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Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

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Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#111

Post by Lapsa »

ddoolin wrote: post #46
2c2c2c wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in competitive games it's all about the social credit the game might a big part of their life, and being perceived as a good player puts you higher in the pecking order within your friend group

Having cheated at a few competitive multiplayer video games over the years, this is one of a few good answers, particularly when it comes to FPS. That, and many such video games induce boredom so quickly, and almost always the reward at the end is not worth the time spent getting there. Sometimes I'm glad I didn't waste my time getting to end-game content just to find out it was more of the same (or garbage) anyway.…

I cheated in Arma3. Moneyhax - just wanted to practice flyin` some jets in a decent combat environment without grinding endlessly. Glitched invisibility - real hillarious for couple hours. Occasional item duping to jumpstart combat readyness of our group (somewhat hated this one). Cliff glitching to enter inside of them and store loot on persistent servers. Most of the cheating came out of curiosity - to explore and push the boundaries of game. Nevertheless, the very best Arma3 gaming experience came out of fair and square pwnage operation of our group on public server. Infil via chopper, 2 snipers @ south / east hills, 1 AT/spotter, 4 people assault squad, myself as a commander miles away on an island watching through UAV. We cleared like 20 people in couple minutes and got a thropy tank without taking (!) any casualties. Planned and prepared for about an hour (+ ~3h to build up necessary supplies).

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#112

Post by mlyle »

ipaddr wrote: post #94
mlyle wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing people who take 10 seconds every move— whether an obvious “only move” or the most complicated situations… and that pick the move that stockfish makes almost all of the time… are cheating.

Depends I like to slow play. It can frustrate someone to play quicker and make mistakes

Yah, I know about slow play, too, and it's effective against me when I'm in the mode "Eh, I didn't really have time for this game, but one more!"

But -- if you're over 2000, surely you've encountered cheaters and understand the difference that I'm driving at.

It's rather blatant, and on Chess.com I almost always get an email a couple weeks later that they were removed for cheating and that I got rating points back, and when I look back on Lichess I often find them banned. I don't even bother reporting anymore.

If it's early enough in the game that I realize it, I can just get into a closed, very-slow-to-progress position and watch them clock flag. But that's still a waste of 10 minutes of my life.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#113

Post by mlyle »

zwkrt wrote: post #34
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #22

I don’t understand what someone gets out of winning chess games by cheating. It would actually make me feel worse about myself.

There are people who’s sense of self-confidence is so fragile that they cannot allow themselves the possibility of losing or feeling “lesser than” in any context. Cheating and being banned is much better than showing the world your actual skill level and confronting the possibility of failure and judgment. The thought process goes something like “well if I beat them by cheating they’re a sucker for actually trying. A…

Happens to mainly two sorts of people, in my experience:

* Overperforming kids (whether smart, in athletics, etc). They don't have to confront failure and work hard like everyone else. They get a lot of praise and self-worth gets tied to it, and it all feels kind of fake/too easy. Then, one day, the work ethic and tolerance of failure everyone else has been learning become critical...

* People raised in abusive or quasi-abusive environments, where success at any cost, appearances over all, etc, are emphasized. The ends justify the means to get the required outcome.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#114

Post by have_faith »

tzs wrote: post #79
have_faith wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it looks like to cheat is more than just playing relatively accurate moves. Average move time, centipawn loss over multiple games, blunder/mistake frequency across multiple games, strengh of moves while in time trouble, etc. Cheaters tend to stand out when you look at a short history of games.

That would clearly work for someone who is cheating by letting an engine do all the work, but how about someone who mostly plays the game themselves just using the engine rarely? Give Nakamura a minute with Stockfish any two times of his choosing in each game, and he would have probably won the Candidates. Heck, just give a good player a blunder alert that tells them after they have made a blunder that they have done…

Subtle cheating is always hard to automatically detect. You can't tell with high confidence that someone used an engine for one move every couple games for instance because sometimes humans find those rare moves on their own. Thankfully a lot cheaters seem to have an ego that pushes them to cheat more and more though so they tend to get weeded out.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#115

Post by ConstantVigil »

wolverine876 wrote: post #69
colechristensen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High level humans and chess engines play differently. You can see commentary on chess YouTube videos when they run across cheaters. Also the chess engines people use are accessible, you can compare what a suspected cheater does with what the cheater does and if they’re exactly the same consistently, you have a pretty strong signal. One of the bigger tells are strange moves that set up a many move series resulting in…

> High level humans and chess engines play differently. You can see commentary on chess YouTube videos when they run across cheaters. That's similar to people describing how to catch other frauds, such as fake Amazon comments or bots. It's medieval 'science': They usually have no evidence of their accuracy, either false negatives (frauds who they overlook) and false positives (people falsely accused of fraud). So it'…

Thing is... if your methods work well enough to help you avoid the thing you wish to avoid; does it matter if it's right or wrong? It works, right?

