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Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

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Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various videos you can see of strong players forcing draws against stockfish (or engine cheaters online etc.). The general way to do it is to trade everything but rooks and then force a very closed position. Then you shuffle for 50 moves or until contempt makes the computer sacrifice material.

I mean I can force a draw against stockfish by just using stockfish myself to beat stockfish. Look to put this into perspective back in 2008 Hikaru Nakamura a world top 10 player won a game once against the then top engine and it was a significant story in the chess world that day. It's been 14 years since then. If people can easily draw stockfish I'd like to see them do it live giving stockfish the same clock. One p…

Note that you've shifted the claim a bit:

"Magnus Carlsen would have a real hard time drawing stockfish on a phone 1/100 games." is what you initially said.

If you're running a fully decked out stockfish with classical time controls, yeah the human will lose every game, but if you aren't, then humans can win in 15 second time controls [0], where computers have a distinct advantage of not needing dexterity to move the pieces, and against online cheaters[1], and with some prep (which like, you get against humans too!) they can win with weird prepped lines (Jonathan Schrantz does this fairly regularly, and he's not even titled).

And the systems those players beat are, uhhh, stronger than a phone. Edit: to substantiate this I just checked, stockfish in the TCEC, which is the big beefy 3700 elo one has hardware to evaluate 200 million positions per second on average. my phone sustained 350k/second, although that was in browser and droidfish is probably 10x faster. But you're still looking at 100x slower than the baseline. That's a significant performance drop. The phone is still comfortably above 3k elo, but not 3500. With prep and meta knowledge in a 100 game match? You only need to trick the machine once.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ObxTiA4wG8

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMTcawGzbOk

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I can force a draw against stockfish by just using stockfish myself to beat stockfish. Look to put this into perspective back in 2008 Hikaru Nakamura a world top 10 player won a game once against the then top engine and it was a significant story in the chess world that day. It's been 14 years since then. If people can easily draw stockfish I'd like to see them do it live giving stockfish the same clock. One p…

Note that you've shifted the claim a bit: "Magnus Carlsen would have a real hard time drawing stockfish on a phone 1/100 games." is what you initially said. If you're running a fully decked out stockfish with classical time controls, yeah the human will lose every game, but if you aren't, then humans can win in 15 second time controls [0], where computers have a distinct advantage of not needing dexterity to move the…

Okay I’ve never seen that 15 second game strategy before, that’s pretty amazing to literally be able to react faster than stockfishjs. I’ve seen that guy do puzzle rushes before he is an insane talent.

I guess I am overestimating the difficulty because I haven’t seen recent anti-computer strategies. I also know they NNUE changed a lot because contempt is no longer a thing.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression from reading about chess engines online is that drawing is far simpler if that is your explicit goal. Several comments online on different websites claims that they are able to end games in draws against stockfish.

There's a parameter called "contempt" that you can increase to make the engine avoid draws. The idea is that if the engine has "contempt" for the opponent, it assigns a negative value to a draw, instead of assigning it a value of zero. The engine will then only attempt to draw if it thinks that it is actually in a worse position, but it will not go for a draw in an objectively drawn game. The engine will even play su…

Contempt died with NNUE being added to stockfish, it can’t be implemented.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to analyse my games after playing them, and I must say that NOT ONCE in a few hundred of games played at my level (~2500+ on lichess rapid) I have seen a forced mate in 10+ moves other than in end-game when there are very few pieces on the board left. And when you see such long checkmate, usually it doesn't really matter, because by then all is already clear on the board. So no, I stand by my point that a spec…

That's surprising to me especially for rapid but you're better than me (2000 lichess). Under time pressure, if I have a passed a or h pawn and can simply trade down and promote I will opt to do that rather than try to calculate a deep mating combination. > other than in end-game This is frequently where such scenarios occur. Many end games are difficult for humans to play with absolute precision, even seemingly simpl…

To be honest, I'm lazy and rarely calculate more than a couple of turns: I just have a mental picture of what I want to achieve and seek ways to get there.

However, I do look up a post-game analysis, and if there are some mid-game deep checkmates, they show up in it, and it is extremely rare. The example you cite about Caruana/Carlsen game actually quite falls into the category of what I referred to as 'endgame mates' - and looking at it with a potentially cheating player in mind, such cases are rather irrelevant: a cheater will win a game or arrive to an overwhelmingly better position in the endgame so such extreme measures with 30+ precise move checkmates will not be necessary.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#256
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you could very easily do that. However, the theory is that cheaters would let the engine decide only 3-4 critical moves during a game and that would be enough to turn the tide in their favor. In chess small advantages compounds so this computer help would be enough for grand masters to beat the world champion. A cheater that understands cheating countermeasures could easily fly under the radar that way.

The problem with this approach is that you'd still need to be able to correctly identify those critical moments in the game, and a single move won't help you. You need the entire line. Which would still require a considerable skill. If you can't figure out why a single move is brilliant, you won't be able to find the entire line. If stockfish tells you the entire line, and the opponent plays something that wasn't inc…

The best cheaters are also highly skilled. This is true in online competitive games as well. Very rarely do these folks just leave cheats on all the time. That's blatant and easy to ban. But toggling it on at critical moments will give you those "clutch" wins which genuinely happen sometimes, but makes them much more reliable.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#257

This is relevant to today's events because Magnus Carlsen just withdrew from a tournament[1] after yesterday's loss to a significantly lower rated opponent who had previously been suspended for cheating on chess.com. The tournament organizers have also implemented additional anti-cheating protocols starting today. Whatever comes out of these accusations, the chess world will sure enjoy its new infusion of drama. [1]…

I know some fairly high rated players who've had accounts suspended for cheating because they got angry and used an engine to cheat a cheater. So you can be a good player and a cheater. Edit: For clarification, after losing to an obvious engine user, they used an engine themselves to strike back.

A speed running cheating expert on YouTube has observed that many cheating scandals start with a genuinely skilled player breaking records legitimately. However, that player starts cheating later in their career to maintain their status when they can't keep up with the brutal grind of being the best.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#258
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which AI has beat humans at poker? I'm curious as I just heard a guest on Lex Fridman's podcast say differently... I'm not up to speed with that realm

Pluribus

Fascinating.

> In AI, two-player zero-sum games (such as heads-up hold'em) are usually won by approximating a Nash equilibrium strategy; however, this approach does not work for games with three or more players. Pluribus instead uses an approach which lacks strong theoretical guarantees, but nevertheless appears to work well empirically at defeating human players. Across the competitions, Pluribus won an average of over 30 milli big blinds per game. Pluribus' self-learned play style eschews "limping" (calling the big blind), and engages in "donk betting" (ending a round with a call and starting the next round by betting) more often than human experts do.

Re: Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So how did he make it to +3 position against #4 player in the world if he is so terrible? There are two answers to this question. One is obvious and is the subject of the article we're all responding to: Cheating. Some people think he's cheating. The other is that nobody actually thinks Hans is terrible. Even if he cheated he's still at least a 2500-level player and perfectly capable of taking the odd game off of s…

> The word you want is conclusive. No. The word I want is indicative , as in "Serving to indicate; Pointing out; bringing to notice; giving intimation or knowledge of something not visible or obvious". Giving "imprecise" analysis at the Q&A session does not mean anything at all, and of course it can't be used as an evidence of any kind that a cheating took place.

If that's really the word you want then you're simply wrong. It can be and is being used as evidence that Hans may have cheated, just like his history of online cheating is being used, but nobody serious who's commented (Hikaru, Eric Hansen etc.) thinks the evidence is conclusive. It's evidence, but it's not proof.
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