10 ms·

AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks

192 points by O__________O 4y ago

O__________O 4y ago
Related paper: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/ccf8111910291ba472b385e9c5f59099-Abstract.html https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/ccf8111910291...
greggarious 4y ago
- danuker 4y ago
  Should downloading/looking at people's chess games not be socially acceptable, in spite of it being a good way to learn?
  - greggarious 4y ago
    I think the issue is if you go beyond "who am I playing" to connecting that to the rest of their online life, if that makes sense. It's fine to want to tailor strategy but not say, out their dissident writings.
    - alar44 4y ago
      They they shouldn't post shit on the internet.
version_five 4y ago
Reminds me of this - predating AI https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ As early as 1860, experienced telegraph operators realized they could actually recognize each individual by everyone's unique tapping rhythm. To the trained ear, the soft tip-tap of every operator could be as recognizable as the spoken voice of a family member.
- myself248 4y ago
  Oh yeah, every ham knows you can recognize the sending fist. If they're actually using a real key, anyway.
  - flak48 4y ago
    This made my Google the etymology of 'ham-fisted' and I was disappointed that it had nothing to do with ham operators with carpal tunnel syndrome.
    - mzi 4y ago
      It's the opposite, really. The radio term was a pejorative, as the professionals saw the amateurs as ham-fisted.
  - Victerius 4y ago
    I don't understand your sentence.
    - wbl 4y ago
      Hey's saying if you are using a straight key instead of an iambic keyer (different morse sending tech) then you can recognize the operator from their patterns (the first)
    - dd82 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key#Operators'_%22fist%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key#Operators'_%22fi... > With straight keys, side-swipers, and, to an extent, bugs, each and every telegrapher has their own unique style or rhythm pattern when transmitting a message. An operator's style is known as their "fist". > Since every fist is unique, other telegraphers can usually identify the individual telegrapher transmitting a particular message. This had a huge significance during the first and second World Wars, since the on-board telegrapher's "fist" could be used to track individual ships and submarines, and for traffic analysis.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dmurray 4y ago
> They gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. To make the task harder, they hid the first 15 moves of each game. The system looked for the best match and identified the mystery player 86% of the time...A non-AI method was only 28% accurate. This sounds incredible, to pick the right player out of 3000 candidates 86% of the time. I am not sure that pruning the first 15 moves is enough to eliminate the information you get from choice of opening (which is presumably the intention of the restriction). For example, if a player religiously plays the Najdorf Sicilian as Black, you can immediately rule out many(most? ) positions that started with a French or a Ruy Lopez. I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that just looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a baseline.
- dmurray 4y ago
  > I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that just looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a baseline. Reading the paper, they have an "opening baseline" which consists of frequency analysis on a player's first 5 moves. That model has 93% accuracy! The mapping of first-five-move sequences to the positions obtained after them is almost a bijection (there are some transposition, but a small effect) so that's similar to my proposal. I can't tell whether the 15-move cutoff is 15 half-moves, so 7-8 moves per player, or 15 moves each which is how every chess player would read the sentence. Either way, I haven't completely read the paper yet, but I don't think it addresses the rebuttal of "I will just change my openings and the machine won't detect me".
- abecedarius 4y ago
  Yeah, that means it extracts roughly 12 bits of information from observing a game after move 15. It takes 33 bits to pick out one human from everyone alive. You get at least 3 bits just knowing someone plays chess, so you're halfway there? Good point about baseline.
  - dmurray 4y ago
    From observing 100 games after move 15, I think you mean.
Havoc 4y ago
This seems incredibly ominous when transferred to social media. Large parts of the internet rely on the pseudo anonymity of it quite heavily - see reddit etc.
- dewey 4y ago
  Basic opsec principles always say that if you want to stay anonymous you have to switch the way you are writing (by adopting a differnet personality, running it through translation apps etc.). If someone would want to stay anonymous the unmasking % would probably be lower. The threat-model of the chess players doesn't include that they have to stay anonymous and need to switch up their way of playing.
  - greggarious 4y ago
    I’m fond of occasionally throwing in some ou s and references to cities other than Ontario to throw folks off, but it’s hard to pull off long term
    - jojo259 4y ago
