13 ms·

This is relevant to today's events because Magnus Carlsen just withdrew from a tournament[1] after yesterday's loss to a significantly lower rated opponent who

This is relevant to today's events because Magnus Carlsen just withdrew from a tournament[1] after yesterday's loss to a significantly lower rated opponent who had previously been suspended for cheating on chess.com. The tournament organizers have also implemented additional anti-cheating protocols starting today. Whatever comes out of these accusations, the chess world will sure enjoy its new infusion of drama. [1] https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1566848734616555523 https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1566848734616555523

zibby8 4y ago
Is there any evidence Hans Niemann was suspended specifically for cheating? I’ve seen multiple unsubstantiated claims, but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating. And no source will. I'm not sure why chess.com didn't make it public (by a notice on his profile that his account was suspended for Fair Play violations). But yes, the only 2 entities that can definitively state that are: 1. chess.com 2. Hans himself Not sure why chess.com won't, but Hans won't for obvious reasons.
runnerup 4y ago
I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work": 1) Feet could be stimulated using electrical voltage (low level shocks). 2) Cheaters could put one foot on their knee and the system would only activate vibration when it was near a 90-degree rotation. 3) Cheaters could incorporate a vibration-damping polymer like sorbothane, probably a particularly low durometer to absorb vibrations between shoe insert and floor plate. I believe the answer is going to have to be establishing a "secure" zone that can't be crossed by anyone without a full x-ray scan of all personal effects and mmWave scanners. If clothing blocks the mmWave scan, people would have to don lighter / more form-fitting clothing while going through the mmWave scanner, send their preferred clothes through the x-ray machine, and then swap into their desired clothes in a secure changing room/bathroom. The main downside to this is increased cost; I'm not even sure how much this would cost to operate. And for which events would FIDE make this extra cost a requirement? Every FIDE rated event seems completely unreasonable - many of these are small local events with very little budget and lots of 1200 rated players. Perhaps any rated event which includes any of the top-10 players? Is there enough money at that level of chess to fund a requirement like this? Still some potential for hiding cheating devices in relatively private areas like bathrooms, changing rooms, utility closets, or even "planting" large objects like potted plants/etc with hidden compartments. Most likely I'd imagine the player wouldn't grab these, they'd have someone they trust hide them in the weeks before the event and have a person retrieve these and then drop them in a secure bathroom stall/etc. These would be, for example, identical shoes to the ones they came in with. Perhaps worth having players go through the scanners again right before they sit down at the table, including in the middle of the match if they take a bathroom break/etc. Maybe that would work, but I'm still concerned about the price -- that would need a separate analysis. How much money is available for each of these matches? The stakes right now are pretty personal but if nations governments get involved in the cheating for reasons of national pride like they do for the Olympics[0] then I'm not sure anyone would be able to stop the cheating. Another strategy might be to change the format of the top level of chess to "allow" cheating by giving everyone access to whatever engine they want, powered by identical hardware and watt-limited. So the competition would be "man+machine" vs "man+machine". There's been some chat about this but I'm not sure that matches wouldn't be so insanely even that you'd need 300+ games to build a reasonable confidence interval so that you can even determine which player "won". Currently the TCEC (highest level engine vs. engine championship) uses 22 games per matchup to determine a clear result. Even that would be excessive. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#:~:text=TCEC%20Swiss,-Tournament&text=Swiss%2Dsystem%20tournament%20with%2038,a%20total%20of%20418%20games.&text=Swiss%2Dsystem%20tournament%20with%2044,a%20total%20of%20484%20games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#....
- gs17 4y ago
  > I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work": There's also no reason to expect the shoe form factor to be used repeatedly. One cheater was accused of morse code blinks, although he also had a camera on him [0]. When people talk about vibrating shoes there's always someone joking about a wireless buttplug instead, which would probably not show up in the mmWave scan (I don't know exactly what they look like but I doubt they have huge antennas sticking out). A Faraday cage would go a lot further for the price than airport style scanners IMO (and make every match a cage match, which makes chess sound way cooler), but it's probably still overkill. [0] https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/chess-players-extravagant-cheating-method/news-story/b5d2189abf77d5f27f17e2610037f474 https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/chess-players-extr...
icelancer 4y ago
Wow, somehow I missed this. Pretty wild accusations from Magnus and Hikaru on this. Hans just had a horrific tournament in his last attempt, which makes this whole thing pretty interesting. Hans didn't play engine perfect lines when beating Magnus in the Sinquefield Cup, though he obviously played extremely accurately.
- lovemenot 4y ago
  It turns out that "Clever Hans" was reading subconscious body language cues from Magnus
  - pge 4y ago
    background for anyone that didn’t get this joke: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
- textadventure 4y ago
