6 ms·

This 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 deter

This 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 ago
  Feynman 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 ago
    Agreed 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 ago
      I 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 ago
      I 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
- almostgotcaught 1y ago
  yea i always remember this when people put on their tinfoil hats about some rare event.
wrsh07 1y ago
Yeah tbh it doesn't really go into chess-specific stats either You could look at a bunch of other metrics to identify cheating: how many errors/perfect moves^ and whether that's within the usual range. How well were the opponents playing? Etc If you consider that Nakamura might have been having a good day/week, was already stronger than his opponents, and some of them may have had bad games/days, you can change something from "extremely unlikely" to "about a dice roll" ^ according to stockfish
- permo-w 1y ago
  not really. this may be true for the average player, but as Magnus has explained multiple times, all he or another top GM would need to be near-unbeatable would be to check an engine in 1 or 2 critical positions per game. this essentially impossible to detect statistically. even if a cheater were to use an engine on every move, it would be trivial to just vary the engine used for each turn, vary the number of moves picked, sometimes play a slightly worse move to evade detection, etc etc
  - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
    What I don’t understand is that Hikaru can visualise in his head 30+ moves ahead from both plays, and yet he’s not better than Magnus?
    - permo-w 1y ago
      ?? I'm all for having a Hikaru/Magnus discussion--one of my favourite topics--but this just doesn't make sense
      - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
        What I was trying to say was that Hikaru can essentially predict the future given he has stockfish running in his head, while I don’t think Magnus has that ability, yet Hikaru is ranked lower
kelipso 1y ago
This article feels like an illustration of how easy it is to fool top chess players. For example, if the accusation was against Hans Niemann, top chess players and their fans would be eating it up.
raincole 1y ago
You can and you should. If you flipped a coin 100 times and all you got are heads you really should assume it didn't happen by chance.
- stack_framer 1y ago
  Nope. A previous flip has no bearing on the next flip.
  - vonneumannstan 1y ago
    You can calculate the probability of having a fair coin and as N(Heads) increases that probability goes down. Each flip is indeed independent but the distribution of flips tells you something about the coin.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    We aren't predicting flips based on "a" previous flip. We're predicting them based on the set of ALL KNOWN previous flips, which allows a statistical model.
  - CyberDildonics 1y ago
    The odds of that happening by chance is so astronomical it involves a number you've probably never even heard of.
- Lerc 1y ago
  'If you flipped a coin 100 times and all you got are heads you' By starting the sentence with if, you are selecting the occurrence to look at. If you said I am about to look at the results of this coin toss that happened yesterday, if it is all heads then I am going to assume it was not random, then you are making the claim before you have seen the results. You can still be wrong, but the chances of you being wrong is the rarity of the event.
- nyeah 1y ago
  Yeah, but say 1,000 people each flipped a coin 10,000 times and one of them once got a streak of 29 heads out of 30 flips. Can we assume anything then?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
emil-lp 1y ago
Your comment made me think of an interesting story and a funfact. During WW2, allies tried to guess the number of German tanks by observing the serial numbers on captured tanks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem If, say, the serial numbers are unique, and come in sequence, if the five first numbers you see are all less than 100, it's a far chance that there aren't produced 200 tanks. (Provided some assumptions, of course.) The funfact is that you get different results if you follow the frequentist or the Bayesian approach.
- edbaskerville 1y ago
  The Bayesian results will depend on the prior. They use a uniform distribution over # tanks produced, in the limit of the distribution's maximum -> infinity. Is that reasonable? Something more constrained might be better, maybe a gamma-Poisson prior with gamma mean based on some plausible estimate of production rate. (The frequentist/Bayesian estimates should converge as you collect more observations.)
paxys 1y ago
Not the same though because we aren't talking about random events. If a player with a significantly lower ELO than Hikaru got the same winning streak against the same tier of players then you could absolutely conclude that it was cheating.
FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
There are actually some freaky patterns in nature (including how people think) that can help identify fake data... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
- lblume 1y ago
  The article itself states that this is not really a pattern of nature, but just a feature of log-normal distributions that sometimes do occur naturally.
macspoofing 1y ago
>This 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. No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
My favorite way to describe this is in the context of predictions. It's the difference between throwing a dart to hit a target and throwing a dart to paint a target around where it lands.
NedF 1y ago
> This is basically an article describing <snip hot take> This is entirely wrong and missing basic high school mathematics for non-theater kids. The original claim is not archived, if you can be bothered you can track it down and do the correct 'hot take'. You can't just grab the first statistical principal you think of even if everyone else on Hacker News does. Article - "it violates the likelihood principle", this seems wrong and Nakamura seems right, but you'd have to look at the original claim. They were finding patterns in a long biased list of numbers, probably.
RaftPeople 1y ago
I had a math teacher in college that told a funny joke: "For safety, I always bring a bomb with me when I fly" "Why?" "Because the odds of two people bringing a bomb on the same plane are so low"

