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Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

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Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#71

Post by hrunt »

blub wrote: post #66
agarden wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regan's analysis is a good deal more detailed than that. He claims that if you check the computer just three times a game, he is going to catch you within three games. Now, if you check just once, it becomes a lot harder. For the game against Carlsen, he looked at the key moves in that game. The first 20 or so moves were theory. You can't ever prove cheating in theory. After they diverged from theory, Regan said ther…

If there are several good moves, it seems logical to cheat by not picking the computer’s top choice.

Is it cheating if you make decisions to purposefully not gain an advantage (ignoring gambling-induced outcomes, like throwing a match)?

"He was cheating! An outside influence was telling him which move to make and he purposefully didn't do it!"

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#73

Post by Overtonwindow »

xlii wrote: post #13

While I'm not interested in chess in general, I'm deeply curious how Carlsen (assuming good intent) could figure out Niemann was cheating. The ideas I have right now would be: 1. To run each early game phase (up to, let's say 3-5 moves) through multiple AI engines and find selection that is: - happening constantly in most of the engines - don't have deviation in multiple rules (i.e. have stable consequence) - aren't…

Is it possible that Carlsen himself is cheating, and the reason he's angry is because he's cheating, and still gets beat, so the other guy MUST be cheating?

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#74

Post by Bakary »

treis wrote: post #63
Bakary wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At their level of play, a single one-bit message can tip the scales in dramatic fashion. All you have to know is that there is a great move to be found in a particular position, without even knowing what the move is.

Engine moves aren't really like that though. They aren't dramatic strokes of brilliance. They're slightly odd moves that pay off 20-30 moves later. And it's a little bit of a meta game. Engines are ultimately playing against themselves when determining the best move. So they might discard a brilliant looking move because of some line that no human is reasonably going to come up with. Similarly they might make a brill…

I don't entirely disagree but consider the following:

1) To be useless to a top player, the decision tree needs to have only long term gains and be barren in terms of short term human-readable profits.

2) In the same vein, the metagaming pruning process you have described has to unfold a certain way, in the context of a game where most of the previous moves have been played by humans and not machines and where there is therefore much more of a chance of an unbalance compared to a purely computed position.

3) the above criteria of long-term, short-term, readability etc. must be defined according to players that are already 95% or so precise. The missing percentages mean that they always get smoked by machines over the course of a game, but can have a remarkable ability to see good lines.

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#75

Post by qurt »

throw7 wrote: post #37

You either have evidence or you don't. This quasi economic modeling of chess players is ridiculous. He says his models don't know anything about playing chess. OK, let's apply your models to all sorts of areas where we suspect fraudulent play. This chess drama is corrosive. Speculation from day 1 starting with carlsen.

This is a fair point, but I think there is confusion around the meaning of the fact that Regan's models do not "know anything about chess". I believe this refers to prior domain knowledge embedded in the algorithm itself - but the idea of exploiting data from a large number of GM games is precisely so the model can extract domain "knowledge" from statistical indicators. As for "applying the model to all sorts of areas", yes conceptually if your model can infer anything from any kind of data distribution this applies. In practice it just won't.

If you take a step back and look at the AlphaGo project, the story shows us a very similar model architecture could be applied to a different game, chess, with AlphaZero. And the "zero" in this case means the model is build with zero human knowledge - not even GM games, only self-play. These models do entirely different things - A0'model given a position, tries to find the best lines, while KR's tool, given a set of games from a given player, will try to price the probability of foul play - but in both cases, no programmer-introduced chess heuristics are part of the model. Yet AlphaZero performs the way it does and appears to "know" quite a bit about the game. So if a purely statistical approach can yield a very strong engine, which has been qualified as displaying some sort of "creativity" (for lack of a better term) in its play, I don't think it is too far-fetched to imagine other models extracting knowledge about what human play should look like.

Totally agree that this is wrong from Magnus, and cheating from Niemann or not he is responsible for the toxic drama.

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#76

Post by blub »

hrunt wrote: post #71
blub wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are several good moves, it seems logical to cheat by not picking the computer’s top choice.

