with typical resource constraints (CPU, RAM, time). Have the chess programs replay recorded games. Compare the suggested moves with the player's actual moves. Divine some kind probability that player is cheating. Extra credit for replaying that player's history of games thru the same fleet. Was the player consistent? Were there spikes of cheating? Until there's a better phrase, I'll call this "parallel construction". It'd be neat to run the fleet of chess programs during live matches. Caveat: I know nothing about chess, so someone is probably doing "parallel construction" for cheat detection.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  It's pretty easy to determine if a player "is* an engine, and all the moves are computer generated. Where it gets difficult is more subtle cheating.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Not really. There are chess engines that are indistinguishable and made to imitate the play style of a top tier human player.
    - reidmcy 6y ago
      Can you give an example? I haven't seen any that are indistinguishable from humans
      - anbende 6y ago
        Well, apparently Chess24 has an engine that will let you play against a simulated Magnus Carlsen at various stages and skill-levels of his career. So you can set some engines not to pick perfect moves but to pick moves consistent with a particular rating or style...
        reidmcy 6y ago
alasdair_ 6y ago
I noticed that poker was mentioned as well. Does anyone have more information on this? I know heads up limit is essentially solves and no-limit is “almost” solved but are poker bots really good enough to handle full ring NLHE at a high level?
ddp26 6y ago
I'm a pretty serious online chess player. I'm in the top 300 players on lichess in blitz. Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible. There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.
- FR10 6y ago
  I had no idea lichess was FOSS and that it was written mostly in Scala [0]. I've been playing in chess.com just because it was the first platform I saw. Thank you, I'm definitely making the switch. [0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila
gowld 6y ago
The crisis is really that humans are desperately trying to "compete" at a game that computers have soundly defeated human players at. The answer, endorsed by leaders like Kasparov, is abandon competitive human chess. Embrace the computers for competition, and use ELO for entertainment matchups. I don't care if I'm playing a "cheater", as long as the cheater is playing at my level.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  But people still enjoy foot races despite the existence of wheeled and powered vehicles. I don't play chess often but would still enjoy a sit-down game with a similarly occasional player, without thinking about how much better of a game the Omnicron Neutron Wrangler can play. It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.
cdelsolar 6y ago
We built and released an open source crossword board game app (1) (think Scrabble/Words With Friends) inspired heavily by Lichess. We are currently exploring options for cheat detection, as cheating is also endemic in our sport, sadly. [1] https://github.com/domino14/liwords https://github.com/domino14/liwords
disown 6y ago
"crisis". It's been a problem for decades now. It's why online blitz/bullet is so popular. Much harder to cheat on shorter time frames.
shagie 6y ago
The story of another sudoku cheating - who also was involved with some questionable chess cheating. Eugene Varshavsky. From Cracking The Cryptic channel: The Great Sudoku "Cheat" Scandal https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4 https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4 And an NPR article about the incident: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varshavsky_sudoku_chess.html https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varsh... And the chess cheating accusations from 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheating-accusations-in-mental-sports-too.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheati...
lanius 6y ago
How much money is on the line? Cheating is also an issue in esports, where all serious tournaments are played offline.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I'm not sure, but hundreds of thousands for sure. World Champion matches each player gets a million (the winner is invited back next year). Until this year the real money was in offline tournaments, but this year to have a tournament at all it needs to be online. There have been big money online tournaments before, but they were not nearly as big as the offline.
kartoshechka 6y ago
Boomers explore online gaming and discover cheating. Somebody get'em native client with anticheat
gentleman11 6y ago
Probably a minority viewpoint, but I grew up playing chess face to face with friends and family and neighbours and people at school and at bus stops. I can’t get any enjoyment out of playing the game on a computer without physical pieces and without the other player being at least familiar enough that I might meet them again sometime
Animats 6y ago
It's hard on puny humans. Computers went slowly from "no computer can play even a decent amateur game of chess" to "supercomputer can play at grandmaster level" and then picked up speed. Now we're at "laptop with $99 program can destroy all humans".
acvny 6y ago
I have recently closed my chess.com account which I had since 2008. I got tired of cheaters. Actually cheaters forced me to only play 3+2 games in the hope they would not have enough time to check each move with the engine, but lately because of better and better cheating tools and higher and higher network latency, that solution stopped working. Now I can see exactly the same trend on lichess. Last year it was a rarity to meet a cheater on lichess. Now it is happening more often.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pizzabearman 6y ago
it might be a naive approach. I just ignore that cheating even happens. I assume everyone is not a cheater. If for some reason they are a cheater, i believe they will just get discovered after a while or it will be their internal satisfaction loss. I don't pour my heart into the game, it's just a fun distraction. But I feel for the more serious players, the paranoia must be so annoying.
glebshevchuk 6y ago
I have a good friend who plays obsessively on chess.com who's taken a "come as it may" attitude to cheating. I wonder if there's a better, more restricted, version of chess.com that minimizes cheating.
Shermanium 6y ago
Is a computer AI cheating when it does a table look up or whatever?
galaxyLogic 6y ago
The interesting thing is the increase in cheating. Is it just because of Covid, or is it perhaps because cheating has become more accepted in general, with "alternate facts" being touted as "facts"?
gosukiwi 6y ago
Is there a reason why they can't implement anticheats? Cheating in videogames is as old as videogames themselves.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  What anticheat would work for occasionally double checking a move in a different tab? Most cheating software can be caught because it interacts with the game directly, I think if you made the perfect move everytime you could be caught but say one out of every 5 or 6 moves? Even if you locked their computer down and made them lose the game if they changed tabs they could use a phone
modzu 6y ago
as someone who's made videogame cheats, ive always got a bit of a chuckle from the enthusiasm of users who defend players accused of cheating. sentiments such as, "it's not a hack, they are just good and you're a sore loser!". how to tell can be extremely difficult. but certainly anything digital that is competitive will have cheats. i regard digital games/sports as more like hybrid/centaur games -- you should assume your competitors are using technologies to their advantage. in a classic game like chess it's pretty lame, but that's why you go to your local club.