  No GM would be stupid enough to cheat playing 100% engine lines, they of all people know which engine lines would look particularly suspicious. All they need to know is to avoid any serious blunders, and play some important moves here and there, and that's enough to get a serious advantage at this level.
- squidbeak 4y ago
  Ignoring the lines (and any cheat at this level would be canny enough to avoid the top few engine moves), there's something seriously off about Niemann's analysis - shallowness and incoherence covered over with bluster. Even Ramirez seemed disdainful of his reasoning about his position against Firoujia tonight. It's pretty grim for him if he really didn't cheat. He won't be invited to a tournament involving Magnus again.
  - searealist 4y ago
    Are you accusing him of cheating today despite the 15 minute delay and heightened security?
avip 4y ago
This makes little sense no? With 200 ELO diff Hans should beat Magnus ~1/4 games.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Only by K factor; those calculations don't hold at the highest levels, the distribution is skewed. Magnus also rarely loses with the white pieces in classical; his last loss was in 2018 at Biel vs. a much better player than Hans.
  - avip 4y ago
    You're right, it's ~1/25. So still should happen.
    - sharedfrog 4y ago
      For sure. On its own, it's no more than a raised eyebrow. The next few days will show if there's any solid evidence. Btw. the 24% chance of "winning" against a 200 Elo higher rated opponent refers to "winning a point" - it includes draws as well.
      - texasbigdata 4y ago
        Rookie question but don’t draws occur more than 20-25% of the time at this level? Or is that just a unique feature of chess versus say StarCraft. Restated, are sports specific ELO scores real? Alternatively phrased, does an X ELO score in one competitive endeavor represent the same relative strength as the same ELO in another subject?
        sharedfrog 4y ago
        Draws are the most common outcome at the "supergrandmaster" level, yes, to the extent that calls for changes to tournament formats or the game itself are often called for. Chess960 is the most popular chess variant, in which the starting positions of the pieces are shuffled in some way, resulting in 960 possible starting positions. There's also been experiments done with no-castling chess or tweaks to how the pawns move, or the ability to capture your own pieces. I'm not sure about your Elo question but I think a 200 points difference should meant the same thing regardless of sport.
systemvoltage 4y ago
Hans seems like a cool guy, I watched his interview afterwards. PowerPlayChess covered the game, it was a magnificent performance but also not perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27zd_dVtFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27zd_dVtFw Those saying it he got banned on chess.com, it was total bullshit, here it is of how it happened live on Han's stream when he was an IM: https://livestreamfails.com/post/84343 https://livestreamfails.com/post/84343 More info here, if he was really cheating he would have been banned for life. It was a suspension for 60 mins: https://twitter.com/boomer_chess/status/1566872068922265606 https://twitter.com/boomer_chess/status/1566872068922265606 Alireza was also banned on Chess.com for cheating but there was none. I don't think HN crowd realizes how easy it is to falsely get banned on Chess.com, don't assassinate someone's character based on that: https://www.chessdom.com/alireza-firouzja-was-banned-for-cheating-on-chess-com-tweetoftheday/ https://www.chessdom.com/alireza-firouzja-was-banned-for-che...
- PKop 4y ago
  He got kicked off of chess.com twice for cheating. Doesn't seem so cool.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    That’s the further punishment of cheating previously. if you do then pull something cool off legitimately, no one believes you.
- jonwachob91 4y ago
  Hans admitted to Chess.com he cheated, that's why he was allowed back in cash tournaments such as Titled Tuesday. Firouzja was 11 years old at the time of his ban and he was an unknown commodity at the time. He was quickly unbanned b/c it was revealed that he was just a kid developing very fast. Hans' situation and Firouzja's situation are not the same.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    There is no direct admission. It is still a speculation: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x6rxcx/fact_check_is_it_true_that_hans_admitted_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x6rxcx/fact_check_is... At this point, I am just extremely skeptical of the narratives in chess. It is much like politics. No substance, all speculation. If I have to speculate, it would be that Hans is a weirdo and has no social skills, people are piling up on his atypical asshole-like personality. If there is proof to any of this, we should condemn it. Cheating sucks. It is even more serious if Hans actually cheated in an OTB game, that would be a major violation of sportsmanship. It would be a career ending move.
fasthands9 4y ago
I know very little about chess. Do computers play like top humans? Or different stylistically? ie - if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer?
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  If every move was an engine it would be suspicious, but it would be easy to just use the engine a few times at important moments in the game to get a huge advantage, and it would be very difficult to detect. The top player normally know the best few moves on the board and choose between them based on long term strategy.
- ummonk 4y ago
