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Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous
- hooloovoo_zoo 4y agoIf the system suspects a cheater, maybe it can just match them up against a GM (or beyond GM) bot to confirm?
- V-2 4y agoYou normally specify a rating range of the opponent you're searching for, so if the cheater isn't targetting GM level himself (in which case it's happening already), the system can't really do it. Of course the system could go ahead anyway, displaying a fake rating - within the search criteria - for this GM / bot, but given that there are always false positives (and it would have to be done for merely suspected accounts, as you said yourself), it would essentially mean deliberately pairing some innocent players against, well, effectively cheaters. Which kind of defeats the core purpose.
- ricardobayes 4y agoThis is really cool. Rampant cheating is the reason I completely abandoned playing chess, so nice to see something happening.
- cmeacham98 4y agoWhere did you experience rampant cheating? I don't remember any particular problems back when I played on ICC in my middle/high school days, and modern equivalents like chess.com and lichess seem to do a relatively good job at catching cheaters. I might have just gotten lucky though.
- mpol 4y agoI never notice cheaters too, but I only play around 1500 FIDE rating. The cheaters are around 2300 FIDE or even higher.
- V-2 4y agoI'm of similar strength, and I have occasionally been informed that some account got banned for cheating (you receive a notification because the system restores your lost rating points after that). But it's definitely affected less than 1 in a 1000 games for me. Of course I might have still gotten beaten by cheaters that went undetected of course, especially if they stopped cheating or lost interest in the whole thing leaving the site before they'd get caught.
- dcow 4y agoHow do you cheat at chess? Serious question… there are fixed rules that govern the game, certainly a piece of software or in the human case 3rd party observer should be able to enforce them? In other words, given a list of moves, you can write a program that returns `valid` if the set of moves is allowed or `invalid` if it is not, no?
- tacitusarc 4y agoSimple: don’t play moves you discover independently, and instead use an advanced chess AI to tell you what to play. You play your opponent’s moves against an alternative AI program, and then play its moves back in your game against the human. I don’t know why people do this. It’s not like it makes them better at chess.
- brundolf 4y agoThe same reasons cheating is rampant in all online videogames, I imagine
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mkmk 4y agoThere are multiple permissible moves. Cheaters use a computer to identify the best one.
- _zihg 4y agoOpen up high level bot in another tab. Play their moves and copy what the bot does in response. I have no idea why people do it, it's not even like video game cheats where it gives people a advantage but you're still in control - you're literally just copying.
- as-j 4y agoI’d have to guess, but fake internet points? The ability to say “I’m ranked 5th at blah blah chess website”. Maybe it’s not even to others but just to themselves.
- DJBunnies 4y agoPerhaps you could clarify what you mean by cheating?
- alar44 4y agoProbably isn't very good and chalks it up to cheating. Chess takes years to get good at. It's a slow slow grind.
- mlyle 4y agoPlaying people who take 10 seconds every move— whether an obvious “only move” or the most complicated situations… and that pick the move that stockfish makes almost all of the time… are cheating.
- ipaddr 4y agoDepends I like to slow play. It can frustrate someone to play quicker and make mistakes
- V-2 4y agoThe point is not that they take their time, the point is that they spend roughly the same fixed amount of time for difficult moves (coming up with seemingly brilliant ones now and then) as trivial ones (even in positions when there's physically only one legal move). This is one of the red flags implying somebody is cheating, and doesn't even understand the position on the board. Their pace is monotonous because the time they need for copying the move over to their engine and then the engine's response is more or less constant.
- mlyle 4y agoYah, I know about slow play, too, and it's effective against me when I'm in the mode "Eh, I didn't really have time for this game, but one more!" But -- if you're over 2000, surely you've encountered cheaters and understand the difference that I'm driving at. It's rather blatant, and on Chess.com I almost always get an email a couple weeks later that they were removed for cheating and that I got rating points back, and when I look back on Lichess I often find them banned. I don't even bother reporting anymore. If it's early enough in the game that I realize it, I can just get into a closed, very-slow-to-progress position and watch them clock flag. But that's still a waste of 10 minutes of my life.
- greggsy 4y agoSame reason why I stopped playing Scrabble apps.
- throwamon 4y ago> nice to see something happening the latest ("real") commit is from 3 years ago
- benediktwerner 4y agoThis isn't the repository which runs on Lichess. The actual one does have much newer commits. Though not sure much fundamentally changed. Ultimately, I guess it does what it's supposed to do (catch obvious cheaters to save human time). But this is only one part of a lot of anti-cheating measures, including a lot more automated ones (some, like kaladin, which actually is a recent development, were also linked in the other thread about Lichess) but also a huge amount of human work. Most of the people here or in the other thread don't really know anything about cheating, how to properly detect it, and the difficulty of it. Though ofc you're certainly right that this isn't a recent development at all and at the same time it's certainly also not perfect yet. And I doubt it ever will be. I don't think cheating in online chess is something that can ever really be solved completely.
