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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

#461

Post by glenstein »

JadeNB wrote: post #52
glenstein wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?

> How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess? It doesn't really matter, does it? There's a big difference between telling someone "if you're not a GM by age 14 [but actually I mean 15], then don't bother, it's hopeless" and "a typical top-level player reaches GM by age 14, but it is possible to reach that level even if you are a relatively 'late bloomer'." I'd prefer not to err on the…

>It doesn't really matter, does it?

It's literally the single most important fact in this context.

If there are lots of people like Aronian, then there's nothing out of the ordinary about the evolution of Hans Neiman as a player. If he's a rare and unusual example, he shouldn't be cited to suggest Hans' skill growth is within the norm.

>I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.

This is a non-sequitur.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#462

Post by Maursault »

daveguy wrote: post #457
Maursault wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with my careless error, the statement in question is still a sweeping generalization. > As of 2021 This is a tough number to track down, and you've limited the count by "active," in 2021, but the number is rapidly increasing. According to the FIFA Database as of a few moments ago, there are 1771 chess grandmasters.[1] 24/1771 > In my opinion, that is a serious problem. Even assuming 1.8% of chess grandmasters ar…

That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating. Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

> That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

The difference between 1.8% and 1.4% is negligible and is only in regards to the limited population of chess grandmasters which could not be a valid sample representation of 93M chess.com members.

> Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

Your answer is apparently in reply to some question that was not asked. On the contrary, my claim was that the argument that cheating was "widespread," by extrapolating a mere two dozen cheaters among 93M, is fallacious reasoning, specifically a sweeping generalization, and also that

>>> Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat.

which is not a postulation but a published fact.[1] Being that two hundredths of a percent may be described as a tiny fraction of a percent rather than more than a fraction of a percent, you can clearly see in this case, by your own scrutiny and straw man, cheating is not a detriment to competition.

[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#463

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

maegul wrote: post #102
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unaware, chess.com recently bought out the Play Magnus Group for about $80 million. They most definitely are not a neutral party in this financially. I personally interpret this sort of situation as creating an additional burden to acknowledge and demonstrate the conflict of interest isn't a material factor. I don't know if Hans cheated beyond his admissions. Online seems plausible if not likely to me. OTB…

Agreed on all fronts. I've gotten the vague impression over the years that the chess establishment isn't the most fair and non-corrupt organisation (par for the course perhaps for sports organisations). It also seems to be relatively behind or new to massive cheating scandals (??). Put together an event like this was almost certainly going to be ugly and unimpressive.

FIDE has a very poor reputation when it comes to handling the more unpleasant stuff.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#464

Post by computerdork »

matttb wrote: post #310
computerdork wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am not a statistician, but at least in an online analysis I saw, seems like correlation can effectively identify players who are playing too much like a computer. Because they don't just run correlations on Niemann, but on all the top players, and do comparisons (and for certain long stretches of tournaments, Niemann's is playing way, way above how anyone else has ever played). This is video explains it pretty well,…

They are referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xqvhgh/chessbases_en...

Ah, have to admit, this is a very good counter argument, calling chessbase's methods in to question. And it's surprising that chessbase does not always do the same analysis for each game, that its nodes aren't setup with the same set of chess engines (although, again, maybe most top chess engines suggest similar moves??). Hmm...

... also, not sure I agree with his opinion that for each move that is analyzed, LetsCheck will return 100% if any engine returns 100% (and there could be multiple computers that were used, each with different engines). The point of the analysis is to determine if a player is playing like a computer, and the user may himself have multiple chess engines open in order to confuse the cheat detection. But again, am not an expert at chess engines or statistics, so am not sure what effects checking multiple engines has...

... also, he says that "Ken Regan's scientifically valid method has exonerated Hans by saying his results do not show any statistically valid evidence of cheating." This is very confusing, because Chess.com post has basically said the opposite (maybe Ken Regan's analysis is referring to a different subset of games?). Guess nothing is definitive. But at this point, I still lean towards Hans cheating (on top of this analysis, there is also a lot of circumstantial things he did that to me indicate he might have cheated, which is too long a topic to go into).

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#465

Post by codyb »

howling wrote: post #415
OJFord wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1200 rapid if that makes a difference? Also, I suppose it's.. certainly not orthogonal, but it's not dead parallel either - can have a good/bad memory and play well/not well.

I'm 1800 rapid on chess.com and can't play blindfold beyond the opening.

Memory is different than chess ability, maybe his friend just has more effective techniques for memorization or visualization or both.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#466

Post by User23 »

pedrosorio wrote: post #226
addicted wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. It’s an absolutely ridiculous basis to make a claim.

> This also ignores a once in a century pandemic. Hans Niemann was almost 17 years old when the pandemic started. When he turned 15 (June 2018) his rating was 2313, almost 200 points (an immense gulf at that level) below the minimum to become a grandmaster.

A name that basically means “John Nobody” is pretty curious.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#467

Post by maegul »

frumper wrote: post #456
maegul wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails. Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to u…

That wherewithal is the design skill. Some people have it, some don't. Some are good with data too, some not.

Ok ... then aren't we stretching the term "design skill" too thinly then, to the point of disrespecting the actual skillset?

I suspect there'd be a tendency to presume a design process is more like solving a problem with a clear techniques for arriving at an objectively correct solution, when in reality, it can and often if just the iterative process of assessing-adjusting-repeat. Being better at these things to the point of sometimes reducing the iterative loop to 0 repeats is "design skill". But the essential base-line ingredient, IMO, is being willing to enter the iterative cycle at least to some extent.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#469

Post by cryptonector »

hibikir wrote: post #69
gbear605 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t find any instances of cheating after August 2020. At that point his OTB ELO was only around 2450. It’s only after his last known instance of cheating that he improved into the truly great level.

The Chess.com anti cheat system, as described by the report, is set up to handle blitz and bullet. This makes sense, both because it's most of what is played on the site, and because it's so much easier to detect cheating in that environment: A whole lot of engine recommendations would be bananas if a human played them in blitz, and finding major mistakes is very challenging under such time pressure. Evaluating when…

> If security is a top priority, at the very least we need to do what the Sinquefield cup did in the last few rounds: No spectators and a 15 minute delay, so that all communication with computers/co-conspirators has to include the player relaying all the moves out before they can get any help.

This. And then let's test this Niemann character, as now I'm really curious as to whether -and how- he cheats at OTB.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#470

Post by eru »

erwincoumans wrote: post #367
eru wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do statistical analysis on the mouse and keyboard inputs to try and detect this. (Very similar to how you might detect chess cheaters, actually.)

You can use (the data of) statistical analysis to train a deep neural network to avoid detection. That may also help avoiding chess detection cheaters, so the moves are not perfect anymore.

Yes. You can't make cheating impossible, but you can make it harder to pull off.
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