Live data from Hacker News

Chess’s Cheating Crisis

theguardian.com

101–110 of 284 posts

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#101
post #100

What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?

Stockfish is free and open source.

https://stockfishchess.org/

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#102

“ Paranoia has become the culture ” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & googl…

Social version of Gresham's Law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's depending on what you consider a "performance enhancing substance". With basic food and drinks, we surely all agree that that's not the case. But the line starts to get blurry with supplements. Whey? Creatine? Caffeine? Supplement stores are full of this stuff, and a lot is really just a waste of money and exists to milk the amateur gym bro cash cow. But some of those things help. And eventually you cross the…

Well, the line still seems blurry regarding medicines that athletes are allowed to take if they have a specific conditions... For instance, a lot of pro cyclists seem to suffer from asthma (40% vs 8% in the general population)!

In the Salazar circle, TUE's for asthma were downright endemic. Everyone knows what's going on, you just need to catch these guys. We got Salazar, and most of his athletes know in the back of their minds we'll get them sooner or later.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#104
post #100

What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?

Most chess sites provide a "firehose" for current games. It should be pretty easy to pipe a game's pgn file to stockfish.

Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line.

If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#105

“ Paranoia has become the culture ” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & googl…

I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.

In some cases, it’s true though. For example, the NFL didn’t test for HGH at all until 2010 and their test remains inadequate even today. It’s fairly reasonable to assume a majority of players were using it prior to 2010 if their choice was between getting a million-dollar contract and taking HGH.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#106

“ Paranoia has become the culture ” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & googl…

Great point, which I am totally ignoring to point out that I think you meant "2020's" instead of "1920's". But great point, though, about the larger issue.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#107

The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational not to cheat to find an edge. Peo…

"The system is broken when honest people have to cheat to compete."

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#108
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I played (at a national level) people would have a laptop connected and playing in another room. They would play the enemies moves on the computer as the player and playing in the tournament would play the moves made by the computer. I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally g…

How could the top players be better than any chess engine? It seems like even in 2000 any off the shelf chess engine could beat any human. But I guess not... It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time. EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became t…

The difference between a super GM and stockfish is that a super GM will play moves the "feel natural" to a human given the current position on the board. A chess engine won't care about what is natural and will maximize the position 15-20 positions down the line. For this reason, they will make sometimes a weird move given the current position that will result in an advantage a lot of moves downstream.

One of the main reasons that Petrosian "got caught" was other GMs (see Hikaru's YouTube video on this) pointing out how unnatural some of his moves felt to them and considering the speed at which he supposedly calculated them.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#110

“ Paranoia has become the culture ” This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades. People know fb & googl…

I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.

Part of it from my layman's perspective is that today, even home exercising frequently involves protein shakes. As you go into even basic body building or training, you start taking more and more "Stuff". There's no clear obvious intuitive big line between "natural talent and hard work" and "illegal chemical cheating". Reading the details of the tests involved a few years ago made me believe the line we draw is thin, porous, arbitrary and ever-changing.

The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.

Post reply on HN