3 ms·

Presumably "the world" used enough engine help to do this.

• somenameforme 1y ago
  This is interesting! I assumed the same thing, so I just skimmed through the game with an engine. The world, on average, was definitely not cheating. As early as move 7 Magnus was outright winning! But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost! I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.
  • Scarblac 1y ago
    Maybe the non cheaters lost interest when he was winning and the cheaters held the draw?
  • rthnbgrredf 1y ago
    I think the assumption that more than 50% of people are cheating in online chess is not correct. Another Grandmaster and ex-world champion Anand recently also did a match against 70k people and won.
    • somenameforme 1y ago
      That's not the assumption at all. The percent of cheaters in online chess is approaching an asymptotic 0 (as a percent of all players) simply because the sites, and chess.com in particular, have gotten very good at culling them. But things like this are social. I didn't follow this (or even know it was going on somehow) but it seems very safe to assume that somebody and probably multiple somebodies were regularly pointing out and discussing engine moves. So my only real assumption is that a significant chunk of people would end up deferring to the engine moves rather than their own preference. Of course my implied assumption there is also that a significant chunk of people were involved in the social aspects of this, but I think that's also a fairly reasonable assumption.
      • squigz 1y ago
        Based on a quick skim of the article, I don't think this was, for example, Twitch Chat picking moves, which might enable the social aspect you're referring to - although I'd like to point out the difficulty inherent to being in a room with many thousands of people, all spamming chess moves, and trying to find the one engine move :P
        • somenameforme 1y ago
          It was a correspondence event, played a move a day time control on chess.com. Chat would've probably been mostly on X and other such places.
          • squigz 1y ago
            In that case, I definitely don't believe a majority of people interested in this sort of thing would be intentionally setting out to cheat.
            • somenameforme 1y ago
              It's not that. It's that once you know the best move you start to see why. And then it becomes hard to get it out of your mind. It's the reason I don't recommend computer assisted game analysis, unless you just want a quick blunder check. A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.
      • darepublic 1y ago
        > the percentage of cheaters is approaching 0. chess.com is _very_ good at culling them Any evidence of this whatsoever?
        • artdigital 1y ago
          There are writeups about this. The sites score each move, it is extremely unlikely to pick superhuman moves multiple times in a row. Once or twice maybe, but not most of the times.