179 points by Thomashuet 6y ago

One way to get around the cameras and the invigilator in the room for a live chess match is to have a small wireless vibrating device somewhere on your body that can encode information such as coordinates and move difficulty. Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though

Just1689 6y ago
When I played (at a national level) people would have a laptop connected and playing in another room. They would play the enemies moves on the computer as the player and playing in the tournament would play the moves made by the computer. I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  How could the top players be better than any chess engine? It seems like even in 2000 any off the shelf chess engine could beat any human. But I guess not... It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time. EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
  - nurettin 6y ago
    Super GMs often catch cheaters by creating a stale board in the late mid-game and watch opponents make pointless moves many times in a row. It becomes pretty obvious at that moment.
    - kaszanka 6y ago
      As someone who only knows the very basics of chess, what do you mean by "stale board"? Searching for that term didn't turn up any interesting results.
      - beaconstudios 6y ago
        I think they mean a closed position without many meaningful moves available. Often times real players make small incremental positional improvements and probe weaknesses, and engines take completely different lines.
      - jsjohnst 6y ago
        I’m not sure, maybe OP means a board where you would customarily ask for a draw as there is no way for you to win and the opponent could only get a stalemate at best.
      - erfgh 6y ago
        He means that a real GM would know that the position is a draw and would offer a draw and stop playing. The cheater doesn't know so he has the engine keep playing forever.
      - nurettin 6y ago
        By a stale board I mean a board state where there are no sensible moves in order to create an advantage. i.e. there are no good pawn moves, no good knight or bishop re-positions, castles mostly stuck and the engine pretty much shows no point difference.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    There's a "no news" zone between a discovery and proliferation. In 1997, deep blue become superhuman.. proving the point. The average consumer engine was still like average tournament player with really weird moves. It took another decade before superhuman engines became widely available to normal people. That decade gap is where we often mispredict the future. Once a point is proven, we expect instant impact. Reality takes time. It took 15-20 years after superhuman chess engines were invented before they really impacted chess. Cheating is one impact, but novelty is another one. "Computer moves" are learned by GMs and played in world class tournaments. Contributing novelties is a mark of influence in chess. Even computer strategies are starting to appear in human tournaments.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      Friendly reminder your GTX 1080 is more powerful than "Deeper blue" (not deep blue beat Kasparov, but deeper blue, which was a heavy upgrade) so unless you're better then Kasparov any kid could beat you through cheating.
      - junar 6y ago
        A more realistic setup is Stockfish on a 4+ core CPU desktop, or maybe on a modern smartphone. GPU chess engines aren't as useful to the majority of machines without a high-end card.
    - pashamur 6y ago
      There was also the little fact that Kasparov was not playing his top chess in the 1997 match - the loss in the sixth game was considered very bizarre at the time (him going for the Caro-Kann, while not having much experience in that opening) His rematch against Deep Junior (the 2003 computer) ended in a 3-3 tie, so humans were actually able to hold off computer for quite a bit longer than 1997...
  - pacbard 6y ago
    The difference between a super GM and stockfish is that a super GM will play moves the "feel natural" to a human given the current position on the board. A chess engine won't care about what is natural and will maximize the position 15-20 positions down the line. For this reason, they will make sometimes a weird move given the current position that will result in an advantage a lot of moves downstream. One of the main reasons that Petrosian "got caught" was other GMs (see Hikaru's YouTube video on this) pointing out how unnatural some of his moves felt to them and considering the speed at which he supposedly calculated them.
    - pashamur 6y ago
