Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chess’s Cheating Crisis

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 284 posts

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#261

Post by pashamur »

dalbasal wrote: post #72
sillysaurusx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a "no news" zone between a discovery and proliferation. In 1997, deep blue become superhuman.. proving the point. The average consumer engine was still like average tournament player with really weird moves. It took another decade before superhuman engines became widely available to normal people. That decade gap is where we often mispredict the future. Once a point is proven, we expect instant impact. Realit…

There was also the little fact that Kasparov was not playing his top chess in the 1997 match - the loss in the sixth game was considered very bizarre at the time (him going for the Caro-Kann, while not having much experience in that opening)

His rematch against Deep Junior (the 2003 computer) ended in a 3-3 tie, so humans were actually able to hold off computer for quite a bit longer than 1997...

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#262

Post by pashamur »

pacbard wrote: post #108
sillysaurusx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

That is true of traditional chess engines, but no longer true for neural net (self-taught) engines that learn the rules of chess by simulating millions of games against itself.

I've played an early version of one of those (its playing strength is roughly proportional to the amount of training it has done) and it was quite human-like in its behavior, even dropping pieces and making very human-like mistakes.

Look up AlphaZero and the open source port LeelaChess :) Once those become commercially available, it's going to be very hard to detect engine usage.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#263

Post by pashamur »

reidmcy wrote: post #156
sudosysgen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There are chess engines that are indistinguishable and made to imitate the play style of a top tier human player.

Can you give an example? I haven't seen any that are indistinguishable from humans

AlphaZero / LeelaChess - neural net / genetic learning based ones; although they're not really commercially available, technically anyone can download the code to LeelaChess and train it if given enough CPU power. They learn chess by repeatedly playing chess against itself and in such a way simulate the organic development that has occurred in human play as well.

That's the next generation of chess engines - AlphaZero trounced Stockfish in a match of 100 games with 28 wins and 72 draws and not a single loss. And if you decrease the power a little bit (take an earlier generation), it makes significantly more human-like moves than Stockfish.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#264

Post by bjourne »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #16
Just1689 wrote: 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…

> 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 true.

There is an interesting section in Hofstaeder's Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 where he speculates that, despite the rapid progress of technology, computers might never be able to play chess at a human level!

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#265

Post by borroka »

noneeeed wrote: post #27
dalbasal wrote: post #18

“ 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.

It should be the default assumption. It is difficult to believe how otherwise-astute people can fall into the feeling-good traps of "talent can beat everything" or "you need to want it more". PEDs get the user a very substantial advantage, from the ability to train more, to changes in muscles mass, to much faster recovery from injuries and so on. Apart from the health risks we all know about (which are in reality overestimated, relatively speaking, otherwise we would see former professional athletes drop like flies), they make the whole machine way better.

Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#266

Post by thatguy0900 »

nottorp wrote: post #177
NikolaNovak wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

If you're home exercising and taking protein shakes and stuff, the person you're cheating is yourself.

I'm curious why you take such a hard line. People only take protein powder when they want to be big, and really it only saves you from having to eat such massive amounts of food. If you're skinny and not used to overeating, eating the reccomended gram of protein per pound of lean body mass for muscle growth can really be quite sickening.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#267

Post by thatguy0900 »

gosukiwi wrote: post #242

Is there a reason why they can't implement anticheats? Cheating in videogames is as old as videogames themselves.

What anticheat would work for occasionally double checking a move in a different tab? Most cheating software can be caught because it interacts with the game directly, I think if you made the perfect move everytime you could be caught but say one out of every 5 or 6 moves? Even if you locked their computer down and made them lose the game if they changed tabs they could use a phone

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#268

Post by sudosysgen »

reidmcy wrote: post #252
sudosysgen wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HIARCS or Lucas Chess are engines that have been made explicitly to play like a human. You won't be able to distinguish them, with some human play in conjunction, from a very strong human player.

Thanks, those do look like they are attempting to play like humans, but neither says how that claim was tested. How would you test the their ability to imitate humans?

By cheating using them and not getting called out anymore than a human player of the same elo.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#269

Post by anigbrowl »

gowld wrote: post #143

The crisis is really that humans are desperately trying to "compete" at a game that computers have soundly defeated human players at. The answer, endorsed by leaders like Kasparov, is abandon competitive human chess. Embrace the computers for competition, and use ELO for entertainment matchups. I don't care if I'm playing a "cheater", as long as the cheater is playing at my level.

But people still enjoy foot races despite the existence of wheeled and powered vehicles. I don't play chess often but would still enjoy a sit-down game with a similarly occasional player, without thinking about how much better of a game the Omnicron Neutron Wrangler can play.

It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.

Re: Chess’s Cheating Crisis

#270

Post by SamReidHughes »

strbean wrote: post #192
vokep wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are protein shakes and such 'stuff' at all approaching performance enhancing chemicals? Performance enhancing chemicals make the body do things it wouldn't normally do, directly modifying behavior to be different than it could be without that substance. Protein shakes are just providing nutrients so the body can make full use of exercise. Giving the body a nutrient rich liquid food is very different from a drug.…

First it is protein shakes. Then creatine and other supplements. Then pre-workout stuff. Then the better pre-workout stuff someone at the gym recommended. Then you find out that pre-workout stuff was banned by the FDA for containing amphetamine analogues. Whoops, you were cheating!

A good example is the "Deer Antler Extract" that Vijay Singh took. It sounds like something akin to Fish Oil. Imagine if Fish Oil from CVS were banned. For all I know, it could be.
Post reply on HN