201–210 of 486 posts
its called centaur and its time to embrace it
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They could have chosen to ban him for life when they caught him cheating. I would have no sympathy for him in that case. But the document paints a different picture. He cheated, and they agreed to re-enable his account if he promised to not cheat again. According to chess.com he kept his promise. So why the sudden new ban? I would agree with you that the initial cheating was enough for lifetime ban. But chess.com dec…
The report outlines the rationale in some detail. The removal of Hans' ban was controversial among chess.com's Fairplay staff. In recent months, suspicions grew about Hans' tournament performance among both elite chess players and chess.com staff. Simultaneously, chess.com is readying to host its largest ever (by cash prize pool) tournament, and Hans recently qualified for it. Then the Sinquefield incident happened,…
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> > 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.
I find this true for any semi-competitive endeavor that doesn't also have intrinsic extra benefits. You're going to hit the people who want it more than you and are willing to put in the practice time, and they're going to beat you.
Consequently, any competitive thing I do has to also have an extra dimension to it. A competitive sport is generally fine since I'm getting in better shape. I'm happy to do stuff like darts or bowling if it has a high social aspect to it. As long as I can be slightly above average and that's good enough and there is some extra benefit, I'm down with it.
Chess, sadly, generally fulfills none of those criteria.
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I guess I’m not as cynical. I picked up chess again when I was deployed (I was on the chess team in high school) and have been closely following this drama, and my sense is that perhaps we all admit that online chess is dead, but a return to analog chess is possible and, perhaps, preferable. I know this begs the question of defeating cheats in irl play, but shouldn’t that be an easier problem to solve?
I would be surprised of over-the-board cheating was viable in the long term. Seems like it should be relatively easy to stamp out provided there's a will to do so.
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Except, chess.com has literal "strength profiles" of every top player. They have enough data to say, hey, this how strong you should be playing, anything outside that expected norm might be suspicious, especially over a long enough time period. It's a similar idea to the 'Biological Passport' seen in sports wherein the biological data of an athlete is stored and you can reference the data points against new test resu…
I was more thinking that cheaters would create a new account and play at a level that’s good but not uncommon like 1700 or 1800 and work their way up to GM status over a few years, careful to coincide their ascension with the historical pace, win rate, etc. of fellow GMs. That way there’s no anomalies in the data.
As a proof of concept it would be interesting to create an AI that has an undetectable natural progression and human-like play style.
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That makes lots of sense for quick real time games. But getting back to my point about how integral computer engines are in chess for training/preparation ... a script to enhance reaction times seems much more like doping in sports where it probably doesn't improve the player's intrinsic abilities only their performance.
Poker would also break if you could just use algorithms to tell you how much to bet and when to fold. I suppose any strategic, turn-based game breaks down as soon as you have a world class engine for it.
Yep. Perhaps just a consequence of technology and an oncoming "singularity" ... professional sports just don't make much sense anymore apart from their value as entertainment (which is already questionable in the case of Chess IMO) and all of the noise around cheating etc is much more about "being immersed in the story" just like good film directing and VFX/SFX. You're either a fan or aren't and that's just how it is.
Hopefully the love and appreciation for amateur sports makes a return ... not much to cheat for if the only prize is pride and pleasure.
I was about to ask "what does Kasparov say?" but decided to research it first. Very disappointing, but coming from him I'm not surprised. See below. [1] https://www.chessdom.com/garry-kasparov-carlsens-behavior-wa... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LaEipwGi0o His Twitter feed is all Ukraine stuff, AFAICT. Maybe he's said something more than the above (?) Personal story: I was the host at his Google talk in Mt. V…
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> 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…
> it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.
> The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself
These statements alone, well sure.... everything is legitimate if it's not caught. That's by definition.
Are you arguing really hard for the definition of word legitimate?
I'm actually quite confused about what it is that you're arguing here from these statements.
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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…
You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception. As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate? I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?
For the purposes of this discussion, I define "legitimate" as whether anyone wants to cry foul on a player's performance. If a player cheats but doesn't get caught, it's legitimate because nobody can cry foul and make it into a problem.
>As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate?
Nope.
>I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?
If we were to drill down to it, it can be argued humans can never truly be objective. Take Neiman for example; so far we haven't seen any evidence (that I'm aware of) that Neiman did cheat in his game with Magnus without any doubt, but it appears that society at large has decided that he was a cheater in that game.
This and the aforementioned thought experiment actually also come back to one of my original arguments: That not cheating is stupid. When you can be judged a cheater despite being honest, or judged honest despite being a cheater, it is much more beneficial to just cheat and attempt to reap the rewards of cheating. Being honest gains you nothing while burdening the risk of losing everything, while cheating potentially gains you more at the risk of losing everything.
Also, I hope you don't misunderstand any of this as me passing judgment one way or another on this sort of behaviour. Personally, I would prefer no cheating, but there are my own thoughts and then there is reality, and reality is as filled with sunshine and flowers as it is dirty and ruthless. I see all this as a great opportunity to appreciate reality for what it truly is, so we hopefully don't end up on the short end of a stick insofar as what's within our powers to affect.
I was about to ask "what does Kasparov say?" but decided to research it first. Very disappointing, but coming from him I'm not surprised. See below. [1] https://www.chessdom.com/garry-kasparov-carlsens-behavior-wa... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LaEipwGi0o His Twitter feed is all Ukraine stuff, AFAICT. Maybe he's said something more than the above (?) Personal story: I was the host at his Google talk in Mt. V…
The room was full and he complained that it was too small. I believe he had the right to do so. You were supposed to organize his reception and you did your job poorly by not doing the due diligence and now you're publicly calling a guy jerk for your failure. I wonder who the real jerk is...