      Just realized the fact I type like an American online (I'm British) would confuse someone for a little bit if they tried to de-anonymize me... (although they probably wouldn't struggle anyway)
  - Havoc 4y ago
    >>switch the way you are writing I'd be very surprised if that actually works. Stuff like vocabulary can't exactly be turned off at will
    - dewey 4y ago
      It probably got a lot easier with ChatGPT now.
- s3000 4y ago
  For those you haven't seen it, from 2 weeks ago: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
iLoveOncall 4y ago
I doubt those players are really anonymous anyway, as either lichess or chess.com can easily identify them. I don't see this changing anything, especially when we already know that chess.com is not impartial in its treatment of players.
Fricken 4y ago
In the early to mid-2010s AI hype peaked, radical Kurzweillean ideas became sales pitches from founders, and a great wave of discussion and speculation passed through the media public consciousness. For a time r/futurology was an interesting place for discussion, and there were really great comments to be found amidst the internet chaff . One of the things I speculated about then was that ai doesn't need be sentient to ruin everything. Powerful tools in the hands of malicious actors could wreak havoc on the internet. The internet could become compromised in so many ways via privacy invasions and data theft, aggressive spam, misinformation, propaganda and malicious code that nobody can reliably depend on it for much of anything any longer. One could receive a phone call from someone who sounds like their own mother, an ai that says things only a mother would know. That voice could be very persuasive. that was the kind of stuff we talked about years ago. There were no instantaneous results, of course, and it became boring and uncool to keep going on about such things. Nonetheless, it seems now that the tools and incentives needed to create a dystopia such as what I described are really starting to come into focus.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  The better the tech, the better it can be used for good as well as evil purposes such as deception/scams, disinformation, mass surveillance, election manipulation, etc. It's not the tech that's wrong, it's the populace in democratic states losing more and more power, to the point where most of these systems can only be described as hybrid regimes anymore. The actual power does not lie with the voters but corporations, the mega wealthy, their various lobby groups and corrupt politicians. There is no monopoly of power exercised by elected officials and law enforcement respecting the constitutions, it's different groups and fractions fighting each other for supremacy. AI is just another tool at their disposal, of course they're making use of it. Guns can be used for protection as well as oppression. The internet can be about free information or about censorship and spying on users. We can live in digital Maoism or digital liberalism. It's up to the common people and for them to realize this before it's too late.
matsemann 4y ago
To not get unmasked by things like this I throw in some blunders here and there. Unfortunately my other moves are often also blunders..
- djexjms 4y ago
  Maybe the strategy here is to just not make any blunders.
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    Oh, right. Like it sounds so easy when YOU say it.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  you could try hiding in plain sight: just play the optimal engine move every time and they'll say you're Hans Niemann, apparently whether they have evidence for that or not.
password4321 4y ago
In case you missed this two weeks ago, "find by example" is possible in many datasets even without AI: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
- kristopolous 4y ago
  This is nice. I consider my stuff fairly easy for me to recognize so when I read the other users I found a bit of myself in them. I thought "well this person seems a bit cynical" - you know, it's not a bad way to go outside yourself
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    I once got annoyed at something I saw on a wikpedia talk page, so I wrote a response comment to it, pointing out all the numerous flaws in the argument. But I couldn't drop the subject, something about it kept bugging me... then an echo of a thought dawned on me so I went back and checked that son of a bitch's comment history: yep, it was me I was arguing with, I'd written the previous comment a few years earlier from totally the other side of the argument :)
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  This is one of the use cases I see AI helping with. You can already ask ChatGPT to reword content for you - breaking analysis like this. A (humorous) example: https://vc.blankenship.io https://vc.blankenship.io If you want to remain anonymous, use an AI filter for your written content.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Thats definitely not private, which is the point of defeating stylometry If only there was some kind of re wording AI that can be run locally.
    - r3trohack3r 4y ago
philippejara 4y ago