      That is true of traditional chess engines, but no longer true for neural net (self-taught) engines that learn the rules of chess by simulating millions of games against itself. I've played an early version of one of those (its playing strength is roughly proportional to the amount of training it has done) and it was quite human-like in its behavior, even dropping pieces and making very human-like mistakes. Look up AlphaZero and the open source port LeelaChess :) Once those become commercially available, it's going to be very hard to detect engine usage.
  - bjourne 6y ago
    > EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true. There is an interesting section in Hofstaeder's Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 where he speculates that, despite the rapid progress of technology, computers might never be able to play chess at a human level!
lemagedurage 6y ago
The invigilator could do a body check, scan for electronics, like they do in airport security.
- BuildTheRobots 6y ago
  If people are determined to cheat, cheat they will. Bluetooth controlled vibrating butplugs are an off the shelf product at this point; not sure if most scanners will show internal objects.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    And thus the term "chess playing buttplug" is used for the very first time in history...
wolf550e 6y ago
play in a Faraday cage
- koolba 6y ago
  As electronic devices become smaller and more integrated, I bet “Faraday Cage Match” is going to be a real thing.
- ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
  You can't even play online then
  - gambiting 6y ago
    I mean, ethernet cables exist.
    - worstenbrood 6y ago
      My god, did we hit the spot where people think everything is wireless ...
    - ganeshkrishnan 6y ago
      then you can cheat with an ethernet cable as well...
- matsemann 6y ago
  While not a Faraday cage, for some high-ranked tournaments (like the WC title) they are now subjected to a scan almost like at an airport before entering a sealed room.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The rules state that the playing space includes a bathroom, a place to smoke, and the halls between. There are limits to what you are allowed to have in the playing space.
- 6y ago
tomcooks 6y ago
> Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though Trivial with the Stockfish open source chess engine
DeusExMachina 6y ago
It would probably be simpler to add a second camera at the back of the player, showing is screen and surroundings.
- jml7c5 6y ago
  This would not detect the vibrating device that parent described.
brbsix 6y ago
It would be easy enough to have a remote friend watching a mirror of your screen. Use an inductive loop earpiece hidden inside your ear hooked up to a phone and they could read out your next moves. I suppose you could write a program using CV to decode the opponents moves on screen and translate them into chess software in lieu of a friend performing the same task, but that's a bit overkill.
- Hyolobrika 6y ago
  Would you need to use computer vision or could you just decode the state of the DOM if on a chess website or monitor the telnet connection if on FICS?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

smnc 6y ago

A similar thing has been happening in online contract bridge. https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheating-scandal/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat... https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-kibitzer/ https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...

viraptor 6y ago
Wait... You can log in to your own online bridge game and see all the hands? Did anyone expect this to not result in blatant cheating? I'm surprised it's an option at all.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Well, people could already cheat trivially by communicating with their partners, which would change the game just as much as being able to see all the cards at anything above the beginner level. It was already completely reliant on the honour system. Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.
- smnc 6y ago
  It is possible to disable kibitzing for a table (or a tournament, or a team match etc.), but kibitzing is a feature. It's often both educational and entertaining to kibitz high profile players and participate in the play commentary and banter. The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner. So the whole thing is built on an honor system.

nurettin 6y ago

Chess drama is the best drama. Anyway it was sad to see armenians disqualified. They are a great team and they absolutely need not cheat. And probably did not. Not sure why petrosian kept looking down in that video, though.