  Top humans tend to pick a slightly weaker move than computers every few moves. By letting the computer veto their chosen move sometimes but not all the time (and only doing so when the computer's chosen move was one they were strongly considering), they can have stronger performance without anyone catching on.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  There are "computer moves" which stand out vs human players. These normally show up in lines where there are many options of roughly equal value and the computer picks a move that is infinitesimally better but out of 'theme' with the position. They can also show up when for instance there are multiple checkmates in a position. The computer will choose the one requiring the least number of moves even if it requires deep calculation and perfect play. Humans will just trade off material and go for an easy win. Now that chess engines have started to use neural networks in move selection the amount of "computer moves" has decreased noticeably. > if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer? With a large enough sample size I believe that top players would be able to tell the difference. But that sample size is much larger than a single game or likely even the ~10 games being played in a tournament. Edit: Oh I should also mention that in the context of cheating with computers there are more signals to look at than the moves themselves. Time management is normally a huge giveaway for cheating. In online chess this normally manifests itself as players using the exact same amount of time for each move in spite of the positions being very different in terms of complexity. In the match being talked about above Hans, the challenger, used a suspicious amount of time during the opening sequence. He played the opening moves in around 10 minutes which is weird because if he had memorized the lines he would have played them much faster. If he didn't memorize the lines then it would have taken him much more than 10 minutes to calculate it all.
queuebert 4y ago
I know some fairly high rated players who've had accounts suspended for cheating because they got angry and used an engine to cheat a cheater. So you can be a good player and a cheater. Edit: For clarification, after losing to an obvious engine user, they used an engine themselves to strike back.
- pvillano 4y ago
  A speed running cheating expert on YouTube has observed that many cheating scandals start with a genuinely skilled player breaking records legitimately. However, that player starts cheating later in their career to maintain their status when they can't keep up with the brutal grind of being the best.
bumbledraven 4y ago
Maybe Ken Regan will investigate. HOW TO CATCH A CHESS CHEATER Ken Regan Finds Moves Out of Mind Chess Life, June 2014 https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/personal/JuneCLarticleKWR.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/personal/JuneCLarticleKWR.pdf
epigramx 4y ago
I'm not sure why wasn't that blatantly obvious until today. Chess is an extremely unsuitable sport for online because you are 100% free to use the strongest computers on it without 100% no cheat protection at all. It should be ..100% restricted to person-to-person tournaments for keeping score.
- pk2200 4y ago
  The tournament Carlsen withdrew from today isn't an online event. All the games are played in person at the St. Louis Chess Club.
  - ycuser2 4y ago
    How was Hans able to cheat? Seriously curios.
    - texasbigdata 4y ago
      Hmmm I wonder what this thread is called
- rcxdude 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to detect the blatent cheaters who just copy moves from the top engines: you just run the engines on the game and compare the moves between the player and engine: a close enough match is certainly cheating. More sophisticated cheaters who actually know the game well themselves are harder to catch.
veidelis 4y ago
I don't understand why a GM would need to explain some of his moves precisely and with a deep understanding of the position as some commentators here point out. Why is that so indicative of cheating? It's known that classical chess has a lot of theory, and Hans himself admits that he checked an engine line the evening before the game. So what? Here's the quote: " I didn’t guess it, but by some miracle I checked this today, and it’s such a ridiculous miracle that I don’t even remember why I checked it. I just remembered 12…h6 and everything after this, and I’ve no idea why I would check such a ridiculous thing, but I checked it, and I even knew that 13…Be6! is just very good. It’s so ridiculous that I checked it. " https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sinquefield-cup-3-niemann-beats-carlsen-to-cross-2700 https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sinquefield-cup-3-niemann-b...
- nsv 4y ago
  What people are speculating is that Magnus' prep got leaked to Hans leading to him researching this line. Of course just speculation, no hard proof. I tend to be of the mindset of "innocent until proven guilty".
- runnerup 4y ago
  It's just one signal among others. All other GM's who have beat Magnus in classical format tournaments have been able to explain themselves very clearly. This guy can't. He might be a more "intuitive" player, or he might be cheating. There's no smoking gun to show laypeople like you and I but people familiar with the scene and its norms do find this to be a salient point of data against Hans.
- ebiester 4y ago
  It's subtle, but the sheer amount of time that it takes to become a top level GM make it such that there's a bit of "GM Speak" that all of them seem to do. So, there is first a cultural variation: the way he speaks doesn't sound like the rest of the experts. By itself, it isn't damning. However, people at the GM level also tend to have an ability to look at a position and remember what they were thinking at that point of time. They internalize lines in a way that is a branch of moves. So, in this case Be6! is such a sharp position that you would expect them to talk a bit through it because it takes a lot of prep. Further, when they turned off Stockfish analysis, his analysis goes down sharply. Further, he was banned from chess.com twice because he was cheating with an engine. Further, when he was talking about a set of analysis, he made something up on the spot involving a match between Carlsen and GM Wesley So, and Wesley So said that what he had said was impossible for multiple reasons on another chess streamer's twitch. It's a lot of little things that don't add up. It's like if you were in an interview and asking a developer to explain some code on their Github about ML, and they sounded like they didn't understand the basic principles of the model they coded. It doesn't mean they didn't write the code, but it casts suspicion.

