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Dear Chess World

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Re: Dear Chess World

#461
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>at least about the moves played You missed a large part. Some of his moves were "somewhat suspect". However, he was interviewed after the game with Magnus and he really could not explain why he was making the moves he made. Even the interviewers were almost laughing as he gave his "analysis" for his own moves. He played off his top engine moves as just getting lucky, while at the same time stating he didn't make oth…

Hans also is trolling. Who knows if he can't explain or just doesn't want to. It means nothing.

If you choose to troll you gotta pay the toll

Re: Dear Chess World

#462
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually fairly easy to cheat statistics. It happens literally all the time in Academia. There's a thousand ways to make a statistical analysis believably say what you want in a way where even other professionals don't realize is the case unless an expert does a thorough analysis.

It's easy to cheat a statistic you create. It's quite hard to cheat a statistic where you don't know who will look when at which particular data points.

Which is exactly the case here, as they decided what data to look at and how, and possibly had a bias.

Further, clearly the analysis wasn't so irrefutable given that they admitted faults with it after others pointed out mistakes[0]

0. https://twitter.com/IglesiasYosha/status/1574308784566067201?

Re: Dear Chess World

#463
post #97

A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requi…

Very interesting. I don’t really understand chess beyond the basics but when I think of sports the difference between good and great really seems to be, in baseball just a hit or two per week, in American football a running back who has the vision to cut decisively a second or less before another running would.

When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.

Re: Dear Chess World

#464
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper . If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that…

is there any thinking on how many bits of information do you need to cheat, and how many can be communicated via thumper? e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone. just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of traini…

Not many at all. For instance it takes a maximum of 6 bits to encode a given destination square on the board. This is probably sufficient, or very close to it.

Re: Dear Chess World

#466

I believe people might be seriously underestimating just how good Magnus may be at detecting cheating. Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now? He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing. I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented soo…

Magnus is obviously extremely qualified to detect cheating, I see many other people who are honestly just as qualified as him say that Hans isn't cheating. I'm going to also say emotions are going to play a massive role here, both in terms of defence of Hans and against Hans.

The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?

>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.

It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?

So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.

Re: Dear Chess World

#467

Chess is, in a way, doomed. At this point cheating by a smart perpetrator is nearly impossible to detect. - Miniature devices can even be implanted. You can probably already have a chess engine onboard your body. - Accomplices of a cheater only need to transmit a few bits of information to be useful - making cheating cheap when audience is allowed. - Statistical methods will not be able to detect a player increasing…

You could play in a Faraday cage, use an SDR and check for weird radio signals, and other steps. Some of this would only really be feasible at the highest levels, but that's where going to those lengths is needed.

Re: Dear Chess World

#468
post #97

A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requi…

Perhaps play naked in a Faraday cage?

You could still run a chess engine offline on a decently powerful phone that would beat high rated players afaik.

Re: Dear Chess World

#469

I believe people might be seriously underestimating just how good Magnus may be at detecting cheating. Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now? He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing. I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented soo…

This. It’s like how some people in here have built amazing intuition about where a bug in a system may be, even if it’s a system they haven’t written or designed themselves

Those data points are cherry-picked by anecdote and statistically useless, unless you're also counting all the times someone thought they had such intuition that turned out not to be correct at all.

Re: Dear Chess World

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example of this, until the Niemann game Magnus had a 53-game win^H^H^Hunbeaten streak. Prior to this he had a 125-game unbeaten streak. Many (most?) of these games were played against competitors within 200 Elo. Many of these were played against the 10 next-best chess players in the world. The back of the envelope percentage calculation absolutely does not apply at this level of chess. In reality if Niemann wer…

So hitting a 1/100 chance means he is cheating? 1% is slim, but far from impossible.

It's not just the winning, it's also how he played
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