cglace 6y ago
He said he uses a touchpad instead of a mouse and would look down at the touchpad.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Mmm, maybe it's me but I look at the pointer on the screen, not at the touchpad. I move my index finger and the pointer moves. If I'd be looking at the touchpad I would have to check where I moved the pointer to. Gaze down, gaze up, repeat every few pixels. Och. I do sometimes look at the keyboard though.
  - cglace 6y ago
    Yeah, I’m not saying I buy it. It’s a very bizarre situation.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  it would be more believable if he said he was reading news or watching porn on his phone.

stabbles 6y ago

Too bad lichess.org isn't mentioned; unlike chess dot com it's free, open source and blazingly fast.

yewenjie 6y ago
And has an interesting tech-stack. Edit: Links. 1. https://lichess.org/source https://lichess.org/source 2. https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila
- loxs 6y ago
  Link please? I mean, to something explaining what is interesting and how is it used. I can find the repo on my own but it's not immediately insightful
  - overlordalex 6y ago
    From https://lichess.org/source https://lichess.org/source > Lichess is written in Scala 2.13, and relies on the Play 2.8 framework. scalatags is used for templating. Pure chess logic is contained in the scalachess submodule. The server is fully asynchronous, making heavy use of Scala Futures and Akka streams. WebSocket connections are handled by a separate server that communicates using redis. Lichess talks to Stockfish deployed in an AI cluster of donated servers. It uses MongoDB to store more than 1.7 billion games, which are indexed by elasticsearch. HTTP requests and WebSocket connections can be proxied by nginx. The web client is written in TypeScript and snabbdom, using Sass to generate CSS. The blog uses a free open content plan from prismic.io. All rated games are published in a free PGN database. Browser testing done with Browserstack. Proxy detection done with IP2Proxy database. Please help us translate Lichess with Crowdin.
- paldepind2 6y ago
  Indeed. It really made my day when I discovered that Lichess uses an open source library that I made (Snabbdom).
salmaanp 6y ago

3np 6y ago

> Sarah Longson, a former British ladies’ champion Athletic sports aside, does anyone know the motivation between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?

paganel 6y ago
> between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess? Because with few exceptions (the Polgar sisters) they didn't manage to compete on the same level as men. Judit Polgar was the highest-ranking women ever (no. 8, in 2005), but 15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
- dagw 6y ago
  15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight. I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.
- aglionby 6y ago
  It isn't fair (in the statistical sense) to make a comparison on the basis of rank between an over- and under-represented group. Interesting read here https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
kriops 6y ago
The classes are open (people can enter regardless of gender), and female-only. The latter exist primarily as a means for recriuting more women to the sport, as far as I know.
cglace 6y ago
They say it’s to encourage female participation.
kace91 6y ago
I vaguely remember some studies about women underperforming when they perceive their opponent as a man (even playing online). A quick google search might get you some articles on the matter, or the papers themselves.

dalbasal 6y ago

“Paranoia has become the culture” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did. Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated. Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.

noneeeed 6y ago
I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.
- andi999 6y ago
  Isnt that even with doping you need to work incredibly hard and make the most of you talents? (since everybody is doing this, it just raises the bar throughout, doesnt it)
  - nix23 6y ago
    >hard and make the most of you talents? True, but if your just 0.2% better because of doping your still on the winning side.
  - gadders 6y ago
    They are necessary but not sufficient.

ben509 6y ago

> Perhaps thinking of Lance Armstrong, he added: “I was a big fan of a certain cyclist and a part of me understands the pressure to succeed at all costs. ..." Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing. There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#USADA_reasoned_decision,_UCI_and_IOC_sanctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US... [2]: http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/ http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
So did Festina, and so did practically every other cycling team in the EPO-nuts 90s. Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
umvi 6y ago
"Doping" sounds bad like he's taking drugs, but isn't doping just putting your own blood back inside of you to get higher red blood cell counts? How is that much different from living on top of a mountain for a few months and then coming down on race day with elevated red blood cell counts? Is the latter cheating as well? Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
- lakis 6y ago
  If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing. But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race. Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?

bluGill 6y ago

> “In his games there were abnormalities, sequences that he played godlike, but there were blunders as well,” The is the secret to successful cheating: knowing where to use the engine and where to go on your own. It is easy to run engine evaluation after the fact and see if your moves always match up with the engine. However when sometimes they do an sometimes they don't it is hard to know if you just happened to stumble on the best move. Particularly since most everyone regularly studies with an engine and so the best players sometimes will pick out the types of lines the engine will prefer without help. Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.