zibby8 4y ago

Is there any evidence Hans Niemann was suspended specifically for cheating? I’ve seen multiple unsubstantiated claims, but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating.

sgjohnson 4y ago
> but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating. And no source will. I'm not sure why chess.com didn't make it public (by a notice on his profile that his account was suspended for Fair Play violations). But yes, the only 2 entities that can definitively state that are: 1. chess.com 2. Hans himself Not sure why chess.com won't, but Hans won't for obvious reasons.

runnerup 4y ago

I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work": 1) Feet could be stimulated using electrical voltage (low level shocks). 2) Cheaters could put one foot on their knee and the system would only activate vibration when it was near a 90-degree rotation. 3) Cheaters could incorporate a vibration-damping polymer like sorbothane, probably a particularly low durometer to absorb vibrations between shoe insert and floor plate. I believe the answer is going to have to be establishing a "secure" zone that can't be crossed by anyone without a full x-ray scan of all personal effects and mmWave scanners. If clothing blocks the mmWave scan, people would have to don lighter / more form-fitting clothing while going through the mmWave scanner, send their preferred clothes through the x-ray machine, and then swap into their desired clothes in a secure changing room/bathroom. The main downside to this is increased cost; I'm not even sure how much this would cost to operate. And for which events would FIDE make this extra cost a requirement? Every FIDE rated event seems completely unreasonable - many of these are small local events with very little budget and lots of 1200 rated players. Perhaps any rated event which includes any of the top-10 players? Is there enough money at that level of chess to fund a requirement like this? Still some potential for hiding cheating devices in relatively private areas like bathrooms, changing rooms, utility closets, or even "planting" large objects like potted plants/etc with hidden compartments. Most likely I'd imagine the player wouldn't grab these, they'd have someone they trust hide them in the weeks before the event and have a person retrieve these and then drop them in a secure bathroom stall/etc. These would be, for example, identical shoes to the ones they came in with. Perhaps worth having players go through the scanners again right before they sit down at the table, including in the middle of the match if they take a bathroom break/etc. Maybe that would work, but I'm still concerned about the price -- that would need a separate analysis. How much money is available for each of these matches? The stakes right now are pretty personal but if nations governments get involved in the cheating for reasons of national pride like they do for the Olympics[0] then I'm not sure anyone would be able to stop the cheating. Another strategy might be to change the format of the top level of chess to "allow" cheating by giving everyone access to whatever engine they want, powered by identical hardware and watt-limited. So the competition would be "man+machine" vs "man+machine". There's been some chat about this but I'm not sure that matches wouldn't be so insanely even that you'd need 300+ games to build a reasonable confidence interval so that you can even determine which player "won". Currently the TCEC (highest level engine vs. engine championship) uses 22 games per matchup to determine a clear result. Even that would be excessive. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#:~:text=TCEC%20Swiss,-Tournament&text=Swiss%2Dsystem%20tournament%20with%2038,a%20total%20of%20418%20games.&text=Swiss%2Dsystem%20tournament%20with%2044,a%20total%20of%20484%20games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#....

