Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand your analogy. There’s no evidence that Hans didn’t cheat in the game against Magnus. This isn’t Hans’s fault, as it’s hard to imagine what such evidence could even be possible, but the fact remains that there’s nothing comparable to having the title, etc. to a car.
He has been caught of cheating online. Where you just open a new window and follow engine moves. Or you have a friend sitting beside you giving engine moves. In his over-the-board match, he didn't have a laptop. He didn't have a friend giving him moves. He didn't have any communication device. He was mostly looking at the board or into the distance while he was playing. He was scanned with a metal detector. So we kno…
Dear Chess World
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Dear Chess World
#772Some interesting meta observations for the few people who read my comment in this already enormous thread. I noticed that opinions on the issue seemed split rather 50/50 until I started seeing the same couple of names over and over on the "no evidence of cheating" side. And in fact, searching the HTML document for this page for a particularly prolific name yields that they make up about 10% of all posts in the thread…
Re: Dear Chess World
#773This whole situation is _not_ a Hans problem…it’s a FIDE problem. They don’t know how to reliably adjudicate claims of cheating, so it ends up being a massive game of “he said he said.” As the game gets more popular, they have a tremendous amount of work to do to guarantee game integrity – not unlike the work baseball had to do with steroids. If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it,…
1. Ramp up anti cheat across the board. Stream delay, collect metrics which trigger an INTERNAL review at a certain threshold, etc.
2. Give players a process for lodging a suspicion of cheating. Part of this would be working with FIDE, not starting public drama. Fine them if they break the rules of that process.
Re: Dear Chess World
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you can call the opinion of the famous player who lost about how hard he thought his opponent was thinking during the game evidence without twisting the meaning of the word past the breaking point.
> the opinion of the famous player This is a hilariously inaccurate description of magnus. He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously. It's not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior; he's an upstanding custodian of the mantle of world champion.
Is this a joke? He literally does have a history of being a sore loser.
Re: Dear Chess World
#775A 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…
> 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 source? sounds like bs to me
The best players in the world, these 2700+ rated players have:
1. Played many many positions many times over and have incredible recall of those general positions.
2. Know how to analyze a position/state of the game at any given moment and have a better "feel" for who is advantaged and/or where the greatest strengths/weaknesses of black/white are located.
However, none of them have the power of chess engines, which analyze singular moves (or poll a db) for the hundreds/thousands of possible outcomes 1, 2, 3, ..., n moves ahead (this is why the best engines are strictly better than humans at this point), so unless a player has both played and committed to memory the exact line being played in a game, the best they tend to get to is "having a feeling" about the state of the game (please forgive my oversimplification here, chess fans)
Now if a 2600 rated player - someone who's still easily in the top 1% of chess players and incredibly capable player of the game - were to be playing a game against a 2800 rated opponent, but had a computer tell them "Hey, this one move is critical" without being told the exact move, they would almost _certainly_ become heavily favored to win. That "feeling" about a position is now irrelevant. There are only a few pieces that will be likely moved on any given turn, and now you can narrow down your own analysis to what is different about moving any one of them in particular because you've been given advanced warning that the most-likely-to-be-played moves will result in wildly different consequences n moves later.
These are hours-long games. Taking 15-20 minutes on a turn is not unheard of, and doing so on a turn that is proven-critical can make all the difference.
Re: Dear Chess World
#776Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magnus can't even say he KNOWS he cheated. He only says he SUSPECTS he cheated. That's all he can say.
I mean, he is the greatest player in history, he definitely can feel if something is odd, it's not the first match he loses.
Re: Dear Chess World
#777Imagine you know someone with a history of stealing cars and other valuable objects. He has been caught multiple times. Now you see him with a shiny new car that you’re pretty sure he can’t afford. Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a n…
That's not a complete analogy tho. Everyone knows Hans cheated in the past. But Magnus is going beyond that and saying that Hans cheated in the over-the-board game against him. Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also…
Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.
Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.
If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.
There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.
Re: Dear Chess World
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the goal of hitting 2900 is basically impossible if there are cheaters in the mix. That has to really make him annoyed.
Re: Dear Chess World
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Hikaru's YouTube channel today he posted a video about today's developments [1]. In the later part of that video ran some software that used Stockfish to analyze that game and show percentage of moves where each player made the top engine move. Magnus only matched the top engine move 43% of the time, which is quite low for a super-GM. Hikaru said he'd bet money that it was Magnus' worst performance in any game in…
If Magnus was playing to detect cheating and not just to win, his play would reflect that. He did play some very obscure lines just to see if it would trigger Hans to “think” but Hans seemed to play the optimal moves quite easily every time. Analyzing the game myself, it appears Magnus was dragging out the game on purpose by picking highly dynamic lines of continuation that should’ve required long and heavy thinks fr…
If the evidence shows that Magnus played badly, we do not have to jump to the conclusion that actually he was playing badly on purpose, for the intent of trying to detect a cheater. He himself wasn't even stupid enough to claim this.
No, instead, I am going to trust other grandmasters opinions that he was merely playing badly.
Re: Dear Chess World
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need something that transmits if you're searching for bug-like devices or any general integrated circuits with a nonlinear junction detector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance…
With that nest of hair I wonder maybe he disassembles the device and puts small parts in various locations, the most detectable in the shoe or "the pocket". Someone familiar with slight of hand could comfortably scratch here and there while dropping pieces in a 'build' pocket.