me_me_me 6y ago
Yes, but its not a strategy to win every game. It will make you play at slightly higher level. Also there are moves that if you don't understand will look odd - computer like. That is also how suspicion can be raised. Anecdotally i remember other cheating story. In online FPS like Counter Strike some top level players have been caught using aim enhancer (aimbot) that move a mouse towards a target. But they had it set to only move mouse 1px. Otherwise it was too obvious, but 1px adjustment at top level is a great competitive edge. And still people get caught. And people still cheat. Its infinite cycle.
- bluGill 6y ago
  It is enough to go from top 500 class to number 1 though. Obviously you need to be good first, but once you are that good you can sometimes quickly figure out the computers plan by looking. Remember the tree of possible moves in any games quickly gets far too wide for a computer (much less human) to search, but if you are given one move you can often see a plan that you didn't think of. (this plan might not be what the computer saw!)

aaron695 6y ago

I'd expect to see Chess engines that allows settings such that it will chose a move only a human at rank X could chose. And make easy mistakes a computer could beat, but a human couldn't. Along with randomisations. So it can pass a Turing test.

alcover 6y ago
Exactly. Cheater of real rank R would set target rank R' = R+delta. Once officially at R', set R'' = R'+delta. And so on by modest increments.

motohagiography 6y ago

The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational not to cheat to find an edge. People cheat for the same reason they do anything: because it's worth it. You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.

specialist 6y ago
"The system is broken when honest people have to cheat to compete."
- whatshisface 6y ago
  "... when honest people would have to cheat to compete, but they don't (by definition), instead leaving, dropping the average culture even more."

QueensGambit 6y ago

I have mostly played in face-to-face tournaments. The first time I played in an online tournament, I was ahead of my opponent. Then, he started inquiring my whereabouts during my moves. I replied out of politeness and lost by timing out. I didn't mind losing this way, but the way he left without saying a word. Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.

bjourne 6y ago

I had a math exam a long while ago. One of those three hour long and the professor had me seated by myself in the math library. So I asked: - There's tons of math books here. How can you know I won't cheat? - Bjourne, do you intend to cheat? - No, of course not. - Alright. Good luck on your exam!

lapetitejort 6y ago
For some classes, especially as you get higher in fields, no amount of open books will help you in an exam. If you're able to figure out the material using a book then and there while not knowing it before, you deserve the grade.
- nottorp 6y ago
  My lowest level graph theory exam at university was "bring anything you think will help you". Including our teacher's book which had all the course contents and then some. Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I studied mathematics too. Algebra and Number Theory. I believe people should be able to have pretty much any book (not software) at their disposal when doing university level math exams. It is stupid to fail because your overworked brain forgot some formula (did not happen to me, but easily could). And people who did not study beforehand will not be able to cheat their way through, at least not in the time limit needed. This isn't paramedic training where you need to do the right thing in seconds.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  When I was an undergrad (UC Berkeley) all Math and CS classes beyond basics (like Calculus etc) allowed "cheat sheets" in exams and some were "open book" (i.e. bring whatever the fuck you want (nothing digital of course, just paper, no calculator)). I don't remember an incident when bringing a cheat sheet was useful during the exam, maybe 1 time for a minor thing. Writing out the cheat sheet before the exam definitely helps learning though. If it's something you can look up during the exam, it's not gonna be something professor will ask you. If it's something you need to read, understand and conceptualize during the exam, it's gonna take you long enough that it'll be a significant disadvantage. EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol. I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.

dpb002 6y ago

Old, player-who-used-to-be-serious here and my first thought was "Wow, Petrosian is still playing?" Turns out it is someone else...

georgiecasey 6y ago
It was confusing. You'd think they'd point that in the article.
microtherion 6y ago
My reaction exactly. Wikipedia says that the younger Petrosian was deliberately named after the older.
anthuswilliams 6y ago
I'm glad I saw your comment. I thought it was the older chess great and was disappointed to read something like this about him.

mellosouls 6y ago

Why would anybody do this? It's not even like cheating in athletics where you can plausibly claim to be doing it yourself (just using illegal enhancements). Here it is something else doing it for you. Bizarre that anybody would take pride from doing it, especially considering the risk of being found out.