I'm not sure why they ham up the risk of privacy loss regarding unmasking anon players, the only "risk" I can think of would be someone developing and testing new strategies but then I'd assume the fingerprinting would be far less accurate, testing if you can effectively hide your own quirks while deviating from them would be far more interesting. As it stands this is nothing new and the concerns seem weirdly pointed, everyone(?) already knows the risks of fingerprinting and pattern recognition in more general applications. It was a fun paper to read, shame half the article promoting it was cautioning.
- lobe 4y ago
  Often the new strategies top level players test on anonymised accounts are subtle tweaks in lines deep into / slightly beyond opening theory. Often these lines are slightly inferior to mainline but come with an edge due to the "surprise factor" making it harder for opponents to prepare. Each of these subtle tweaks will only arise in a small proportion of games (as only some of the time your opponent will play the line you want to test), so I imagine fingerprinting based on play style will still work relatively well.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Why do you "ham" it down? What is too much or too little? Other people want to be anonymous. Can they have beliefs and preferences independent of yours? Can their free choices have value independently of whether you agree? The value is in their free choice for it; your choice is equally valuable, but doesn't diminish theirs.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    I don't get your point, I want to be anonymous generally and am all for it, but the risks being cited for half the article have been known for a decade already and it's pointless wasting this much time on it as if it were news.
alkonaut 4y ago
Pseudonymous. Just like anyone who is willing to do the work can identify my real identity from my HN writing, a pseudonymous chess handle gives a lot of information. A chess player who wants to be anonymous should not re-use a handle for two games. There is no anonymity anywhere if you provide enough entropy which you do if you use a persistent pseudonym.
- sureglymop 4y ago
  What if the playing style of one game is already enough to hint at who might be playing?
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    Then you are never entirely anonymous. I doubt that’s the case though.
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      They aren’t comparing two sets of games. They are comparing a single game with all player's known set of game. Any FIDE rated player will have a set of games that is known to everyone.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        Yes. If you played enough as a human then you can't play a completely anonymous/pseudonymous game. Just like if you have written 10 bestsellers you probably can't write even a short pseudonymous newspaper column without someone recognizing your style. They can't be sure from that little information, so you aren't completely exposed - but if you keep writing a series of columns they'll be more and more sure. The same thing with chess. Play chess under your real name (or write texts or draw illustrations whatever) and you'll never do so anonymously again. I'm not sure what's so upsetting or revolutionary here.
  - lmm 4y ago
    The fact that entire games have been repeated, even in top-level play, proves that there's not enough information to determine a player's identity from a single game.
neaden 4y ago
There was recently a player who shot up the Chess.com blitz leaderboard under the name Sinister Magnus. They were eventually removed from the leaderboard, presumably for being an alt of an existing GM, but I don't think anyone has figured it out for sure who they are, it would be interesting test to see if they are able to figure the player out using this.
- rollcat 4y ago
  Interesting! Why is it not allowed to have alt accounts? And why was such severe action taken, without enough evidence? Why do people want using alts in the first place, in a game with perfect information? In StarCraft II, having alts is tolerated (well, depending on your manners - nobody likes smurfing), but we have sc2revealed.com which takes crowd-sourced reports to try to unmask "barcode" (llllllllllll) players. Many pros try to practice anonymously on the ladder, because SC2 a game of imperfect information, and in a best-of-3 series (like in a tournament), you 1. don't want to use the same opening every match, and 2. don't want your opponent to immediately recognize what you're doing, or work on preparing a counter ahead of time.
  - neaden 4y ago
    You can have an alt account, and Sinister Magnus is still around, you just can't be on the leaderboard more then once. So SM is presumably the alt of someone who is already on the leaderboard. Similar to StarCraft a GM might want to prep openings without revealing that's what they are doing, so there are reasons for having alts but that applies more for longer time controls rather then blitz. Generally GMs do their prep with a small and usually secret team before a big tournament.
croes 4y ago
Could it be used to find cheaters? If you don't play like yourself you're likely cheating.
- recursive 4y ago
  I really don't like this. Sometimes I want try a different style. It sounds like a presumption of guilt. "Machine doesn't know what' he's doing? Probably cheating"
  - WJW 4y ago
