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The relevant section of the video on YouTube is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI&t=1080s
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…
It's not that simple. I'm an amateur player (2200 at lichess) but there are plenty of situations where I simply _know_ the best variation. Plenty of chess players analyze their own games using an engine and then use their memory when they are confronted with the same position. The same with opening theory: when I'm using my opening preparation, I'm playing at GM level as these are just the moves played by GMs in that…
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…
Happened to a good friend of mine up in Seattle. Good fella, incredibly smart, graduated top marks, a bit ostentatious sometimes but you can tell he really wants to do right by others in spite of his sometimes high falutin tendencies.
Anyway.
Lost a game of chess to his blue collar dad, guy couldn’t handle it. Fell into a hole of depression that lasted for at least an entire episode of Cheers
I love chess. At my absolute best, I had a over-the-board USCF rating of 2156. I never made it to master no matter how hard I tried. So, ticked off, I gave up serious play. Years go by and while I'm no where near as good these days, I started enjoying playing again. And, then I start running into people online who were clearly using engines instead of their own skills and wits. Now, I only pay with friends and over-t…
I have been playing daily for about two years now on Lichess and over-the-board whenever the opportunity presents itself. I find people who burn the clock when their game takes a turn for the worse far more frustrating than those who cheat their way to victory. At least with the cheaters, the game is over pretty quickly, so I can move onto a game which is actually enjoyable.
Having now played nearly 2000 games on Lichess, I'm pretty happy with their ability to weed out cheaters. I've very rarely had cause to suspect my opponent wasn't playing fair. Maybe once or twice someone with a lower ranking than me seemed to be a bit too good --but then we all have our flashes of inspiration, as well as our off days.
However, on a couple of occasions, I've logged onto the site to see a notification that I've had some ranking points restored, as a previous opponent had cheated. But, unfortunately, Lichess doesn't tell you which opponent or which game, so I'm still none the wiser.
PS: Agree with you about the people who run the clock down, when they're losing. Really annoying. When this happens, I usually switch to another browser tab and read intarwebs instead, switching back to the Lichess tab every 5 mins or so, to see if they've made a move yet.
I see a lot of comments about the general topic, but none on the actual tool, which appears to have no (public-facing) updates in about three years. Presumably it could be a tool that incrementally improves over time with the explosion of data lichess has, but surely there would be a single commit since 2019. Do we know that this is what's actually running on lichess's backend today?
Lichess: The free and open source chess server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32045763 - July 2022 (65 comments)
This is really cool. Rampant cheating is the reason I completely abandoned playing chess, so nice to see something happening.
> nice to see something happening the latest ("real") commit is from 3 years ago
Though ofc you're certainly right that this isn't a recent development at all and at the same time it's certainly also not perfect yet. And I doubt it ever will be. I don't think cheating in online chess is something that can ever really be solved completely.
I see a lot of comments about the general topic, but none on the actual tool, which appears to have no (public-facing) updates in about three years. Presumably it could be a tool that incrementally improves over time with the explosion of data lichess has, but surely there would be a single commit since 2019. Do we know that this is what's actually running on lichess's backend today?
Yes, it is used according to this: https://lichess.org/source
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?
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…
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's easy to say, 'this is how to identify them' - nobody will ever test your claim.
Regarding false negatives, for example, there is reason to believe that people detect only the obvious frauds, and that our detection becomes tuned for the obvious. Regarding false positives, people will cite the 'obvious' positives - e.g., some humanly impossible property - but even if they are correct, the problem is the cases in the grey area. False accusations are no joke.
Ironically, now we want a bot to solve our problems. What data do we have to say that it's accurate, or any more accurate than we are?