- than3 4y agoI'm in a similar boat, I used to play ~ 50 games a day and I'm down to about 3 games a week now. No weekend play. Once you get to ~1900 FIDE level of play and rework your repertoire for anti-engine strategy you realize just how much rampant cheating is happening. This continues until at some point you have to ask yourself, do you want to waste your time volunteering to be a victim to satisfy someone else's severe mental illness. They get their dopamine hit for psychologically abusing you with a tool they didn't create, often with some amount of delusion to justify it. What do you get out of playing a game against a Super-GM rated computer? Nothing but time theft. The current state of the game is without a guarantee that the game is between two humans, the game isn't actually chess. The providers for online chess don't make that guarantee. So based on the incentives, the game you play on their services is more likely to be not-chess but they still call it chess. Deceitful bunch.
- CSSer 4y agoI’ve seen a video of Magnus Carlsen playing on Lichess before. Does Irwin ever accidentally flag him or people like him? Do these sorts of folks have to be verified in some fashion?
- timetraveller26 4y agoNot lichess, but Alireza Firouzja (World Rank #3) was banned from chess.com when he was younger. It was some time ago so probably their cheat engine detection, and also lichess's should give less false positives.
- CSMastermind 4y ago> Not lichess, but Alireza Firouzja (World Rank #3) was banned from chess.com when he was younger. This has turned into a bit of an urban legend. The automated system flagged him based on both his rapid rise in rating and reports from several verified titled players. On inspection by a human, he was cleared. Danny exaggerates when he tells the story cause it's a funny anecdote. This was also a very old version of the anti-cheat like you mentioned. Personally, part of the reason I prefer chess.com is their much better cheat detection than Lichess.
- pgwhalen 4y agoMy understanding is that that was not about his actual play, but instead about his rapid rise in rating.
- have_faith 4y agoWhat it looks like to cheat is more than just playing relatively accurate moves. Average move time, centipawn loss over multiple games, blunder/mistake frequency across multiple games, strengh of moves while in time trouble, etc. Cheaters tend to stand out when you look at a short history of games.
- personjerry 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoI don’t understand what someone gets out of winning chess games by cheating. It would actually make me feel worse about myself.
- zwkrt 4y agoThere are people who’s sense of self-confidence is so fragile that they cannot allow themselves the possibility of losing or feeling “lesser than” in any context. Cheating and being banned is much better than showing the world your actual skill level and confronting the possibility of failure and judgment. The thought process goes something like “well if I beat them by cheating they’re a sucker for actually trying. And if I get banned then that’s the system out to get me” Such a person often ends up making an absolute fool of themselves from the perspective of someone with a little bit more self integrity. But maybe it is worth extending a little compassion, after all a lack of compassion is probably how they ended up like that anyhow.
- dvtrn 4y agoThere are people who’s sense of self-confidence is so fragile that they cannot allow themselves the possibility of losing or feeling “lesser than” in any context. Happened to a good friend of mine up in Seattle. Good fella, incredibly smart, graduated top marks, a bit ostentatious sometimes but you can tell he really wants to do right by others in spite of his sometimes high falutin tendencies. Anyway. Lost a game of chess to his blue collar dad, guy couldn’t handle it. Fell into a hole of depression that lasted for at least an entire episode of Cheers
- mlyle 4y agoHappens to mainly two sorts of people, in my experience: * Overperforming kids (whether smart, in athletics, etc). They don't have to confront failure and work hard like everyone else. They get a lot of praise and self-worth gets tied to it, and it all feels kind of fake/too easy. Then, one day, the work ethic and tolerance of failure everyone else has been learning become critical... * People raised in abusive or quasi-abusive environments, where success at any cost, appearances over all, etc, are emphasized. The ends justify the means to get the required outcome.
- CrankyBear 4y agoI love chess. At my absolute best, I had a over-the-board USCF rating of 2156. I never made it to master no matter how hard I tried. So, ticked off, I gave up serious play. Years go by and while I'm no where near as good these days, I started enjoying playing again. And, then I start running into people online who were clearly using engines instead of their own skills and wits. Now, I only pay with friends and over-the-board. If this can help wipe out the cheats, I may finally go back to playing online again.
