10 ms·
A recent chess controversy
- 5tk18 1y agoIt is well known that Kramnik baselessly accuses everyone. The article seems to be more about statistics than chess, and doesn’t make any accusations. Kind of a click bait title IMO.
- cortesoft 1y agoIt’s using a random accusation as a starting point for explaining Bayesian analysis.
- bleuarff 1y agoIt's to be expected per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- adw 1y agoWhich is itself intuitive if you have the prior that “making the claim is the stronger headline, so if the claim is true, it’ll be in the headline”
- mrala 1y agoThe title is “Did a US Chess Champion Cheat?” and the text of the article uses statistical analysis to show that the person most likely did not cheat. What would you consider to be misleading between the title and the article?
- bediger4000 1y agoThe headline also complies with Betteridge's Law of Headlines. It's entirely legal.
- RegnisGnaw 1y agoThis is a perfect example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- joshuat 1y ago"Statistical analysis shows US Chess Champion most likely did not cheat, despite recent claims" would be nice
- thieving_magpie 1y agoWhen I opened the article I thought it was going to be about someone cheating at the US Chess Championship.
- paxys 1y agoHeadlines following Betteridge's law were the original clickbait, and this definitely fits.
- 512 1y agoHikaru is also notable for quickly accusing players baselessly
- rendall 1y agoWhom did he accuse? Kramnik is known to accuse other players. I've never heard this about Nakamura.
- frenchtoast8 1y agoHe's accused Luis Paulo Supi (Brazillian grandmaster) a few times after losing to him, and he accused Andrew Tang after losing to him. The latter was criticized in some online circles because it was seen as bullying a then 14 year old. I don't know many other notable cases of Nakamura accusing players of cheating. Many players dislike how Nakamura conducts himself on stream and how he interacts with the chess community and this leads to exaggeration. It's simply wrong to compare him to Kramnik, who has dedicated many hours over the last couple years to accusing players.
- wesnerm2 1y agoNakamura was sued for $100 million by Hans Niemann. https://www.chess.com/news/view/hans-niemann-lawsuit-dismissed https://www.chess.com/news/view/hans-niemann-lawsuit-dismiss...
- freeopinion 1y agoAnd what was the result? Weren't all counts dismissed?
- vrmiguel 1y agoHikaru accused Luis Paulo Supi of cheating at least twice. From his Wikipedia article: ``` In an online blitz tournament hosted by the Internet Chess Club in May 2015, American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura accused Supi of cheating (Supi had defeated Nakamura).[2] The tournament judges accepted Nakamura's accusation, reverted the match's result, and banned Supi from the tournament. Brazilian Grandmaster Rafael Leitão wrote in his personal website, "Accusing him of using an engine in this match is absurd. The match is full of tactical mistakes. Nakamura played extremely poorly and, honestly, wouldn't have survived long against any engine given his terrible opening.". ``` Some years later Nakamura lost 4-0 and again insinuated that GM Supi used an engine. Despite all that, Nakamura still published a video calling him a "legend" for once beating Magnus in 18 moves
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess, the only thing that comes to mind is moving pieces, and sneaking new ones on the board, but if there's enough cameras, how do you get away with it, eventually someone WILL notice, highlight it, point it out, and you will be shamed.
- ceejayoz 1y agoBluetooth buttplug (you can get such things on Amazon; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovense) and an observer in the audience tapping out Morse code? Or, more mundanely, bathroom breaks. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/sports/kirill-shevchenko-chess-expelled-phone.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/sports/kirill-shevchenko-... Your iPhone can reliably beat the best chess players in the world.
- AdamN 1y agoIn the old Soviet/US rivalry days there was an accusation of cheating that I thought was novel. The accusation was that the Soviet players in the middle rounds were doing subtle not-right moves with the US #1. This forced the lead US player to put way too much effort into figuring out if it was some new line that he didn't know about and tiring him out. Then by the time he got to the final he was exhausted and confused.
- ceejayoz 1y agoI'm not inclined to see that as cheating.
