Chess’s Cheating Crisis

Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:

3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)

2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)

1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")

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3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)

2: For your National-cup

1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)

Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.

Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.

I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).

Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.

You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.

"Of the 50 fastest men's 100m sprint times ever, only 15 have been run by an athlete NOT banned for drugs. All 15 were by Usain Bolt."

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1164654855329329152...

There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.

The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.

If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.

Notice the discontinuity around 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_metres_world_record_pro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5000_metres_world_record_progr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_1500_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_sta...

You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.

EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche

Anti doping agencies are always behind in doping research and many athletes have access to the best clinics there are.

If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones

For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.

If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?

Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".

Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.

Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.

Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?

And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.

Sports are a theatric illusion.

It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.

For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.

The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):

... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.

It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.

Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.

Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.

Gresham's law for chess would be noncheaters leave when cheaters move in. All that's left on Facebook is conspiracy bots chattering to eachother and suchlike.

If you haven't played in a while, then glicko will give you a wide ratings deviation, and pair you against much stronger or much weaker opponents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

Well, as the saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Maybe we should just move over to computer-assisted human chess and compete that way?

Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.

EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.

I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.

It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.

EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.

To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.

  If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing. 
   But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race. 
   Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?

So, yeah, the issue is someone getting an advantage, which in turn puts pressure on athletes to have to dope or take PEDs to have a career.

I'm not sure what the equilibrium outcome is if the restrictions are lifted, but the usual assumption is that it's a race to the bottom.

But WADA clearly has a perverse incentive to ban more and more drugs simply to justify its own existence.

Maybe the solution is to let athletes themselves figure out the rules, since they have to live with them.

I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.

In situations where you are expected to perform worse due to a stereotype one tends to perform worse.

Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.

The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner.

So the whole thing is built on an honor system.

So maybe my only novel suggestion is running lichess (or equiv) live in parallel. Something livestream viewers could also help with.

And I hope someone's replaying historical games.

"how a deep search is needed to evaluate"

Of course. Obvious now that you mention it.

I assumed different programs would make different suggestions. So overseers would want to run a few programs to see if any matched the player's gameplay, style, etc.

Probably the last time I played chess was on an IBM PC XT. The quality of misc game engines varied widely. Of course there's probably been a convergence since.

No one strategy is sufficient.