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Comment by catnip09 | Hacker News Reader

Lichess is amazing given how little they receive in funding. The interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.

They also handle guest plays much better. I've faced less cheating bots and no annoying pop ups on lichess when playing as a guest compared to chess.com

Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection? I would love a high level overview of how it works especially when you have no data on the player.

fun nugget: HN users hosted tournaments on lichess at the start of the pandemic [0]

0] https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news

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Not sure about lichess specifically, but I know many game servers are a bit cagey about their cheat detection systems, since they don't want to give the cheaters any hints.

But as a broad concept, one technique is to compare moves against bot suggested moves. i.e. if a high % of your moves are those that a strong AI would make, something is fishy.

There’s a much simpler and more effective way. I met someone who had done that work for a chess company, done some ML to detect cheats, and they were surprised how easy it was to detect changes.I’m not going to post the solution but you might be able to guess if you think through the feature space. It’s obvious in retrospect.

They seem to use two projects:

Irwin: https://github.com/clarkerubber/irwin

Kaladin: https://github.com/lichess-org/kaladin

> Can anyone point me to how they handle cheating detection?

You can listen to Thibault talk about here [0]

0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI

> The interface is miles ahead of commercial competitors.

I much prefer the chess.com UI

Same. I love lichess and I’m so happy it exists, but I prefer the chess.com interface for playing, and analyzing games.

Probably because I started there

I play on both sites, but for analysis I almost always import the games into chess.com

Can you share what it is that you need to see on chess.com but is not available on lichess?

(I use lichess analysis frequently and haven't used chess.com much)

I personally think lichess analysis is better :

- latest engine, with webassembly or cloud mode - "learn from your mistakes" mode where when there is a drop in valuation of the position, you're given the position and are asked to find a better move ; you can also find bad moves from the opponent which is interesting to help spot mistakes faster

Also puzzles are great if you have an account (free), I find the puzzles of great quality, they really match your level and once you get better at solving the common tactics, they look more and more like small studies where you might only get positionnal advantage sometimes (instead of the classic "win material / mate in X moves" type of problem which is a bit redundant after a while).

I don't know how they generate puzzles but it seems that a lot of them are from games actually played on the site where only one line seems to give an advantage. I think it's amazing that they do that. High quality puzzles from real games.

It is open source also the neural network that they use for that. It is called Irwin and you can find it on GitHub.

I imagine (without research) that it's just "what percentage of your moves are the same as top computer moves", with a threshold.

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