Tangently related, reading this I couldn't help but think about the biological passports for professional cyclist. It tracks blood and other values overtime, so that anomalies will jump out.
A recent chess controversy
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: A recent chess controversy
#52Earlier 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.
Getting any kind of information from a chess engine would be sufficient to gain an edge for a good player. Even something as simple as a nudge that there is a high value move in a position with no information about what the actual move is could be enough. Big chess tournaments tightly control phones and other devices for this reason. That's on a single-match level. On a tournament level there have been allegations of…
Makes sene! Thanks, I dont play much chess so its a bit out of my wheelhouse.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#53Can anyone tell me why numbers in this article are being rendered higgledy-piggledy on my browser, Firefox / Windows 11?
It uses old style figures rather than lining, if that’s what you mean by “higgledy-piggledy”. See https://practicaltypography.com/alternate-figures.html#oldst...
ta
Re: A recent chess controversy
#54> Nakamura responded to Kramnik’s allegations by arguing that focusing on a particular streak while ignoring other games was cherry-picking. 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. I don't quite understand this objecti…
Or if Bob Barker has opened door number 3 and there's a goat behind it.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#55Here's a better question:
What are the odds that a cheating accusation accurately identifies an instance of cheating?
I don't say this lightly: Kramnik very likely has some sort of untreated psychiatric disorder. He is effectively a lolcow in the chess community because he regularly (as in, almost daily) accuses much better chess players of cheating.
It's honestly a bit undignified to treat his accusation against Nakamura as anything other than a man yelling at the sky.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#56Here's a better question: What are the odds that a cheating accusation accurately identifies an instance of cheating? I don't say this lightly: Kramnik very likely has some sort of untreated psychiatric disorder. He is effectively a lolcow in the chess community because he regularly (as in, almost daily) accuses much better chess players of cheating. It's honestly a bit undignified to treat his accusation against Nak…
There’s some strange inverse, where situations we KNOW are rife with cheating have few accusations thereof (bike racing perhaps), and those that are almost certainly very rare may also have few accusations (because it’s rare).
Sometimes you have to treat any accusation as “real” just to keep the cheaters at bay. (Cheating at online bridge is rampant, and cheating at bridge competitions was and perhaps still is fraught with many scandals).
It’s often common that the cheaters really ARE very good players - they’re just looking for less work, not a goal they couldn’t obtain otherwise.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hikaru is also notable for quickly accusing players baselessly
Whom did he accuse? Kramnik is known to accuse other players. I've never heard this about Nakamura.
He's accused Luis Paulo Supi (Brazillian grandmaster) a few times after losing to him, and he accused Andrew Tang after losing to him. The latter was criticized in some online circles because it was seen as bullying a then 14 year old.
I don't know many other notable cases of Nakamura accusing players of cheating. Many players dislike how Nakamura conducts himself on stream and how he interacts with the chess community and this leads to exaggeration. It's simply wrong to compare him to Kramnik, who has dedicated many hours over the last couple years to accusing players.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess, You use a chess engine to tell you the best move - you can run a chess engine on a modern phone that will easily best the world's top human chess players. The simplest forms of this are things like: "play online, chess engine open in another window", "use your phone hiding in a bathroom cubicle" and "member of the audience follows your game with a chess eng…
Future chess games will have to be played as Faraday cage matches. Two men enter, one man leaves.
This makes me want to cheat just as a technical challenge. Could I hide a computer in my hair? Could I ingest a capsule computer and communicate with it using the resonance of my teeth chattering? (No, I would not insert one in an inappropriate place).
I'm sure it would be a downer that I cheated but it would do them a favor by saying: "look, you cannot stop it. Time for something new".
Re: A recent chess controversy
#59> Nakamura responded to Kramnik’s allegations by arguing that focusing on a particular streak while ignoring other games was cherry-picking. 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. I don't quite understand this objecti…
Indeed. I'd say that the issue is that they are misinterpreting the word "collecting". The principle is true if you are collecting or observing data live, but this data was collected long ago and with a much wider scope: when the games were recorded.
What they are doing here is sampling the data after the fact, and obviously one needs to take a uniformly random sample of a dataset for any statistical analysis done on it to be representative.
Re: A recent chess controversy
#60It is well known that Kramnik baselessly accuses everyone. The article seems to be more about statistics than chess, and doesn’t make any accusations. Kind of a click bait title IMO.
There's a YouTube video where he orders a match with someone and insists that they order brand new in box laptops and a locally hosted chess server (I think the hypothesis was testing if in person games were any different than online. The other player was in the same room). But they ran into technical difficulties when windows began auto-updates.