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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

#271
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). I think it's the other way, chess is about as easy to cheat as it gets. With chess you can have a perfectly usable cheating system that isn't on the same computer at all - computer A is clean, and is where you actually play on chess.com, computer B is where you ent…

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student. Strategy games may be harder, bu…

Funny thing, there are already YOLOv3 derived aimbots, and a lot of anti cheat now scans pci-e cards to try to detect them. They intercept video input and act as mouse and keyboard devices, acting almost completely independent of the host computer.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student. Strategy games may be harder, bu…

I doubt that since a weekend project. You need to analyze a video stream of hundreds fps in real time with very low latency requirments. You'd probably need an FPGA to do that. Custom training an AI to only trigger on heads.

YOLOv3 can do it

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#273
post #27

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1] The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted…

It's chess, it's not heart surgery exams. The cheating sucks, but anti-cheat measures are infinitely worse. There is no better way to suck the fun out of something than demanding you submit to a patdown and metal scan or a rootkit before you can participate.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#274
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need 'hundreds' fps - you can do it w/ 10sec and get better reaction time than humans (reaction under 100ms in track events is consider foul). It should not be so difficult with a separate GPU and a capture card. Serial mouse/keyboard inputs are trivial as well.

How is Serial mouse/keyboard trivial? You'd need to make a custom mouse that receives data from your second PC. You'd probably want it to be wireless else you will have 2 cables coming out of it. And no just having a second fake mouse is not fair. That's easily detectable by software and would definitely raise a lot of red flags.

This is how: take ESP32 - it has bluetooth, wifi and serial port all integrated and it costs couple of dollars. It's small and it runs on 3.3V, it has a voltage regulator that it allows to connect to 5V.

I can do the code and place the esp32 in a mouse on a Saturday (my C is always rusty, not using it professionally). And I am a hobbyist at best. So the original serial mouse/keyboard are connected to ESP32 that normally proxies the signal of the hand movement to the PC.

If I press a pedal (w/ foot) the second computer would receive a signal, calculate a human alike trajectory to move the mouse and send it to the ES32. The latter will execute it along with the left click to shoot.

Like I said - trivial. The same can be done with the USB port as well, and it's not harder. Just that for PS/2 I have the tools laying around.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#275
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student. Strategy games may be harder, bu…

It's not hard to make cheating tools, it's hard to run them on the same hardware as the game and not get caught. Chess cheating tools don't need to be on the same hardware, so they're not detectable in the same ways.

It is not hard to run cheats for basically any game that uses video on another machine. Just a little more expensive (i.e. it is harder for someone in high school, but not anyone over 20).

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's trivial these days, and this very task is one of the introductory tutorials to Google's Coral AI Tensorflow boards: https://coral.ai/models/object-detection/ Which you can buy as a USB stick for $59: https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ Sure, it's a little more complex if you want to train on specific heads as opposed to a generic model, but not hugely so. The biggest challenge would likely be downsampling…

That's a generic AI. I would be very surprised you could get it to work accurately for games and hyper specific the heads of (possibly non-human)models. The box you see in the marketing material is completely useless for this use case. Besides how do you get the data to your standard second PC, scale the input the USB thing expects. Send it over USB and back, and then you have to send it to a custom mouse that receiv…

If you want absolutely olympic response times (110-120ms), it is a little tight but nowhere near impossible. 7ms as the other poster says is absolutely insane. Most videogames will already trigger on consistent peak human response times, so you'll want to trim down your bot to go to a more average person (160ms, maybe a bit higher) to fly under all the heuristics they might (but probably don't) use. Plenty of time to compute things.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#277
post #5

So page 9 from the last paragraph is interesting. Chess.com basically indicate that apart from Hans, a number of highly rated players (including higher than Hans) have been caught and admitted to cheating. I haven't gone over the report thoroughly, but it's clearly focused on Hans's conduct and not so much on the state of play regarding online cheating, which is, even by Magnus's statement, the chief focus of all of…

Rampant online cheating? Hm: > At the outset, we want to make clear that while these events highlight a critical topic in chess—cheating the vast majority of chess games do not involve any cheating. We estimate that fewer than 0.14% of players on Chess.com ever cheat, and that our events are by and large free from cheating. We firmly believe that cheating in chess is rare, preventable, and much less pervasive than is…

How rare is cheating in contexts where there is money at stake?

Your average person playing blitz while seated on the toilet has little incentive to cheat, particularly if it involves setting up real time access to a powerful engine ... One expects almost no cheating in such an environment.

What if the numbers are: 1/700 cheat, but 1/7 GMs cheat ...?

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#278
In releasing this report, Chess.com appears to violate their promise of confidentiality expressed in Exhibit C:

> As we mentioned earlier, we have made no public statements regarding the reasons for your account closure or our findings, and anything that happens in this conversation will remain confidential.

But they did at least hide the player identity, so we only know it's a FIDE top 100 nearly-2700 player.

I'm slightly surprised at how easy they make it for a confessed cheater to unban themselves:

> As a titled player, we would like to offer you a chance to re- establish yourself within the Chess.com community, and because of that, we have made no public statements regarding the reasons for your account closure or our findings. If you choose to acknowledge any of the behaviors that you feel might have resulted in your account being closed within the next 72 hours, we may try to work with you privately to have a new account opened, equipped with a title and Diamond Membership.

Re: The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

#279

Tbh this scandal only reminds me there is no point in playing a game like chess or go online for fun.

Or any game online, really. Couch multiplayer is the way.

I've played a few online competitive games that were fun. But if you go to the mainstream games you end up with kids calling you a stupid noob ... when you beat them. Weaned me off StarCraft at the least.
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