TheHypnotist 6y ago
Just imagine the type of person who then pays for cheats in any number of online games. Sometimes they have to jump through hoops (or pay) just to get another account active. It's just a thing that some people do for whatever reason.
bluGill 6y ago
At the high level winners can take home > $100,000, but only a few of these events happen every year. If you love chess and want to make it a job you need to win a few tournaments every year (you may have to pay travel expenses to get there). Cheating is the difference between getting a "real job" for many, so there is a reason.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Let computers compete with human beings at the helm as entertainment. Or, keep changing the rules of chess right before the match so no one wouldn’t have time to program the initial conditions.

_wldu 6y ago

What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?

sslnx 6y ago
Stockfish is free and open source. https://stockfishchess.org/ https://stockfishchess.org/
pacbard 6y ago
Most chess sites provide a "firehose" for current games. It should be pretty easy to pipe a game's pgn file to stockfish. Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line. If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.
Domenic_S 6y ago
If you want to just goof around, use any chess program (such as OSX's built-in Chess.app) set at the hardest difficulty, and play the opposite color from your real game. Then copy your opponent's moves to Chess.app, and make the computer's moves in the real game.

georgiecasey 6y ago

I used to cheat on chess.com. It started as a small bit of cheating here and there, just checking every now and then if the move I was going to make was the best. Of course, the computer always had a better move and then I examine the line and told myself I probably would have thought of that! Like a drug, it escalated and I was checking moves all the time. I was never caught but I was ashamed and just stopped playing. Actually, more than ashamed, cheating took all the joy out of it as it felt like a job, switching tabs, and you don't get the dopamine hit when you think of a great line yourself. I uninstalled scid vs pc and opened a lichess account and never cheated on that. Though lichess tells me loads of opponents I've played have been banned for cheating. I never suspect a thing.

sfblah 6y ago
I recently quit online chess completely. The last straw was lichess sending me a warning because I pointed out to a guy he was obviously using an engine. The cheating just got tiresome. I’m going to go back to playing over the board with actual people.
ritchiea 6y ago
Lichess will flag your account as a cheater w/o notifying you so that your opponents see the flag and avoid games. I know this because a friend of mine who is an average player got flagged that way after a stretch of games he won handily, including one against me where I checked computer analysis and noticed he made zero incorrect moves. A red flag popped up next to his screenname, I asked if he was aware of it and he said he couldn’t see it and got no notification of it. I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  They should pair cheaters with cheaters.
  - thope 6y ago
    this is how it works, there is a whole alternative lichess universe where shadow-banned users play each others.

slingnow 6y ago

If anyone is curious what Petrosian looked like during the match, here is part of the match with GM Nakamura analyzing: https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798 https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798

specialist 6y ago

Idea: Replay games to detect cheating. Create a fleet of chess programs, with typical resource constraints (CPU, RAM, time). Have the chess programs replay recorded games. Compare the suggested moves with the player's actual moves. Divine some kind probability that player is cheating. Extra credit for replaying that player's history of games thru the same fleet. Was the player consistent? Were there spikes of cheating? Until there's a better phrase, I'll call this "parallel construction". It'd be neat to run the fleet of chess programs during live matches. Caveat: I know nothing about chess, so someone is probably doing "parallel construction" for cheat detection.

dalbasal 6y ago
It's pretty easy to determine if a player "is* an engine, and all the moves are computer generated. Where it gets difficult is more subtle cheating.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Not really. There are chess engines that are indistinguishable and made to imitate the play style of a top tier human player.
  - reidmcy 6y ago
    Can you give an example? I haven't seen any that are indistinguishable from humans
    - anbende 6y ago
      Well, apparently Chess24 has an engine that will let you play against a simulated Magnus Carlsen at various stages and skill-levels of his career. So you can set some engines not to pick perfect moves but to pick moves consistent with a particular rating or style...
      - reidmcy 6y ago

alasdair_ 6y ago

I noticed that poker was mentioned as well. Does anyone have more information on this? I know heads up limit is essentially solves and no-limit is “almost” solved but are poker bots really good enough to handle full ring NLHE at a high level?

ddp26 6y ago

I'm a pretty serious online chess player. I'm in the top 300 players on lichess in blitz. Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible. There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.