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 ago
Feynman 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 ago
  Agreed 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    I 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
almostgotcaught 1y ago
yea i always remember this when people put on their tinfoil hats about some rare event.

wrsh07 1y ago

Yeah tbh it doesn't really go into chess-specific stats either You could look at a bunch of other metrics to identify cheating: how many errors/perfect moves^ and whether that's within the usual range. How well were the opponents playing? Etc If you consider that Nakamura might have been having a good day/week, was already stronger than his opponents, and some of them may have had bad games/days, you can change something from "extremely unlikely" to "about a dice roll" ^ according to stockfish

permo-w 1y ago
not really. this may be true for the average player, but as Magnus has explained multiple times, all he or another top GM would need to be near-unbeatable would be to check an engine in 1 or 2 critical positions per game. this essentially impossible to detect statistically. even if a cheater were to use an engine on every move, it would be trivial to just vary the engine used for each turn, vary the number of moves picked, sometimes play a slightly worse move to evade detection, etc etc
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  What I don’t understand is that Hikaru can visualise in his head 30+ moves ahead from both plays, and yet he’s not better than Magnus?
  - permo-w 1y ago
    ?? I'm all for having a Hikaru/Magnus discussion--one of my favourite topics--but this just doesn't make sense
    - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
      What I was trying to say was that Hikaru can essentially predict the future given he has stockfish running in his head, while I don’t think Magnus has that ability, yet Hikaru is ranked lower

kelipso 1y ago

This article feels like an illustration of how easy it is to fool top chess players. For example, if the accusation was against Hans Niemann, top chess players and their fans would be eating it up.

raincole 1y ago

You can and you should. If you flipped a coin 100 times and all you got are heads you really should assume it didn't happen by chance.

stack_framer 1y ago
Nope. A previous flip has no bearing on the next flip.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  You can calculate the probability of having a fair coin and as N(Heads) increases that probability goes down. Each flip is indeed independent but the distribution of flips tells you something about the coin.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  We aren't predicting flips based on "a" previous flip. We're predicting them based on the set of ALL KNOWN previous flips, which allows a statistical model.
- CyberDildonics 1y ago
  The odds of that happening by chance is so astronomical it involves a number you've probably never even heard of.
Lerc 1y ago
'If you flipped a coin 100 times and all you got are heads you' By starting the sentence with if, you are selecting the occurrence to look at. If you said I am about to look at the results of this coin toss that happened yesterday, if it is all heads then I am going to assume it was not random, then you are making the claim before you have seen the results. You can still be wrong, but the chances of you being wrong is the rarity of the event.
nyeah 1y ago
Yeah, but say 1,000 people each flipped a coin 10,000 times and one of them once got a streak of 29 heads out of 30 flips. Can we assume anything then?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

emil-lp 1y ago

Your comment made me think of an interesting story and a funfact. During WW2, allies tried to guess the number of German tanks by observing the serial numbers on captured tanks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem If, say, the serial numbers are unique, and come in sequence, if the five first numbers you see are all less than 100, it's a far chance that there aren't produced 200 tanks. (Provided some assumptions, of course.) The funfact is that you get different results if you follow the frequentist or the Bayesian approach.

edbaskerville 1y ago
The Bayesian results will depend on the prior. They use a uniform distribution over # tanks produced, in the limit of the distribution's maximum -> infinity. Is that reasonable? Something more constrained might be better, maybe a gamma-Poisson prior with gamma mean based on some plausible estimate of production rate. (The frequentist/Bayesian estimates should converge as you collect more observations.)

paxys 1y ago

Not the same though because we aren't talking about random events. If a player with a significantly lower ELO than Hikaru got the same winning streak against the same tier of players then you could absolutely conclude that it was cheating.

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago

There are actually some freaky patterns in nature (including how people think) that can help identify fake data... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

lblume 1y ago
The article itself states that this is not really a pattern of nature, but just a feature of log-normal distributions that sometimes do occur naturally.

macspoofing 1y ago

>This 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. No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago

My favorite way to describe this is in the context of predictions. It's the difference between throwing a dart to hit a target and throwing a dart to paint a target around where it lands.

NedF 1y ago

> This is basically an article describing <snip hot take> This is entirely wrong and missing basic high school mathematics for non-theater kids. The original claim is not archived, if you can be bothered you can track it down and do the correct 'hot take'. You can't just grab the first statistical principal you think of even if everyone else on Hacker News does. Article - "it violates the likelihood principle", this seems wrong and Nakamura seems right, but you'd have to look at the original claim. They were finding patterns in a long biased list of numbers, probably.

RaftPeople 1y ago

I had a math teacher in college that told a funny joke: "For safety, I always bring a bomb with me when I fly" "Why?" "Because the odds of two people bringing a bomb on the same plane are so low"