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Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

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321–330 of 339 posts

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#321

There is so much more to our report than what was focused on in the WSJ article. The full report will be shared shortly…

I'd be curious to know about the cheating rate on chess.com. I'd expect at lot of people to cheat occasionally, e.g. kids with too much time on their hand, people trying to "fix" their ranking, or getting a bit of help when they play against their friend and so on... And also... who cares? there are no stake, just playing against random people, who cares if they cheat as long as you have fun playing. It's less fun fo…

Since chess.com ranks similar players against each other, and I'm not planning on tournament play at all, I actually wouldn't care in the slightest if I played someone who was consistently cheating. That would mean I'm playing a hybrid human/computer instead of a pure human, but I'd still be playing someone with a consistent ranking and it would still in some sense be a fair fight.

I would be upset if someone was inconsistently cheating, and so I'm playing someone nominally at 1400 but for this game they're actually playing 2100.

Of course for true tournament play, the rules are the rules, whatever they may be, and they must be followed for it to have any meaning.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#322

> “Outside his online play, Hans is the fastest rising top player in Classical [over-the-board] chess in modern history,” the report says, while comparing his progress to the game’s brightest rising stars. “Looking purely at rating, Hans should be classified as a member of this group of top young players. While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.” I…

The word "evidence" is badly misunderstood, often even by the very people throwing it around.

There's a rather large contingent of people who use it as a synonym for "proof", thus demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of the very concept even as they think they are looking smart. There's a lot of people who think that it is somehow the responsibility of someone like Carlson to have unambiguous proof that is often physically, legally, or morally impossible for them to have. Not that the Kantian imperative is the be-all, end-all of morality or philosophy, but it's still a useful idea, and if one runs this memeset through that grid it quickly reveals that you can't use this as the bar people must meet. It creates a society where anything that can be hidden, often not even hidden particularly well but just hidden at all since the standard is "proof", will be gotten away with. This is impractical.

(Although there is an extent to which we do indeed live in that society.)

There's another smaller contingent (from what I can see, the former is the dominant group) who thinks that "evidence" doesn't have to be proof per se, but that for something to be "evidence" it must be single-handedly capable of meeting some bar, be it "preponderance of evidence" or whatever is being used. These people are blind to the fact that it is often possible to produce ten pieces of evidence that are individually weak, but together are too improbable to ignore. While this case must certainly be treated with care since it is sensitive to how well done the Bayesian-style analysis of their probabilities is, it is perfectly reasonable to use such evidence to come to conclusions. This contingent will often try to defeat the evidence in detail, decrying each individual one and downplaying it, and completely failing to address the totality, be it either as a method of being disingenuous, or, I am convinced, often just lacking the intellectual firepower necessary to address the totality of evidence holistically.

It's important not to fall into that trap because I think in the real world, this is how many very important questions can be settled... and I don't just mean big philosophical or societal questions, or even news of the day like this, but even little personal things. The signs that your partner is cheating on you often come in like this... you may not catch them in the act, nor even receive some individually huge clue, because there's one or two humans intelligently trying to deceive you. Such situations often end up giving off a lot of little clues, each of them individually explainable-away, but the totality pointing to the truth. Or you can determine some new direction your company may be trying to take by a pattern of little changes long before they announce it publicly. Any number of things in the world where you can carefully assemble a lot of little things to come to some reasonably strong conclusion.

Back on topic, the combination of the fact that Neimann was known to have cheated before and the accusation of the current best player in chess, who was kind of going out on a limb to do so, was quite strong evidence that Niemann did cheat. Neither individually would be enough for me to come to that conclusion strongly on its own, but the combination was compelling. I considered that enough proof for my personal opinion. Proof enough for authority figures to sanction would require a higher standard and I support and applaud them for being more careful.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#323
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How true is that at the top levels of play? What do you think the success rate is for online players telling an engine from a human? 1% 99%

At top levels it gets closer -- often human play is compared to engine play and people will discuss which moves were 'engine-like' vs 'human', and a significant achievement would be to play the engine moves on every turn. Although it should be said that engine moves are not always necessarily the best moves positionally, nor the moves with the highest win % versus a human (because you can 'trick' a human, whereas the…

Thanks for breaking down how this would actually work in practice. As an amateur player, I don't think I personally would be able to tell the difference between playing a much better player and a good bot, or a bad player and a bad bot.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#324
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever people do at young age does not have to define the rest of their lives. Did you never do anything stupid in your life? Also, I don't know why alleged cheating when playing on some site should affect OTB tournament games. They are even governed by different bodies! Just have really thorough anti-cheating measures in place, and see how strong he plays.

