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The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

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Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#161

Post by irjustin »

Dalewyn wrote: post #75
erdevs wrote: post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

>The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me. Not to me. When the stakes of winning are so damn valuable, sometimes literally so, it would be patently stupid to not cheat and increase your odds of winning. Remember: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught. If you're never caught, cheating is completely legitimate. These aren't games of pleasu…

> cheating is completely legitimate.

100% disagree.

Legitimate would mean condoning cheating. Which then means everyone should be allowed to use engines, which then would mean engine vs engine, which we already have.

Human vs human no augmentation.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#162

Post by msbarnett »

maegul wrote: post #150
msbarnett wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, that it's common amongst the elite of the sport is huge. Either online chess is somewhat dead on arrival as a sport and was never taken seriously by many players (which makes sense to me given how integrated computer engines are in the sport) ... or the chess world needs to go through some sort of cultural revolution here. Really? My takeaway is that chess.com is doing a better job of detecting cheaters tha…

From page 17 of the report: > In conclusion, while we cannot definitively prove that Hans’ rise in strength is entirely “natural,” we have also found no indications in the game data to suggest otherwise. While some have suggested that a move-by-move analysis by humans may surface some oddities in move choice or analysis, there is nothing in our statistical investigation to raise any red flags regarding Hans’ OTB play…

That’s specifically in response to the question of whether or not Niemann has played a statistically anomalous number of “near perfect games”, based on analysis of on-board moves. But as they note earlier:

> Hans is consistently above many contemporaries in strength increases, even though he has only recently shown the same caliber of play. Likewise, as set forth in Figures A and B below, Hans had the fastest and biggest increase in his score over time in comparison to his peers and other notable players, when considering all of their known Classical OTB games played from age 11-19.

Which should raise a lot of red flags given the nature of the “peers” (Fischer, Magnus) and its very sudden occurrence after being banned from online tournaments. It’s much harder to detect computer-aided cheating in classical time control moves than in speed chess (where they detected it in his online play) — not least because, as they note, they have no access to time-usage data for the OTB events, which would be critical to any such analysis. Nevertheless they do flag 6 OTB events that their FairPlay team believes merits further analysis by FIDE, in Appendix X.3. Reading between the lines I think that’s about as strong a statement as they can make without fully creating political issues with FIDE, who they’re probably hoping will work more closely with them going forward.

All that said, it makes more sense to look at the anomalous nature of his OTB outcomes rather than searching individual OTB moves trying to find a smoking gun given chess.com’s relative lack of data there, and the political entanglements involved. And as for that

> While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#163

Post by Dalewyn »

ndespres wrote: post #152
Dalewyn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another. Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy o…

This is sociopathic rationalization for poor behavior. It isn’t true. If you are a compulsive liar and cheater, perhaps you will justify your immoral behavior by deluding yourself into believing that everyone else is doing it too- but it is not so. We are not all behaving this way.

You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

You also fail to understand I'm not passing judgment on such behaviour. Rather, I'm saying we need to take into account the ruthless nature of reality if we don't want to get screwed over ourselves.

Calling evidence of Neiman cheating a surprise is an honest and naive understanding of reality, one which leaves you wide open to cheating thrown your way that you will never realize because you never expect it.

Nobody is a saint, much less when achieving victory is so heavily incentivized as in professional games.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#164

Post by User23 »

bsder wrote: post #66
lysp wrote: post #19

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess. > Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest Wow.

> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess. This is confusing correlation and causation. One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/ If you don't…

That's why I quit playing seriously when I was still an underclassman. It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant, and there was absolutely no practical reason for me to play chess whatsoever. Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#165

Post by nurettin »

Dalewyn wrote: post #110
fsckboy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your attitude about chess competition was applied toward you in all of your routine irl activities, you would be extremely unhappy. The cop does better in his job by meeting his quota of speeding tickets, so it objectively makes sense that he would issue you a speeding ticket every day with no evidence and over your strenuous objections... except you wouldn't object because the cop is working the system rationally…

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another. Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy o…

Cheating might work if you have nothing to lose. Example: you are supposed to be present in an online lecture as a formality, there is no interaction and nothing to gain by being in it. Sure, people are likely to join, mute and do other things.

However, for serious real life situations where stakes are high, risk of ruin is too high. This is not rational. In fact, those stars have to align for the cheater, not the honest ones.

(I still don't think Hans cheated OTB and chess.com is being ridiculous)

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#166

Post by lmm »

maegul wrote: post #123
erdevs wrote: post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

> [1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage thei…

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting.

Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). This is a major scandal that should have serious consequences, but there's no reason for it to be the end of online chess.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#167

Post by maegul »

BeefWellington wrote: post #135

I think the thing I'd like to have clarified: Why does chess.com care about the results of an OTB game? I can understand their online tournaments being something they care about and why they might rescind an invitation based on these allegations but there's something very strange about them taking it upon themselves to ban him from the platform as a result of his play against someone whose company they're in the proc…

> It seems to me as though they're inserting themselves into this unnecessarily with their analysis too. They spend a great deal of time explaining their rationale in a few places and then toss in a "In our view, no conclusions should be made from this data." at the end of it. If no conclusions should be drawn, don't bother sharing the data; it's useless. By sharing it in this manner, they are attempting to pretend it's reliable and effectively make the accusation with an out to claim they didn't.

I agree. Inline with your comments, the report has to me a bit of the vibe of an PR department scrambling to get ahead of the story. The poorly and inconsistently formatted graphs indicates they were pulled out of various documents written by various people at different times. And the spray and prey arguments that don't go any where make it seem like they're desperate to appear as objective and unbiased as possible ... which indicates that they are very biased in their urge/need to respond to the "Magnus refuses to play with Hans" situation.

If their cheating detection is so good, wouldn't it be reasonable for chess.com to say to Magnus that you don't have to worry about cheating in our tournaments so you'll play whoever you're paired with and you can leave it up to us to ban people because we know what we're talking about. Why ban Hans now, right after Magnus's ultimatum?

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#168

Post by Dalewyn »

irjustin wrote: post #161
Dalewyn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me. Not to me. When the stakes of winning are so damn valuable, sometimes literally so, it would be patently stupid to not cheat and increase your odds of winning. Remember: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught. If you're never caught, cheating is completely legitimate. These aren't games of pleasu…

> cheating is completely legitimate. 100% disagree. Legitimate would mean condoning cheating. Which then means everyone should be allowed to use engines, which then would mean engine vs engine, which we already have. Human vs human no augmentation.

I commented on this already in another post, but I'll reiterate here: How do you know a player is a cheater?

If you can't prove a player cheated, that is if you never catch the cheater, then whatever the player did is legitimate. It doesn't matter if the player in fact cheated and got away with it, it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.

The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself, only the results and only if the cheater is caught.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#169

Post by cowvin »

erdevs wrote: post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

One of the most interesting (but inconclusive) points they found was how Hans' evaluated strength dropped after they introduced the 15 minute broadcast delay.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#170

Post by maegul »

lmm wrote: post #166
maegul wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage thei…

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting. Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). This is a major scandal that s…

Totally fair ... and it would make a lot of sense that this event brings about some sort of cultural cleansing or realignment. I guess I really just meant "dead to me."

That being said, if it turns out that online chess continues to do well, but there's still plenty of cheating going on, I don't think it'd be accurate to say online chess is alive because it wouldn't be chess but something different, for better or worse. And whether such an outcome occurs might be what's really at stake here.

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