    For most normal humans, if they merely try a different style than what they are used to their performance would probably go down rather than up. After all, you'd have seen many common positions before and know most of the usual ideas for your chosen openings etc. If someone suddenly plays a different style and also their move quality goes up significantly, that might be an additional indicator of cheating. All cheat detection works in a probabilistic fashion, since it is not allowed (and would be way worse) to actually observe players 24/7 in their home to verify whether they're cheating or not.
rvba 4y ago
Why did meta hire someome to study poker bots? Arent they afraid that after spending a lot of money on some developer that peraon will just quit facebook and write own poker bots? How does this research help facebook? Im very, very far away from Musk and his antics, but really some of those big companies seem to have lots of people who do passion projects. Meanwhile an actual user has low if no chance to get decent support (probably for the cost of that of programmer they could get multiple people). And yes I am aware that I sound anti illectual here and research the sake of reseaech can lead to nice things. I just think that the person will quit facebook to write poker bots and ruin the game for those who play it by detecting their weaknesses ( btw. I dont even play poker).
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  > Arent they afraid that after spending a lot of money on some developer that peraon will just quit facebook and write own poker bots? That's a risk when you pay workers to research or learn nearly anything new. If you run a pizzeria, you teach your workers how to make pizzas; they could turn around and make pizzas for another business instead. Maybe even open their own pizza shop and compete with you, using your own recipe. I think accepting this kind of risk is simply table stakes for running a business.
- Jerrrry 4y ago
  Studying poker and humans style of play of the game translate directly to improving generalized agents that can play other games. For all we know, the guy who was kinda good at poker made the small break-thru that led Google's Alpha/Omega chess or Go achievement. It's actually difficult to tell what piece of such complex systems are responsible for which - but in general, applying incremental piecemeal improvements have been monumental for the magnitude jump in progress in recent years.
swayvil 4y ago
To state the obvious : of course we are using this exact same technology to identify people by writing style. All of us. Right now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quotemstr 4y ago
Just wait until quantum computing breaks all non-PFS encrypted internet traffic from the past 20 years. It's going to be wild. David Brin is going to get to live out his vision of a transparent society.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
forrestthewoods 4y ago
Super cool and fascinating. I don’t know why, but I don’t like that the headline frames it as a “privacy risk”. Are we really concerned about privacy when playing chess? I think the world probably needs to accept there’s no such thing as “anonymous behavior”. Behavior itself is individualized. Therefore if behavior can be observed the probability that it is anonymous rapidly approaches zero with time and observations. The only way to be verifiably anonymous is to not be observed. This means if you are a person at risk of harm if your identity is unmasked that you can’t rely on supposedly anonymous behavior. Bummer.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > I don’t know why, but I don’t like that the headline frames it as a “privacy risk”. Are we really concerned about privacy when playing chess? To the extent that headlines matter, I'd way rather that people worry about the privacy risks of de-anonymizing technology long before it's at the point where it's a practical issue. If we only worry about it when it becomes an actual issue already being, or about to be, applied to unambiguously privacy-invading matters, then, well, that's the way we've already done it and it's too late now—why didn't you bring it up earlier? I'd also prefer to avoid the "what do you have to hide?" issue. Maybe someone, for whatever reason, does have something to hide; if they intentionally play chess anonymously, presumably they intend to do so. It shouldn't be up to me to decide whether or not their need, or even just desire, for privacy is legitimate. (Of course, it's already too late—and has been since, at the very latest, the AOL incident—to worry about the onset of such de-anonymization, but it's always (or only almost always?) better to face inevitable future problems now, rather than waiting for that future.)
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Why is it important to some people to shout down other people's anonymity and desire for it? What's it to you? It's only hopeless if we give up - do that if you like, but why is it important to you that other people give up?
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    The authoritarian impulse is fundamentally about controlling the behavior of others, whereas the impulse for liberty is to control your own behavior. As we continue to drift towards authoritarianism, there are many people cheering this on, revealing their true affinities. You see this with people exuberant for restrictions of cash transactions, joyous at censorship and control over communications media, exuberance over other types of social policing, etc.