- thomasz 1y agoRight, it's collusion.
- ceejayoz 1y agoNo? It's a technique that could readily be done by one person, and teams are allowed to strategize. Bluffing/deception is kosher in chess, just harder as the key elements of the game are all public. Before computers put an end to the practice, long games used to adjourn overnight. https://www.chess.com/terms/chess-adjournment https://www.chess.com/terms/chess-adjournment > During adjournments, players could count on the help of other strong masters, called seconds. These seconds would analyze the position and tell the player what they should play when the game resumed.
- gosub100 1y agoThere's a YouTube video where he orders a match with someone and insists that they order brand new in box laptops and a locally hosted chess server (I think the hypothesis was testing if in person games were any different than online. The other player was in the same room). But they ran into technical difficulties when windows began auto-updates.
- benjaminsky2 1y agoVlad the Implier
- Retric 1y agoThe underlying flaw in this analysis is it assumes ratings reflect actual performance in a given game. A long winning streak becomes far more likely if one of the players is part of several matches while tired, drunk, etc. Similarly a players peak performance is going to be higher than their ELO because that ELO includes games played under less ideal conditions. ELO is presumably more accurate for over the board games at tournaments where players bring their A game than low stakes online games where someone may be less engaged. That’s IMO more worth testing.
- cortesoft 1y agoThis is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance. It is like asking someone to pick a random number between 1 and 1 million and then saying, “oh my god, it must not actually be random… the chances of choosing the exact number 729,619 is 1 in a million! That is too rare to be random!”
- JDEW 1y ago“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” -Feynman, from Six Easy Pieces
- cortesoft 1y agoFeynman is one of the best ever at explaining complicated concepts in ways almost everyone can understand. That is a very rare skill for the super intelligent to have.
- tehlike 1y agoAgreed on Feynman, but not necessarily on the generalization that it being a rare skill to simplify things. When you understand a thing so well, you can simplify it enough.
- IAmBroom 1y agoI think it also takes a certain humility of character (which can coexist with tremendous self-esteem and even ego; see Feinman, Richard for an example).
- sniggler 1y agoI know plenty of smart people that know a topic well and are still not great at simplifying it in a way that can be understood well by laymen. Separate skill imo
- aqme28 1y agoI'd be much more suspicious if his online performance didn't track with his professional over-the-board performance, where cheating would be much more difficult.
- m348e912 1y agoI thought this chass cheating story was going to be about Hans Niemann's (alleged) vibrating anal beads. I'm slightly dissapointed.
- abdulhaq 1y agoCan anyone tell me why numbers in this article are being rendered higgledy-piggledy on my browser, Firefox / Windows 11?
- mechanicum 1y agoIt uses old style figures rather than lining, if that’s what you mean by “higgledy-piggledy”. See https://practicaltypography.com/alternate-figures.html#oldstyle-figures https://practicaltypography.com/alternate-figures.html#oldst...
- abdulhaq 1y agota
- rprenger 1y agoI think if Kramnik accuses someone of cheating it might actually drop the posterior probability that they cheated.
- ARandumGuy 1y agoIf you want a deep dive into chess cheating, including a lot of wild stories, Sarah Z put out an entertaining Youtube video [1] a couple of months ago that explores the concept. It's a long video, but well worth the watch. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtN-i-IkRWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtN-i-IkRWI
- srge 1y agoKramnik has proven himself a troll and did a lot of damage to the reputation of honest and otherwise wholesome people and this without credible proof at all. That those allegations persist under the form of news article is very unfortunate to those victims of his smearing.
- zahlman 1y agoBeing a "troll" connotes bad faith, i.e. not believing one's own accusations. From the footage I've seen of Kramnik, I think he does believe himself, and is just generally very "salty" about losing (as the kids say).
- valiant55 1y agoI don't believe the strength of ones convictions factors into whether they are a troll or not. Take patent trolls for example.