- IThoughtYouGNU 4y agoYou should be happy with that! That's like candidate master level. Real impressive
- momento 4y agoI have been playing daily for about two years now on Lichess and over-the-board whenever the opportunity presents itself. I find people who burn the clock when their game takes a turn for the worse far more frustrating than those who cheat their way to victory. At least with the cheaters, the game is over pretty quickly, so I can move onto a game which is actually enjoyable.
- Normille 4y agoI got into Lichess myself about a year ago, after not really having played much chess in the past 20 or 20 years. Oddly enough, it was people on HN who persuaded me to give online chess a chance. I'd never bothered previously, as I couldn't see how you would ever know the other player wasn't getting their moves from a chess app. HNers persuaded me to give it a go because Lichess had algorithms in place which detected cheating. Having now played nearly 2000 games on Lichess, I'm pretty happy with their ability to weed out cheaters. I've very rarely had cause to suspect my opponent wasn't playing fair. Maybe once or twice someone with a lower ranking than me seemed to be a bit too good --but then we all have our flashes of inspiration, as well as our off days. However, on a couple of occasions, I've logged onto the site to see a notification that I've had some ranking points restored, as a previous opponent had cheated. But, unfortunately, Lichess doesn't tell you which opponent or which game, so I'm still none the wiser. PS: Agree with you about the people who run the clock down, when they're losing. Really annoying. When this happens, I usually switch to another browser tab and read intarwebs instead, switching back to the Lichess tab every 5 mins or so, to see if they've made a move yet.
- xyyzy 4y agohow can you cheat on chess?
- mwt 4y agoI see a lot of comments about the general topic, but none on the actual tool, which appears to have no (public-facing) updates in about three years. Presumably it could be a tool that incrementally improves over time with the explosion of data lichess has, but surely there would be a single commit since 2019. Do we know that this is what's actually running on lichess's backend today?
- myle 4y agoYes, it is used according to this: https://lichess.org/source https://lichess.org/source
- mwt 4y agoThanks! I didn't know about this page.
- benediktwerner 4y agohttps://github.com/lakinwecker/irwin https://github.com/lakinwecker/irwin has more recent commits and I think is what actually runs on Lichess, or at least close to it. Not sure much fundamentally changed though. This isn't "the whole of Lichess' anticheat". It's a tool doing one specific thing which it mostly has been doing that way since it was created. There are a bunch of other parts to cheat detection, some of which are much more recent developments. For example kaladin, which has also been linked in the other thread about Lichess. But there's a fair bit more. Understandably though, Lichess doesn't really talk much about all of them, even though pretty much all of it is open source if you know where to look and how to use it.
- mwt 4y agoThanks for the context - I haven't spent a ton of time looking around but it does seem like there are several moving parts (and evidently some important stuff isn't in the same github org)
- jka 4y agoRelated to this, there's a really good talk by the founder of lichess that includes an overview of the cheating problem, and the techniques they use to detect and manage it. The relevant section of the video on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI&t=1080s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI&t=1080s
- dang 4y agoRecent and related: Lichess: The free and open source chess server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045763 - July 2022 (65 comments)
- kuboble 4y agoIt takes $420k per year to run Lichess - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955204 - February 2022 (266 comments)
- wolverine876 4y agoNow we have a computer effectively accusing people of fraud (if I understand correctly). How does Irwin address the obvious risks and dangers?
- lupire 4y ago
- MaxMoney 4y ago
- Lapsa 4y agojust hire Kamsky
- than3 4y agoUnless they've made significant improvements, this thing is borderline useless. About all it does is act as a nice PR/gimmick. Magic thinking. When last I checked about 5 years ago, they were including client-based stats in the analysis (time per move, focus, and timing between clicks to pick a piece up and drop a piece). The issue with doing that is the client is fungible, you can set any state you want locally; and so by manipulating these stats you could skew the input going into these models. To give people a layman's short overview of the model: It uses a several CNN Pooling Layers for feature detection and LSTM (attention embeddings) in a siamese network architecture. CNN models notoriously fail to detect features that that are larger than its kernel size. The LSTM embeddings can only be as useful as the features that it is trying to detect. There were a number of problems with the model at the time, a high false positive rate, overfitting, and too much weight was being given to client-controllable input. When the client-controllable input was held stable (constant). Certain book openings would be skewed with additional weight towards a false positive, and earlier book moves activated more often than lesser seen positions. I brought the issues up to ornicar years ago in an issue, but they closed the issue without comment. The posts are mostly gone now. There were a number of disagreements (mostly about certain people with admin privileges abusing their authority, not sure if it was ornicar or one of their flunkies; either way not important just completely unprofessional). I guess it was good enough for them despite the high false positive rate (driving account churn).