192 points by O__________O 4y ago

Related paper: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/ccf8111910291ba472b385e9c5f59099-Abstract.html https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/ccf8111910291...

greggarious 4y ago

danuker 4y ago
Should downloading/looking at people's chess games not be socially acceptable, in spite of it being a good way to learn?
- greggarious 4y ago
  I think the issue is if you go beyond "who am I playing" to connecting that to the rest of their online life, if that makes sense. It's fine to want to tailor strategy but not say, out their dissident writings.
  - alar44 4y ago
    They they shouldn't post shit on the internet.

version_five 4y ago

Reminds me of this - predating AI https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ https://axbom.com/keystroke-dynamics/ As early as 1860, experienced telegraph operators realized they could actually recognize each individual by everyone's unique tapping rhythm. To the trained ear, the soft tip-tap of every operator could be as recognizable as the spoken voice of a family member.

myself248 4y ago
Oh yeah, every ham knows you can recognize the sending fist. If they're actually using a real key, anyway.
- flak48 4y ago
  This made my Google the etymology of 'ham-fisted' and I was disappointed that it had nothing to do with ham operators with carpal tunnel syndrome.
  - mzi 4y ago
    It's the opposite, really. The radio term was a pejorative, as the professionals saw the amateurs as ham-fisted.
- Victerius 4y ago
  I don't understand your sentence.
  - wbl 4y ago
    Hey's saying if you are using a straight key instead of an iambic keyer (different morse sending tech) then you can recognize the operator from their patterns (the first)
  - dd82 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key#Operators'_%22fist%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key#Operators'_%22fi... > With straight keys, side-swipers, and, to an extent, bugs, each and every telegrapher has their own unique style or rhythm pattern when transmitting a message. An operator's style is known as their "fist". > Since every fist is unique, other telegraphers can usually identify the individual telegrapher transmitting a particular message. This had a huge significance during the first and second World Wars, since the on-board telegrapher's "fist" could be used to track individual ships and submarines, and for traffic analysis.
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dmurray 4y ago

> They gave the system 100 games from each of about 3000 known players, and 100 fresh games from a mystery player. To make the task harder, they hid the first 15 moves of each game. The system looked for the best match and identified the mystery player 86% of the time...A non-AI method was only 28% accurate. This sounds incredible, to pick the right player out of 3000 candidates 86% of the time. I am not sure that pruning the first 15 moves is enough to eliminate the information you get from choice of opening (which is presumably the intention of the restriction). For example, if a player religiously plays the Najdorf Sicilian as Black, you can immediately rule out many(most? ) positions that started with a French or a Ruy Lopez. I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that just looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a baseline.

dmurray 4y ago
> I'd like to see what the best results are from a model that just looks at the position after move 15, and use that as a baseline. Reading the paper, they have an "opening baseline" which consists of frequency analysis on a player's first 5 moves. That model has 93% accuracy! The mapping of first-five-move sequences to the positions obtained after them is almost a bijection (there are some transposition, but a small effect) so that's similar to my proposal. I can't tell whether the 15-move cutoff is 15 half-moves, so 7-8 moves per player, or 15 moves each which is how every chess player would read the sentence. Either way, I haven't completely read the paper yet, but I don't think it addresses the rebuttal of "I will just change my openings and the machine won't detect me".
abecedarius 4y ago
Yeah, that means it extracts roughly 12 bits of information from observing a game after move 15. It takes 33 bits to pick out one human from everyone alive. You get at least 3 bits just knowing someone plays chess, so you're halfway there? Good point about baseline.
- dmurray 4y ago
  From observing 100 games after move 15, I think you mean.

Havoc 4y ago

This seems incredibly ominous when transferred to social media. Large parts of the internet rely on the pseudo anonymity of it quite heavily - see reddit etc.

