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A recent chess controversy

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Re: A recent chess controversy

#101

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

cortesoft wrote: post #4

This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance. It is like asking someone to pick a random number between 1 and 1 million and then saying, “oh my god, it must not actually be random… the chances of choosing the exact number 729,619 is 1 in a million! That is too rar…

There are actually some freaky patterns in nature (including how people think) that can help identify fake data...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Re: A recent chess controversy

#103

Post by almostgotcaught »

JDEW wrote: post #8
cortesoft wrote: post #4

This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance. It is like asking someone to pick a random number between 1 and 1 million and then saying, “oh my god, it must not actually be random… the chances of choosing the exact number 729,619 is 1 in a million! That is too rar…

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” -Feynman, from Six Easy Pieces

yea i always remember this when people put on their tinfoil hats about some rare event.

Re: A recent chess controversy

#104

Post by fatbird »

AdamN wrote: post #16
giancarlostoro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess, the only thing that comes to mind is moving pieces, and sneaking new ones on the board, but if there's enough cameras, how do you get away with it, eventually someone WILL notice, highlight it, point it out, and you will be shamed.

In the old Soviet/US rivalry days there was an accusation of cheating that I thought was novel. The accusation was that the Soviet players in the middle rounds were doing subtle not-right moves with the US #1. This forced the lead US player to put way too much effort into figuring out if it was some new line that he didn't know about and tiring him out. Then by the time he got to the final he was exhausted and confus…

In parallel to this (and Bobby Fischer explicitly accused them of this), the Soviet players had already decided who would be the champion amongst themselves, and subtly let that player win his matches so that he was fresh and well-rested when he ended up playing non-Soviet players.

Re: A recent chess controversy

#105

Post by neaden »

mft_ wrote: post #39
tomku wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast, overwhelming majority of chess games are not played in front of cameras or even in-person. The accusation in the article was about online play, and specifically blitz which is played online even more commonly than slower formats of chess because moving quickly is easier for many people with a mouse than a physical board. The way people cheat online is by running a chess engine that analyzes the state of the…

> It's not that good for top-level chess because a Magnus or Hikaru or basically anyone in the top few hundred players can bang out a series of extremely accurate moves in a critical spot - that's why they're top chess players, they're extremely good. Interesting; I thought I'd read that even the very best players only average ~90% accuracy, whereas the best engines average 99.something%?

Accuracy is a poor measure for cheating since better chess players will put you in a more complicated position. I'm not especially good but I've played some games with high accuracy just because I just did some book moves and the opponent makes a mistake. Accuracy was high but the correct moves were never especially hard to see.

Re: A recent chess controversy

#106

Post by sniggler »

tehlike wrote: post #75
cortesoft wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feynman is one of the best ever at explaining complicated concepts in ways almost everyone can understand. That is a very rare skill for the super intelligent to have.

Agreed on Feynman, but not necessarily on the generalization that it being a rare skill to simplify things. When you understand a thing so well, you can simplify it enough.

I know plenty of smart people that know a topic well and are still not great at simplifying it in a way that can be understood well by laymen. Separate skill imo

Re: A recent chess controversy

#107

Post by macspoofing »

cortesoft wrote: post #4

This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance. It is like asking someone to pick a random number between 1 and 1 million and then saying, “oh my god, it must not actually be random… the chances of choosing the exact number 729,619 is 1 in a million! That is too rar…

>This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance.

No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.

Re: A recent chess controversy

#108

Post by steppi »

indigodaddy wrote: post #91
bluecalm wrote: post #33

>>The researchers note that there’s a problem with this argument, too, as it violates the likelihood principle. This principle tells us the interpretation should only rely on the actual data observed, not the context in which it was collected. and then in the publication itself: >>The likelihood principle [Edwards et al., 1963] is a fundamental concept in Bayesian statistics that states that the evidence from an expe…

General statistical question. If we say extend the coin flip example distribution to say 10B times. Should/would we expect to see a streak of 100 or even 1000 in the distribution somewhere? Intuition alone tells me probably not for 1000 but a smallish chance for 100 (even if 10B in a row i would think a streak of 100 would be unlikely)

Your intuition's not bad. The expected value for the longest run of heads in N total flips of a fair coin is around log2(N) - 1 with a standard deviation that's approximately 1.873 plus a term that vanishes as N grows large. log2(10B) - 1 is approximately 32 and with that standard deviation, even a run of 100 in 10B flips is incredibly unlikely. For more info see Mark F. Schilling's paper, "The Longest Run of Heads" available here https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/tlroh.pdf.

Re: A recent chess controversy

#109

Post by freeopinion »

wesnerm2 wrote: post #80
rendall wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whom did he accuse? Kramnik is known to accuse other players. I've never heard this about Nakamura.

Nakamura was sued for $100 million by Hans Niemann. https://www.chess.com/news/view/hans-niemann-lawsuit-dismiss...

And what was the result? Weren't all counts dismissed?

Re: A recent chess controversy

#110

Post by lblume »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #101
cortesoft wrote: post #4

This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance. It is like asking someone to pick a random number between 1 and 1 million and then saying, “oh my god, it must not actually be random… the chances of choosing the exact number 729,619 is 1 in a million! That is too rar…

There are actually some freaky patterns in nature (including how people think) that can help identify fake data... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

The article itself states that this is not really a pattern of nature, but just a feature of log-normal distributions that sometimes do occur naturally.
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