gs17 4y ago
> I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work": There's also no reason to expect the shoe form factor to be used repeatedly. One cheater was accused of morse code blinks, although he also had a camera on him [0]. When people talk about vibrating shoes there's always someone joking about a wireless buttplug instead, which would probably not show up in the mmWave scan (I don't know exactly what they look like but I doubt they have huge antennas sticking out). A Faraday cage would go a lot further for the price than airport style scanners IMO (and make every match a cage match, which makes chess sound way cooler), but it's probably still overkill. [0] https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/chess-players-extravagant-cheating-method/news-story/b5d2189abf77d5f27f17e2610037f474 https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/chess-players-extr...

icelancer 4y ago

Wow, somehow I missed this. Pretty wild accusations from Magnus and Hikaru on this. Hans just had a horrific tournament in his last attempt, which makes this whole thing pretty interesting. Hans didn't play engine perfect lines when beating Magnus in the Sinquefield Cup, though he obviously played extremely accurately.

lovemenot 4y ago
It turns out that "Clever Hans" was reading subconscious body language cues from Magnus
- pge 4y ago
  background for anyone that didn’t get this joke: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
textadventure 4y ago
No GM would be stupid enough to cheat playing 100% engine lines, they of all people know which engine lines would look particularly suspicious. All they need to know is to avoid any serious blunders, and play some important moves here and there, and that's enough to get a serious advantage at this level.
squidbeak 4y ago
Ignoring the lines (and any cheat at this level would be canny enough to avoid the top few engine moves), there's something seriously off about Niemann's analysis - shallowness and incoherence covered over with bluster. Even Ramirez seemed disdainful of his reasoning about his position against Firoujia tonight. It's pretty grim for him if he really didn't cheat. He won't be invited to a tournament involving Magnus again.
- searealist 4y ago
  Are you accusing him of cheating today despite the 15 minute delay and heightened security?

avip 4y ago

This makes little sense no? With 200 ELO diff Hans should beat Magnus ~1/4 games.

icelancer 4y ago
Only by K factor; those calculations don't hold at the highest levels, the distribution is skewed. Magnus also rarely loses with the white pieces in classical; his last loss was in 2018 at Biel vs. a much better player than Hans.
- avip 4y ago
  You're right, it's ~1/25. So still should happen.
  - sharedfrog 4y ago
    For sure. On its own, it's no more than a raised eyebrow. The next few days will show if there's any solid evidence. Btw. the 24% chance of "winning" against a 200 Elo higher rated opponent refers to "winning a point" - it includes draws as well.
    - texasbigdata 4y ago
      Rookie question but don’t draws occur more than 20-25% of the time at this level? Or is that just a unique feature of chess versus say StarCraft. Restated, are sports specific ELO scores real? Alternatively phrased, does an X ELO score in one competitive endeavor represent the same relative strength as the same ELO in another subject?
      - sharedfrog 4y ago
        Draws are the most common outcome at the "supergrandmaster" level, yes, to the extent that calls for changes to tournament formats or the game itself are often called for. Chess960 is the most popular chess variant, in which the starting positions of the pieces are shuffled in some way, resulting in 960 possible starting positions. There's also been experiments done with no-castling chess or tweaks to how the pawns move, or the ability to capture your own pieces. I'm not sure about your Elo question but I think a 200 points difference should meant the same thing regardless of sport.