- NohatCoder 1y agoWhile it is good to see some Bayesian statistics in use, I wouldn't in this case put so much emphasis on an exact calculated probability that he did or din not cheat, the prior in this case is simply too wishy-washy for that. The sound conclusion is that this is not evidence of cheating, but it is not evidence of the contrary either.
- univalent 1y agoKramnik went from chess champion who really came up with new lines in the Berlin defense, beating Kasparov at his peak: to now becoming a troll :(
- catigula 1y agoA simple solution is to hold all chess matches in a SCIF.
- beepbooptheory 1y agoThere is probably 1000 hours of videos online of Hikaru talking through games, literally exhibiting his skill in full transparency. Hard for me to even understand what it would mean for him to cheat, his brain at times feels like the cheat.
- bluecalm 1y ago>>The researchers note that there’s a problem with this argument, too, as it violates the likelihood principle. This principle tells us the interpretation should only rely on the actual data observed, not the context in which it was collected. and then in the publication itself: >>The likelihood principle [Edwards et al., 1963] is a fundamental concept in Bayesian statistics that states that the evidence from an experiment is contained in the likelihood function. It implies that the rules governing when data collection stops are irrelevant to data interpretation. It is entirely appropriate to collect data until a point has been proven or disproven, or until the data collector runs out of time, money, or patience Surely there is a difference when you look at someone who played 46 games online in his life and scored 45.5 and when you look at someone who played 46000 games and scored 45.5/46 once. The difference is that Kramnik wasn't "collecting the data" but looked at the whole Nakamura's playing history and found a streak. Another example would be looking at coinflips and discarding everything before and after you encounter 10 heads in a row to claim you have solid evidence that the coin is biased. They are misapplying the principle here. If what they wrote was correct then someone claiming: "Look, Nakamure won 100 out of 100 if you just look at games 3, 17, 21, 117...." would be proving Nakamura cheated if they applied methodology from the paper even assuming one in 10000 guilty players. Just because you can choose sampling strategy and stopping rules (what the likelyhood principle states) doesn't mean you can discard data you collected or cherry pick parts that support your hypothesis. How the data is collected is absolutely relevant and Nakamura is right to point it out.
- indigodaddy 1y agoGeneral statistical question. If we say extend the coin flip example distribution to say 10B times. Should/would we expect to see a streak of 100 or even 1000 in the distribution somewhere? Intuition alone tells me probably not for 1000 but a smallish chance for 100 (even if 10B in a row i would think a streak of 100 would be unlikely)
- steppi 1y agoYour intuition's not bad. The expected value for the longest run of heads in N total flips of a fair coin is around log2(N) - 1 with a standard deviation that's approximately 1.873 plus a term that vanishes as N grows large. log2(10B) - 1 is approximately 32 and with that standard deviation, even a run of 100 in 10B flips is incredibly unlikely. For more info see Mark F. Schilling's paper, "The Longest Run of Heads" available here https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/tlroh.pdf https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/tlroh.pdf.
- sobiolite 1y ago> Nakamura responded to Kramnik’s allegations by arguing that focusing on a particular streak while ignoring other games was cherry-picking. The researchers note that there’s a problem with this argument, too, as it violates the likelihood principle. This principle tells us the interpretation should only rely on the actual data observed, not the context in which it was collected. I don't quite understand this objection? If I won the lottery at odds of 10 million to 1, you'd say that was a very lucky purchase. But if it turned out I bought 10 million tickets, then that context would surely be important for interpreting what happened, even if the odds of that specific ticket winning would be unchanged?
- AlecBG 1y agoOr similarly I flip a coin a thousand times, but only tell you when it's heads and don't tell you how many flips I did.
- gus_massa 1y agoI agree. The problem when you look only at some "interesting" data even has a name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
- bregma 1y agoOr if Bob Barker has opened door number 3 and there's a goat behind it.
- sema4hacker 1y agoMonty Hall.
- oersted 1y agoIndeed. I'd say that the issue is that they are misinterpreting the word "collecting". The principle is true if you are collecting or observing data live, but this data was collected long ago and with a much wider scope: when the games were recorded. What they are doing here is sampling the data after the fact, and obviously one needs to take a uniformly random sample of a dataset for any statistical analysis done on it to be representative.