Is it cheating if you make decisions to purposefully not gain an advantage (ignoring gambling-induced outcomes, like throwing a match)? "He was cheating! An outside influence was telling him which move to make and he purposefully didn't do it!"

Like I said, it depends on the available set of moves. If #1 is +1 and #2 is +0.7, but the cheater wanted to play #5 at -0.5 then that’s an outcome-changing difference.

Chess engines like Hiarcs can show a series of good, ok, questionable and bad moves for each touched piece color-coded on the board for example.

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#77

Post by Bakary »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #73
xlii wrote: post #13

While I'm not interested in chess in general, I'm deeply curious how Carlsen (assuming good intent) could figure out Niemann was cheating. The ideas I have right now would be: 1. To run each early game phase (up to, let's say 3-5 moves) through multiple AI engines and find selection that is: - happening constantly in most of the engines - don't have deviation in multiple rules (i.e. have stable consequence) - aren't…

Is it possible that Carlsen himself is cheating, and the reason he's angry is because he's cheating, and still gets beat, so the other guy MUST be cheating?

It's not impossible, technically. But it would contradict more than a decade of behavior and performance along with having no circumstantial or hard evidence to back it up.

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#78

Post by dandanua »

notafraudster wrote: post #55
dandanua wrote: post #17

Chess became a joke today. People decide if you cheat or not just based on your moves and results. It's nonsense. It's like deciding if an athlete is cheating or not without doping tests - solely based on the "distribution" of success. And Magnus behavior - hinting accusations again and again - is far from ethical too.

I think people decided he’s cheating because he admitted to cheating the two times he got caught cheating online, denied ever cheating besides those times, has had a meteoric rise in terms of moving from low GM to his current state, was unable to explain his play in a reasonable way, played almost perfectly, beat a substantially better player, and that player feels he cheated despite having never made accusations lik…

1. Cheating in online chess as a teen is a factor, but not that strong. Also, the details of cheating are still private, so we can't rely on that. BTW, chess.com belongs to Magnus, partially.

2. It's normal for teens to have jumps in their development.

3. I watched his explanations, they are not that great, but not unreasonable either.

4. They played a couple of weeks before, with the result 3-1 for Magnus [1]. Magnus lost the first game and won other 3. Magnus losing to Niemann wasn't something extraordinary in general. Also, a player can have much better morale while playing with a King, it simply gives more motivation.

5. Magnus hinting cheating accusations is certainly a new thing. But refusing to defend his World Champion title this year is also a new thing. I guess he started to feel way too entitled in chess. Also, all this affects his position in chess business, since he owns a lot of it. He is not just a player anymore. It's a conflict of interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_Chess_Tour_2022#FTX_...

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#79

Post by agarden »

thedstrat wrote: post #24
anothernewdude wrote: post #14

A bell curve. That's it. Is Hans Niemann cheating? Ken Regan is cheating people into calling him an expert.

Agreed. The analyses based solely on a comparison of average centipawn loss is so so flawed. It only takes using an engine move once or twice to completely demolish a much better opponent in a game. These types of analyses don't find this type of cheating. A much better analysis imo would be trying to find the probability of someone at his ELO finding surprising moves. EG I played a 1900 online recently who happened…

Regan's analysis works, in part, the way you suggest is better. He looks for tricky moves with non-obvious consequences and looks at one's success rate in those. For the Niemann-Carlsen game, he identified two such moves and Niemann chose suboptimally for both of them. For one is those, Niemann played a nice that could have cost him a tempo. Definitely an inaccuracy.

Re: Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes

#80

Post by bpodgursky »

rob74 wrote: post #61
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making moves perceived to be outside his skill class I assume.

If it's that, then it's pretty arrogant - I mean, that's like saying: "he's too stupid to make such a good move, so he must be cheating"? Even (relatively) bad players are bound to make good moves from time to time, either through dumb luck or through occasional sparks of inspiration, so that's hardly a reason to be 100% sure they are cheating...

When you are #2 in the world at something you are allowed to be a bit arrogant about it.

(down to #8 now, I suppose)

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