dewey 4y ago
Basic opsec principles always say that if you want to stay anonymous you have to switch the way you are writing (by adopting a differnet personality, running it through translation apps etc.). If someone would want to stay anonymous the unmasking % would probably be lower. The threat-model of the chess players doesn't include that they have to stay anonymous and need to switch up their way of playing.
- greggarious 4y ago
  I’m fond of occasionally throwing in some ou s and references to cities other than Ontario to throw folks off, but it’s hard to pull off long term
  - jojo259 4y ago
    Just realized the fact I type like an American online (I'm British) would confuse someone for a little bit if they tried to de-anonymize me... (although they probably wouldn't struggle anyway)
- Havoc 4y ago
  >>switch the way you are writing I'd be very surprised if that actually works. Stuff like vocabulary can't exactly be turned off at will
  - dewey 4y ago
    It probably got a lot easier with ChatGPT now.
s3000 4y ago
For those you haven't seen it, from 2 weeks ago: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I doubt those players are really anonymous anyway, as either lichess or chess.com can easily identify them. I don't see this changing anything, especially when we already know that chess.com is not impartial in its treatment of players.

Fricken 4y ago

In the early to mid-2010s AI hype peaked, radical Kurzweillean ideas became sales pitches from founders, and a great wave of discussion and speculation passed through the media public consciousness. For a time r/futurology was an interesting place for discussion, and there were really great comments to be found amidst the internet chaff . One of the things I speculated about then was that ai doesn't need be sentient to ruin everything. Powerful tools in the hands of malicious actors could wreak havoc on the internet. The internet could become compromised in so many ways via privacy invasions and data theft, aggressive spam, misinformation, propaganda and malicious code that nobody can reliably depend on it for much of anything any longer. One could receive a phone call from someone who sounds like their own mother, an ai that says things only a mother would know. That voice could be very persuasive. that was the kind of stuff we talked about years ago. There were no instantaneous results, of course, and it became boring and uncool to keep going on about such things. Nonetheless, it seems now that the tools and incentives needed to create a dystopia such as what I described are really starting to come into focus.

trompetenaccoun 4y ago
The better the tech, the better it can be used for good as well as evil purposes such as deception/scams, disinformation, mass surveillance, election manipulation, etc. It's not the tech that's wrong, it's the populace in democratic states losing more and more power, to the point where most of these systems can only be described as hybrid regimes anymore. The actual power does not lie with the voters but corporations, the mega wealthy, their various lobby groups and corrupt politicians. There is no monopoly of power exercised by elected officials and law enforcement respecting the constitutions, it's different groups and fractions fighting each other for supremacy. AI is just another tool at their disposal, of course they're making use of it. Guns can be used for protection as well as oppression. The internet can be about free information or about censorship and spying on users. We can live in digital Maoism or digital liberalism. It's up to the common people and for them to realize this before it's too late.

matsemann 4y ago

To not get unmasked by things like this I throw in some blunders here and there. Unfortunately my other moves are often also blunders..

djexjms 4y ago
Maybe the strategy here is to just not make any blunders.
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  Oh, right. Like it sounds so easy when YOU say it.
fsckboy 4y ago
you could try hiding in plain sight: just play the optimal engine move every time and they'll say you're Hans Niemann, apparently whether they have evidence for that or not.

password4321 4y ago

In case you missed this two weeks ago, "find by example" is possible in many datasets even without AI: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

kristopolous 4y ago
This is nice. I consider my stuff fairly easy for me to recognize so when I read the other users I found a bit of myself in them. I thought "well this person seems a bit cynical" - you know, it's not a bad way to go outside yourself
- fsckboy 4y ago
  I once got annoyed at something I saw on a wikpedia talk page, so I wrote a response comment to it, pointing out all the numerous flaws in the argument. But I couldn't drop the subject, something about it kept bugging me... then an echo of a thought dawned on me so I went back and checked that son of a bitch's comment history: yep, it was me I was arguing with, I'd written the previous comment a few years earlier from totally the other side of the argument :)
r3trohack3r 4y ago
This is one of the use cases I see AI helping with. You can already ask ChatGPT to reword content for you - breaking analysis like this. A (humorous) example: https://vc.blankenship.io https://vc.blankenship.io If you want to remain anonymous, use an AI filter for your written content.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Thats definitely not private, which is the point of defeating stylometry If only there was some kind of re wording AI that can be run locally.
  - r3trohack3r 4y ago

philippejara 4y ago

I'm not sure why they ham up the risk of privacy loss regarding unmasking anon players, the only "risk" I can think of would be someone developing and testing new strategies but then I'd assume the fingerprinting would be far less accurate, testing if you can effectively hide your own quirks while deviating from them would be far more interesting. As it stands this is nothing new and the concerns seem weirdly pointed, everyone(?) already knows the risks of fingerprinting and pattern recognition in more general applications. It was a fun paper to read, shame half the article promoting it was cautioning.