systemvoltage 4y ago

Hans seems like a cool guy, I watched his interview afterwards. PowerPlayChess covered the game, it was a magnificent performance but also not perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27zd_dVtFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27zd_dVtFw Those saying it he got banned on chess.com, it was total bullshit, here it is of how it happened live on Han's stream when he was an IM: https://livestreamfails.com/post/84343 https://livestreamfails.com/post/84343 More info here, if he was really cheating he would have been banned for life. It was a suspension for 60 mins: https://twitter.com/boomer_chess/status/1566872068922265606 https://twitter.com/boomer_chess/status/1566872068922265606 Alireza was also banned on Chess.com for cheating but there was none. I don't think HN crowd realizes how easy it is to falsely get banned on Chess.com, don't assassinate someone's character based on that: https://www.chessdom.com/alireza-firouzja-was-banned-for-cheating-on-chess-com-tweetoftheday/ https://www.chessdom.com/alireza-firouzja-was-banned-for-che...

PKop 4y ago
He got kicked off of chess.com twice for cheating. Doesn't seem so cool.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  That’s the further punishment of cheating previously. if you do then pull something cool off legitimately, no one believes you.
jonwachob91 4y ago
Hans admitted to Chess.com he cheated, that's why he was allowed back in cash tournaments such as Titled Tuesday. Firouzja was 11 years old at the time of his ban and he was an unknown commodity at the time. He was quickly unbanned b/c it was revealed that he was just a kid developing very fast. Hans' situation and Firouzja's situation are not the same.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  There is no direct admission. It is still a speculation: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x6rxcx/fact_check_is_it_true_that_hans_admitted_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/x6rxcx/fact_check_is... At this point, I am just extremely skeptical of the narratives in chess. It is much like politics. No substance, all speculation. If I have to speculate, it would be that Hans is a weirdo and has no social skills, people are piling up on his atypical asshole-like personality. If there is proof to any of this, we should condemn it. Cheating sucks. It is even more serious if Hans actually cheated in an OTB game, that would be a major violation of sportsmanship. It would be a career ending move.

fasthands9 4y ago

I know very little about chess. Do computers play like top humans? Or different stylistically? ie - if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer?

camjohnson26 4y ago
If every move was an engine it would be suspicious, but it would be easy to just use the engine a few times at important moments in the game to get a huge advantage, and it would be very difficult to detect. The top player normally know the best few moves on the board and choose between them based on long term strategy.
ummonk 4y ago
Top humans tend to pick a slightly weaker move than computers every few moves. By letting the computer veto their chosen move sometimes but not all the time (and only doing so when the computer's chosen move was one they were strongly considering), they can have stronger performance without anyone catching on.
CSMastermind 4y ago
There are "computer moves" which stand out vs human players. These normally show up in lines where there are many options of roughly equal value and the computer picks a move that is infinitesimally better but out of 'theme' with the position. They can also show up when for instance there are multiple checkmates in a position. The computer will choose the one requiring the least number of moves even if it requires deep calculation and perfect play. Humans will just trade off material and go for an easy win. Now that chess engines have started to use neural networks in move selection the amount of "computer moves" has decreased noticeably. > if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer? With a large enough sample size I believe that top players would be able to tell the difference. But that sample size is much larger than a single game or likely even the ~10 games being played in a tournament. Edit: Oh I should also mention that in the context of cheating with computers there are more signals to look at than the moves themselves. Time management is normally a huge giveaway for cheating. In online chess this normally manifests itself as players using the exact same amount of time for each move in spite of the positions being very different in terms of complexity. In the match being talked about above Hans, the challenger, used a suspicious amount of time during the opening sequence. He played the opening moves in around 10 minutes which is weird because if he had memorized the lines he would have played them much faster. If he didn't memorize the lines then it would have taken him much more than 10 minutes to calculate it all.