I don’t know if you are aware but he was removed from chess.com in 2020 and admired he was cheating then. So has a long term and recent history with cheating, this wasn’t just some youthful indiscretion. The report includes strong evidence he was recently and repeatedly cheating in games for prize money which shows a serious lack of ethics. Anyway, I don’t see any significant difference in OTB vs online cheating. It’…

> It’s at most slightly easier to cheat online

This statement is so far removed from reality that I am not sure that it would be productive to continue the discussion.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#325
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily observed to people who know what to look for or how these things work. I'm sure a mechanic would scoff at how many "obvious signs" the average driver misses about potential problems with their vehicle.

these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of webdev beyond “here’s how html syntax works”

>these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of webdev beyond “here’s how html syntax works”

these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of autorepair beyond “here’s how internal combustion engines work”

See what I mean? It's a bar that most people don't cross.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#326
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if you are aware but he was removed from chess.com in 2020 and admired he was cheating then. So has a long term and recent history with cheating, this wasn’t just some youthful indiscretion. The report includes strong evidence he was recently and repeatedly cheating in games for prize money which shows a serious lack of ethics. Anyway, I don’t see any significant difference in OTB vs online cheating. It’…

> It’s at most slightly easier to cheat online This statement is so far removed from reality that I am not sure that it would be productive to continue the discussion.

Your disbelief just shows ignorance.

The hard part of cheating isn’t inputting and receiving moves, and in fact documented chess cheating goes back to the late 1800’s.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#327
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of webdev beyond “here’s how html syntax works”

>these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of webdev beyond “here’s how html syntax works” these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of autorepair beyond “here’s how internal combustion engines work” See what I mean? It's a bar that most people don't cross.

I kinda see what you’re saying, but I also really think that observing that websites often act differently when you’re not focused on them is a pretty standard-level observation to make even if you’re not a programmer

also knowing how an internal combustion engine works is not equivalent to knowing that html code goes in angle braces. it’s more equivalent to knowing that you need to use a certain type of wrench when working on a certain type of car (I don’t know if this is actually true because I don’t know how to fix cars, but it’s more equivalent)

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#328
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of webdev beyond “here’s how html syntax works” these are things I’ve noticed without any experience of autorepair beyond “here’s how internal combustion engines work” See what I mean? It's a bar that most people don't cross.

I kinda see what you’re saying, but I also really think that observing that websites often act differently when you’re not focused on them is a pretty standard-level observation to make even if you’re not a programmer also knowing how an internal combustion engine works is not equivalent to knowing that html code goes in angle braces. it’s more equivalent to knowing that you need to use a certain type of wrench when…

>I also really think that observing that websites often act differently when you’re not focused on them is a pretty standard-level observation

Agreed, and I would guess that is the extent of what people do with that observation. They see it, and have no clue why or how or what that means. Is it only certain browsers that do it, or does it depend on if it's a phone or laptop? Maybe it's a AT&T service feature on phones now? Or maybe just iPhones do it. Maybe it's only on previously visited sites? Or maybe it's a virus or a scam of some sort.

People with no frame of reference see things very differently. It's a magic box.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#329
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know about the cheating rate on chess.com. I'd expect at lot of people to cheat occasionally, e.g. kids with too much time on their hand, people trying to "fix" their ranking, or getting a bit of help when they play against their friend and so on... And also... who cares? there are no stake, just playing against random people, who cares if they cheat as long as you have fun playing. It's less fun fo…

Since chess.com ranks similar players against each other, and I'm not planning on tournament play at all, I actually wouldn't care in the slightest if I played someone who was consistently cheating. That would mean I'm playing a hybrid human/computer instead of a pure human, but I'd still be playing someone with a consistent ranking and it would still in some sense be a fair fight. I would be upset if someone was inc…

This is actually what lichess does - if it flags you as a cheater, you are silently paired against other cheaters.

They have almost the entirety of the lichess system source code publicly available, but from what I can gather they have a private set of weights on inputs - I assume to prevent cheaters from fully reverse-engineering the system.

Re: Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

#330
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each I always wonder what the expected value on this strategy is. I'm a naive sucker, so I have worked my ass off at my job, and I have had 250% salary growth in 5 years at it. Maybe that's standard if you're job hopping. Do you ever get raises? Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get? Would it be more stressful to juggle this…

Depends the sacrifices you are willing to make and what you want. I earn 300K CAD between the jobs plus a pension. Let's call it 230K USD. I have three years of experience. I live in a low cost city in Canada as all my jobs are remote. I suppose it depends on whether you view this as a pro or a con, but my earnings are virtually all cash (some 20K in stock in total), so I am not taking a beating with the current mark…

I like your approach. Thanks for posting an informative reply. You provided some valuable insight which, while intuitive, is much more useful when codified.

I work one job, make a bit more but not a lot, have house and boat payments, and bank most of the rest. Just started collecting SS. I could retire, but with the uncertain US economy, I'm looking to go part-time, or work remote instead. Remote would give me back the ~10hrs/wk of commute time to do other things. But virtually no chance of going remote without a job change.

I had an AWS interview which looked great, sounded great, nice increase, and was mostly remote. I aced the pre-interview(he told me so), thought I aced the interview (8rs over 2 days), but was "not selected", and "no specific feedback". Since, they've invited me to interview for several other positions. I've ignored them as 1) large expenditure of time and energy to prep and perform in the interview, and 2) I think there may have been some age "consideration" on their part. Not sure I'd want to stay long enough to be fully vested in the stock compensation. I can play that from the outside.

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