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#116

Post by than3 »

Unless they've made significant improvements, this thing is borderline useless.

About all it does is act as a nice PR/gimmick. Magic thinking.

When last I checked about 5 years ago, they were including client-based stats in the analysis (time per move, focus, and timing between clicks to pick a piece up and drop a piece).

The issue with doing that is the client is fungible, you can set any state you want locally; and so by manipulating these stats you could skew the input going into these models.

To give people a layman's short overview of the model:

It uses a several CNN Pooling Layers for feature detection and LSTM (attention embeddings) in a siamese network architecture.

CNN models notoriously fail to detect features that that are larger than its kernel size.

The LSTM embeddings can only be as useful as the features that it is trying to detect.

There were a number of problems with the model at the time, a high false positive rate, overfitting, and too much weight was being given to client-controllable input.

When the client-controllable input was held stable (constant). Certain book openings would be skewed with additional weight towards a false positive, and earlier book moves activated more often than lesser seen positions.

I brought the issues up to ornicar years ago in an issue, but they closed the issue without comment. The posts are mostly gone now.

There were a number of disagreements (mostly about certain people with admin privileges abusing their authority, not sure if it was ornicar or one of their flunkies; either way not important just completely unprofessional).

I guess it was good enough for them despite the high false positive rate (driving account churn).

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#117

Post by than3 »

CSSer wrote: post #14

I’ve seen a video of Magnus Carlsen playing on Lichess before. Does Irwin ever accidentally flag him or people like him? Do these sorts of folks have to be verified in some fashion?

I would assume they verify titled players to avoid any potential liability or defamation legal issues but they aren't the most professional bunch so who really knows. There are a lot of questionable practices they've done over the years as an organization.

As for Irwin, its detection rate, and thresholds, it has fairly high false-positive rates inherent in the model.

From my experience, if you get banned don't expect any kind of due process. They aren't professional, they don't respond. Not even the legal contact on their charity.

Not everyone gets banned for cheating.

They do ban people from the lichess site for many other unprofessional reasons such as contributing to the project (when they don't like what you had to say on an issue and you weren't spamming).

I have to wonder how many similar-named accounts got axed alongside mine when they decided to go after me for what I disclosed. Its not like my github username was connected in any way to my lichess account (or that similarly named).

Needless to say, I don't use their platform anymore because its more bots than anything else, and I don't volunteer my time to people that don't deserve it.

As a side note, their lack of standard professional practices make me wonder what kind of fraud is actually going on behind the scenes.

As a business, the only arguably beneficial reason for not following GAAP+ other standard business practices is to commit a fraud.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#118

Post by than3 »

ricardobayes wrote: post #2

This is really cool. Rampant cheating is the reason I completely abandoned playing chess, so nice to see something happening.

I'm in a similar boat, I used to play ~ 50 games a day and I'm down to about 3 games a week now. No weekend play.

Once you get to ~1900 FIDE level of play and rework your repertoire for anti-engine strategy you realize just how much rampant cheating is happening.

This continues until at some point you have to ask yourself, do you want to waste your time volunteering to be a victim to satisfy someone else's severe mental illness.

They get their dopamine hit for psychologically abusing you with a tool they didn't create, often with some amount of delusion to justify it.

What do you get out of playing a game against a Super-GM rated computer? Nothing but time theft.

The current state of the game is without a guarantee that the game is between two humans, the game isn't actually chess. The providers for online chess don't make that guarantee.

So based on the incentives, the game you play on their services is more likely to be not-chess but they still call it chess. Deceitful bunch.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#119

Post by than3 »

DJBunnies wrote: post #5
ricardobayes wrote: post #2

This is really cool. Rampant cheating is the reason I completely abandoned playing chess, so nice to see something happening.

Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by cheating?

Failing to follow the rules set forth for chess.

Specifically, in this context receiving outside assistance directly or indirectly, that in any way impacts your decisions made during the currently on-going game.

This includes more than just lines and moves, such as the exact evaluation score of a given position.

Re: Irwin – the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous

#120

Post by wolverine876 »

ConstantVigil wrote: post #115
wolverine876 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High level humans and chess engines play differently. You can see commentary on chess YouTube videos when they run across cheaters. That's similar to people describing how to catch other frauds, such as fake Amazon comments or bots. It's medieval 'science': They usually have no evidence of their accuracy, either false negatives (frauds who they overlook) and false positives (people falsely accused of fraud). So it'…

Thing is... if your methods work well enough to help you avoid the thing you wish to avoid; does it matter if it's right or wrong? It works, right?

> if your methods work well enough to help you avoid the thing you wish to avoid; does it matter if it's right or wrong?

You don't know if it's helping you at all; that's the issue. The latter question is a bit bizarre.

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