FR10 6y ago
I had no idea lichess was FOSS and that it was written mostly in Scala [0]. I've been playing in chess.com just because it was the first platform I saw. Thank you, I'm definitely making the switch. [0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila https://github.com/ornicar/lila

gowld 6y ago

The crisis is really that humans are desperately trying to "compete" at a game that computers have soundly defeated human players at. The answer, endorsed by leaders like Kasparov, is abandon competitive human chess. Embrace the computers for competition, and use ELO for entertainment matchups. I don't care if I'm playing a "cheater", as long as the cheater is playing at my level.

anigbrowl 6y ago
But people still enjoy foot races despite the existence of wheeled and powered vehicles. I don't play chess often but would still enjoy a sit-down game with a similarly occasional player, without thinking about how much better of a game the Omnicron Neutron Wrangler can play. It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.

cdelsolar 6y ago

We built and released an open source crossword board game app (1) (think Scrabble/Words With Friends) inspired heavily by Lichess. We are currently exploring options for cheat detection, as cheating is also endemic in our sport, sadly. [1] https://github.com/domino14/liwords https://github.com/domino14/liwords

disown 6y ago

"crisis". It's been a problem for decades now. It's why online blitz/bullet is so popular. Much harder to cheat on shorter time frames.

shagie 6y ago

The story of another sudoku cheating - who also was involved with some questionable chess cheating. Eugene Varshavsky. From Cracking The Cryptic channel: The Great Sudoku "Cheat" Scandal https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4 https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4 And an NPR article about the incident: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varshavsky_sudoku_chess.html https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varsh... And the chess cheating accusations from 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheating-accusations-in-mental-sports-too.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheati...

lanius 6y ago

How much money is on the line? Cheating is also an issue in esports, where all serious tournaments are played offline.

bluGill 6y ago
I'm not sure, but hundreds of thousands for sure. World Champion matches each player gets a million (the winner is invited back next year). Until this year the real money was in offline tournaments, but this year to have a tournament at all it needs to be online. There have been big money online tournaments before, but they were not nearly as big as the offline.

kartoshechka 6y ago

Boomers explore online gaming and discover cheating. Somebody get'em native client with anticheat

gentleman11 6y ago

Probably a minority viewpoint, but I grew up playing chess face to face with friends and family and neighbours and people at school and at bus stops. I can’t get any enjoyment out of playing the game on a computer without physical pieces and without the other player being at least familiar enough that I might meet them again sometime

Animats 6y ago

It's hard on puny humans. Computers went slowly from "no computer can play even a decent amateur game of chess" to "supercomputer can play at grandmaster level" and then picked up speed. Now we're at "laptop with $99 program can destroy all humans".

acvny 6y ago

I have recently closed my chess.com account which I had since 2008. I got tired of cheaters. Actually cheaters forced me to only play 3+2 games in the hope they would not have enough time to check each move with the engine, but lately because of better and better cheating tools and higher and higher network latency, that solution stopped working. Now I can see exactly the same trend on lichess. Last year it was a rarity to meet a cheater on lichess. Now it is happening more often.

deleted 6y ago

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pizzabearman 6y ago

it might be a naive approach. I just ignore that cheating even happens. I assume everyone is not a cheater. If for some reason they are a cheater, i believe they will just get discovered after a while or it will be their internal satisfaction loss. I don't pour my heart into the game, it's just a fun distraction. But I feel for the more serious players, the paranoia must be so annoying.

glebshevchuk 6y ago

I have a good friend who plays obsessively on chess.com who's taken a "come as it may" attitude to cheating. I wonder if there's a better, more restricted, version of chess.com that minimizes cheating.

Shermanium 6y ago

Is a computer AI cheating when it does a table look up or whatever?

galaxyLogic 6y ago

The interesting thing is the increase in cheating. Is it just because of Covid, or is it perhaps because cheating has become more accepted in general, with "alternate facts" being touted as "facts"?

gosukiwi 6y ago

Is there a reason why they can't implement anticheats? Cheating in videogames is as old as videogames themselves.

thatguy0900 6y ago
What anticheat would work for occasionally double checking a move in a different tab? Most cheating software can be caught because it interacts with the game directly, I think if you made the perfect move everytime you could be caught but say one out of every 5 or 6 moves? Even if you locked their computer down and made them lose the game if they changed tabs they could use a phone

modzu 6y ago

as someone who's made videogame cheats, ive always got a bit of a chuckle from the enthusiasm of users who defend players accused of cheating. sentiments such as, "it's not a hack, they are just good and you're a sore loser!". how to tell can be extremely difficult. but certainly anything digital that is competitive will have cheats. i regard digital games/sports as more like hybrid/centaur games -- you should assume your competitors are using technologies to their advantage. in a classic game like chess it's pretty lame, but that's why you go to your local club.