- Simulacra 1y agoTangently related, reading this I couldn't help but think about the biological passports for professional cyclist. It tracks blood and other values overtime, so that anomalies will jump out.
- rybosworld 1y agoHere's a better question: What are the odds that a cheating accusation accurately identifies an instance of cheating? I don't say this lightly: Kramnik very likely has some sort of untreated psychiatric disorder. He is effectively a lolcow in the chess community because he regularly (as in, almost daily) accuses much better chess players of cheating. It's honestly a bit undignified to treat his accusation against Nakamura as anything other than a man yelling at the sky.
- bombcar 1y agoThere’s some strange inverse, where situations we KNOW are rife with cheating have few accusations thereof (bike racing perhaps), and those that are almost certainly very rare may also have few accusations (because it’s rare). Sometimes you have to treat any accusation as “real” just to keep the cheaters at bay. (Cheating at online bridge is rampant, and cheating at bridge competitions was and perhaps still is fraught with many scandals). It’s often common that the cheaters really ARE very good players - they’re just looking for less work, not a goal they couldn’t obtain otherwise.
- Scarblac 1y agoI find it counter intuitive that the frequency of cheating matters. It's not something that happens randomly, people choose to. And if the #2 in the world decides to cheat it may be for different reasons than other players. But, of course he doesn't. He streams all his games and gives constant stream of consciousness commentary. If you can explain your top level moves live with seconds per move, you aren't cheating.
- lblume 1y ago> It's not something that happens randomly, people choose to. In Bayesian analysis, probability does not refer to the long-term frequency but instead to the subjective credence given to the event. Otherwise the probability of any one-off event would be undefinable. Therefore it follows that you need to have a prior over possible hypothesis in order to update your beliefs systematically according to the laws of probability theory. If it were known that Hikaru had cheated in the past, but typically does not, we might use a different prior (e.g. a Laplacian prior in this case); if we knew cheating to be dependent on some other measurable variable (e.g. the emotional state of the player), we would incorporate this into our evidence.
- siegecraft 1y agoIt's frustrating that their entire analysis is based on the claim that cheating occurs in maybe 1 out of 10,000 games; they got this from a quote in an interview with the deputy president of the World Chess Federation after he had been beaten in a charity match by someone who admitted cheating. To their credit they also ran the analysis assuming cheating is 1/500 and the odds rose to 7%. I suppose it makes sense that they are merely rebutting the accusations based on the same methodology but it's still frustrating.
- cortesoft 1y agoPart of Bayesian analysis is choosing your prior probabilities. Luckily, with enough data the priors become less and less important, but you do need to choose them.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoTitle is: Did a US Chess Champion Cheat? why was it changed? This isn't a 'recent' story, it's from January.
- anteloper 1y agoThis leaves out the extremely important detail that many if not all of these 46 games, Hikaru was actively streaming on Twitch. The actual chess community's takeaway from this (if consensus is important to you) is that Kramnik (the accuser) has lost it a bit.
- bloodyplonker22 1y agoAnyone who does competitive gaming or sports knows that the greatest compliment is to be called a hacker or cheater when not actually cheating.
- TZubiri 1y ago> Kramnik pointed out the statistical improbability of Nakamura’s streak and stated that such a winning run would require the chess prodigy to play at a level higher than his current Elo rating (an estimate of a player’s skill level based on their historical play). While ELO ratings are a probabilistic model, who said wins and losses have to be randomly distributed, there can be bad days and good days, for example if you haven't slept or if you are at the peak combination of study and cognitive, say because you are well rested on a monday and have been studying on the weekend.
- mwkaufma 1y agoOnce against, (ab)using Bayes is the favored tool for Technical Boys when they want to bullshit.
- zkmon 1y agoOnline chess is nonsense. One can beat all detection of using engines. Use 10 different engines and take their moves in random order. To avoid getting same move from all engines, make them to have varying strength.