Is it just me, or is Chess becoming a thing lately? I've recently started to really enjoy watching it (kinda hate playing it, haha), so maybe it's just because I'm paying attention?
[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I first followed a WC match through live commentary in 2013 (incidentally Carlsen Vs Vishy in Chennai), which I think was the first ever live streamed on YouTube.
I've been following these WC matches since then; in similar boat as yours. Love watching all these analyses of immortal-games etc., but absolutely hate playing it :-)
Online chess( pandemic apart) would never be considered equivalent to tournaments over a board
The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.
But suppose you sample from the engine's ranked moves to have some decent ACPL (average centipawn loss) error rate. Just a slightly lower rate than you'd have on your own.
If you further bias your sample to moves to that look reasonable to you, then I don't see how you'd get caught.
Current engines may not have the right support for such sampling, but it wouldn't be hard to implement, e.g. with a private fork of Stockfish.
Detecting a stockfish moves over enough sample size is easy sure, but detecting a engine which is designed to imitate human play not make the best move everytime is not easy with number of moves a human would play in their lifetime.
The original commenter say it’s easy to cheat at chess. While potentially possible, I wouldn’t consider building a ML model to mimic your own play an ‘easy’ cheat method.
I’d also say building a model to mimic your own play consistently would be incredibly difficult. But, that’s for a different conversation.
The point is cheating is bigger concern in online chess than other eSports
Anyway, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on chess cheating. For me, the small chance someone is cheating doesn’t ruin the esport for me - For you it does, which is a perfectly reasonable response to it.
Secondary thought in the engine idea you had - chess fraud detection, I imagine, goes well beyond just the engine and move likeliness. It will also human-like interaction (Can’t confirm this, but the PM in me has me consumed with thinking about solutions to this problem)
When people play a chess game online, they are frequently evaluating positions. This results in cursor/mouse behavior that’s sporadic. If a user is considering moving the queen, they’ll move their cursor over to it. A user relying on an engine for every move would interact with the board in a very precise manner.
A player with a perfect engine to mimic humans will still get caught as their interaction with the board would differ greatly because only one position is considered for each move.
Chess is only there because of history but it checks none of successful esport checkmarks. One might even argue that it has been a "solved" game for decades which is the opposite of what you want for a successful esports game.
One of the most important esport features is updates be it meta changes or new patches. That's why our current esport games are so huge even though they are relatively very new.
Id much rather watch competitors competing on 100% equal terms, without any developed advantage other than one created through the competitors skill.
Rocket league is a fantastic esport, and it’s been the same mechanics for years. There are no ‘special items’ or OP’d power ups. Both sides are 100% equal. It’s why I love it, the game is pure - Competitor vs competitor.
Most (all?) esport games use fog-of-war (RTS) or level design (FPS) or some other mechanism that hides the enemy from you. Without that, esports games have also been "solved by computers" for decades.
There is of course a chess variant with fog-of-war (dark chess). As far as I know, computers don't beat humans at that.
Chess is often played on software and tracked on software, and my understanding is that there are sometimes issues related to cheating.
You can't similarly use the strength of hydraulic cylinders to aid your strategic skills in a heavy lifting contest, or trebuchet skills, etc
I understand what you mean though, so fair enough. But I think it's generally only worth being nitpicky about definitions if it's important to maintain them and I think in this case formally solved is one of the important ones.
As for meta changes and new patches, chess kinda sees this in the rise and fall of certain openings. For example, the popularity of the London System in the recent decade and the development of new theory within popular openings (I recall the Tal Variation of the Advanced Caro-Kann being popular in a recent tournament even though the Short variation was seen as the most critical way to continue for white for a long time). And this is just at the highest level, anyone in online blitz has had to learn to refute the Stafford Gambit because it "entered the meta" after Eric Rosen popularized it a few months ago.
I've been playing online since the 90's and I can count one hand the times I've been certain I was playing a cheater.
Lichess and FICS are great (and free).
The "smarter" cheats use the engine only when they need to and those are harder to spot but again it's moves that make no "sense" with the direction of play - be like playing sunday league football and having the chubby dude with the beard take of down the pitch like Messi.
Mostly they catch them by running engine(s) over the games afterwards and looking for correlation between moves played vs what the machine wanted to do.
The funny ones are the players who drop a piece from a blunder then immediately start playing like Kasparov for the rest of the game.
Every day we have world class GMs (including Magnus) playing online, streaming play, commentary & such. It's put a real buzz into the game. A lot of it has to do with the personalities of current competition GMs and top streamers at the top.