lobe 4y ago
Often the new strategies top level players test on anonymised accounts are subtle tweaks in lines deep into / slightly beyond opening theory. Often these lines are slightly inferior to mainline but come with an edge due to the "surprise factor" making it harder for opponents to prepare. Each of these subtle tweaks will only arise in a small proportion of games (as only some of the time your opponent will play the line you want to test), so I imagine fingerprinting based on play style will still work relatively well.
wolverine876 4y ago
Why do you "ham" it down? What is too much or too little? Other people want to be anonymous. Can they have beliefs and preferences independent of yours? Can their free choices have value independently of whether you agree? The value is in their free choice for it; your choice is equally valuable, but doesn't diminish theirs.
- philippejara 4y ago
  I don't get your point, I want to be anonymous generally and am all for it, but the risks being cited for half the article have been known for a decade already and it's pointless wasting this much time on it as if it were news.

alkonaut 4y ago

Pseudonymous. Just like anyone who is willing to do the work can identify my real identity from my HN writing, a pseudonymous chess handle gives a lot of information. A chess player who wants to be anonymous should not re-use a handle for two games. There is no anonymity anywhere if you provide enough entropy which you do if you use a persistent pseudonym.

sureglymop 4y ago
What if the playing style of one game is already enough to hint at who might be playing?
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Then you are never entirely anonymous. I doubt that’s the case though.
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    They aren’t comparing two sets of games. They are comparing a single game with all player's known set of game. Any FIDE rated player will have a set of games that is known to everyone.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      Yes. If you played enough as a human then you can't play a completely anonymous/pseudonymous game. Just like if you have written 10 bestsellers you probably can't write even a short pseudonymous newspaper column without someone recognizing your style. They can't be sure from that little information, so you aren't completely exposed - but if you keep writing a series of columns they'll be more and more sure. The same thing with chess. Play chess under your real name (or write texts or draw illustrations whatever) and you'll never do so anonymously again. I'm not sure what's so upsetting or revolutionary here.
- lmm 4y ago
  The fact that entire games have been repeated, even in top-level play, proves that there's not enough information to determine a player's identity from a single game.

neaden 4y ago

There was recently a player who shot up the Chess.com blitz leaderboard under the name Sinister Magnus. They were eventually removed from the leaderboard, presumably for being an alt of an existing GM, but I don't think anyone has figured it out for sure who they are, it would be interesting test to see if they are able to figure the player out using this.

rollcat 4y ago
Interesting! Why is it not allowed to have alt accounts? And why was such severe action taken, without enough evidence? Why do people want using alts in the first place, in a game with perfect information? In StarCraft II, having alts is tolerated (well, depending on your manners - nobody likes smurfing), but we have sc2revealed.com which takes crowd-sourced reports to try to unmask "barcode" (llllllllllll) players. Many pros try to practice anonymously on the ladder, because SC2 a game of imperfect information, and in a best-of-3 series (like in a tournament), you 1. don't want to use the same opening every match, and 2. don't want your opponent to immediately recognize what you're doing, or work on preparing a counter ahead of time.
- neaden 4y ago
  You can have an alt account, and Sinister Magnus is still around, you just can't be on the leaderboard more then once. So SM is presumably the alt of someone who is already on the leaderboard. Similar to StarCraft a GM might want to prep openings without revealing that's what they are doing, so there are reasons for having alts but that applies more for longer time controls rather then blitz. Generally GMs do their prep with a small and usually secret team before a big tournament.

croes 4y ago

Could it be used to find cheaters? If you don't play like yourself you're likely cheating.