queuebert 4y ago

I know some fairly high rated players who've had accounts suspended for cheating because they got angry and used an engine to cheat a cheater. So you can be a good player and a cheater. Edit: For clarification, after losing to an obvious engine user, they used an engine themselves to strike back.

pvillano 4y ago
A speed running cheating expert on YouTube has observed that many cheating scandals start with a genuinely skilled player breaking records legitimately. However, that player starts cheating later in their career to maintain their status when they can't keep up with the brutal grind of being the best.

bumbledraven 4y ago

Maybe Ken Regan will investigate. HOW TO CATCH A CHESS CHEATER Ken Regan Finds Moves Out of Mind Chess Life, June 2014 https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/personal/JuneCLarticleKWR.pdf https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/personal/JuneCLarticleKWR.pdf

epigramx 4y ago

I'm not sure why wasn't that blatantly obvious until today. Chess is an extremely unsuitable sport for online because you are 100% free to use the strongest computers on it without 100% no cheat protection at all. It should be ..100% restricted to person-to-person tournaments for keeping score.

pk2200 4y ago
The tournament Carlsen withdrew from today isn't an online event. All the games are played in person at the St. Louis Chess Club.
- ycuser2 4y ago
  How was Hans able to cheat? Seriously curios.
  - texasbigdata 4y ago
    Hmmm I wonder what this thread is called
rcxdude 4y ago
It's pretty easy to detect the blatent cheaters who just copy moves from the top engines: you just run the engines on the game and compare the moves between the player and engine: a close enough match is certainly cheating. More sophisticated cheaters who actually know the game well themselves are harder to catch.

veidelis 4y ago

I don't understand why a GM would need to explain some of his moves precisely and with a deep understanding of the position as some commentators here point out. Why is that so indicative of cheating? It's known that classical chess has a lot of theory, and Hans himself admits that he checked an engine line the evening before the game. So what? Here's the quote: " I didn’t guess it, but by some miracle I checked this today, and it’s such a ridiculous miracle that I don’t even remember why I checked it. I just remembered 12…h6 and everything after this, and I’ve no idea why I would check such a ridiculous thing, but I checked it, and I even knew that 13…Be6! is just very good. It’s so ridiculous that I checked it. " https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sinquefield-cup-3-niemann-beats-carlsen-to-cross-2700 https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sinquefield-cup-3-niemann-b...

nsv 4y ago
What people are speculating is that Magnus' prep got leaked to Hans leading to him researching this line. Of course just speculation, no hard proof. I tend to be of the mindset of "innocent until proven guilty".
runnerup 4y ago
It's just one signal among others. All other GM's who have beat Magnus in classical format tournaments have been able to explain themselves very clearly. This guy can't. He might be a more "intuitive" player, or he might be cheating. There's no smoking gun to show laypeople like you and I but people familiar with the scene and its norms do find this to be a salient point of data against Hans.
ebiester 4y ago
It's subtle, but the sheer amount of time that it takes to become a top level GM make it such that there's a bit of "GM Speak" that all of them seem to do. So, there is first a cultural variation: the way he speaks doesn't sound like the rest of the experts. By itself, it isn't damning. However, people at the GM level also tend to have an ability to look at a position and remember what they were thinking at that point of time. They internalize lines in a way that is a branch of moves. So, in this case Be6! is such a sharp position that you would expect them to talk a bit through it because it takes a lot of prep. Further, when they turned off Stockfish analysis, his analysis goes down sharply. Further, he was banned from chess.com twice because he was cheating with an engine. Further, when he was talking about a set of analysis, he made something up on the spot involving a match between Carlsen and GM Wesley So, and Wesley So said that what he had said was impossible for multiple reasons on another chess streamer's twitch. It's a lot of little things that don't add up. It's like if you were in an interview and asking a developer to explain some code on their Github about ML, and they sounded like they didn't understand the basic principles of the model they coded. It doesn't mean they didn't write the code, but it casts suspicion.