recursive 4y ago
I really don't like this. Sometimes I want try a different style. It sounds like a presumption of guilt. "Machine doesn't know what' he's doing? Probably cheating"
- WJW 4y ago
  For most normal humans, if they merely try a different style than what they are used to their performance would probably go down rather than up. After all, you'd have seen many common positions before and know most of the usual ideas for your chosen openings etc. If someone suddenly plays a different style and also their move quality goes up significantly, that might be an additional indicator of cheating. All cheat detection works in a probabilistic fashion, since it is not allowed (and would be way worse) to actually observe players 24/7 in their home to verify whether they're cheating or not.

rvba 4y ago

Why did meta hire someome to study poker bots? Arent they afraid that after spending a lot of money on some developer that peraon will just quit facebook and write own poker bots? How does this research help facebook? Im very, very far away from Musk and his antics, but really some of those big companies seem to have lots of people who do passion projects. Meanwhile an actual user has low if no chance to get decent support (probably for the cost of that of programmer they could get multiple people). And yes I am aware that I sound anti illectual here and research the sake of reseaech can lead to nice things. I just think that the person will quit facebook to write poker bots and ruin the game for those who play it by detecting their weaknesses ( btw. I dont even play poker).

LarryMullins 4y ago
> Arent they afraid that after spending a lot of money on some developer that peraon will just quit facebook and write own poker bots? That's a risk when you pay workers to research or learn nearly anything new. If you run a pizzeria, you teach your workers how to make pizzas; they could turn around and make pizzas for another business instead. Maybe even open their own pizza shop and compete with you, using your own recipe. I think accepting this kind of risk is simply table stakes for running a business.
Jerrrry 4y ago
Studying poker and humans style of play of the game translate directly to improving generalized agents that can play other games. For all we know, the guy who was kinda good at poker made the small break-thru that led Google's Alpha/Omega chess or Go achievement. It's actually difficult to tell what piece of such complex systems are responsible for which - but in general, applying incremental piecemeal improvements have been monumental for the magnitude jump in progress in recent years.

swayvil 4y ago

To state the obvious : of course we are using this exact same technology to identify people by writing style. All of us. Right now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

quotemstr 4y ago

Just wait until quantum computing breaks all non-PFS encrypted internet traffic from the past 20 years. It's going to be wild. David Brin is going to get to live out his vision of a transparent society.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

forrestthewoods 4y ago

Super cool and fascinating. I don’t know why, but I don’t like that the headline frames it as a “privacy risk”. Are we really concerned about privacy when playing chess? I think the world probably needs to accept there’s no such thing as “anonymous behavior”. Behavior itself is individualized. Therefore if behavior can be observed the probability that it is anonymous rapidly approaches zero with time and observations. The only way to be verifiably anonymous is to not be observed. This means if you are a person at risk of harm if your identity is unmasked that you can’t rely on supposedly anonymous behavior. Bummer.

JadeNB 4y ago
> I don’t know why, but I don’t like that the headline frames it as a “privacy risk”. Are we really concerned about privacy when playing chess? To the extent that headlines matter, I'd way rather that people worry about the privacy risks of de-anonymizing technology long before it's at the point where it's a practical issue. If we only worry about it when it becomes an actual issue already being, or about to be, applied to unambiguously privacy-invading matters, then, well, that's the way we've already done it and it's too late now—why didn't you bring it up earlier? I'd also prefer to avoid the "what do you have to hide?" issue. Maybe someone, for whatever reason, does have something to hide; if they intentionally play chess anonymously, presumably they intend to do so. It shouldn't be up to me to decide whether or not their need, or even just desire, for privacy is legitimate. (Of course, it's already too late—and has been since, at the very latest, the AOL incident—to worry about the onset of such de-anonymization, but it's always (or only almost always?) better to face inevitable future problems now, rather than waiting for that future.)
wolverine876 4y ago
Why is it important to some people to shout down other people's anonymity and desire for it? What's it to you? It's only hopeless if we give up - do that if you like, but why is it important to you that other people give up?
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  The authoritarian impulse is fundamentally about controlling the behavior of others, whereas the impulse for liberty is to control your own behavior. As we continue to drift towards authoritarianism, there are many people cheering this on, revealing their true affinities. You see this with people exuberant for restrictions of cash transactions, joyous at censorship and control over communications media, exuberance over other types of social policing, etc.