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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

Wow, somehow I missed this. Pretty wild accusations from Magnus and Hikaru on this. Hans just had a horrific tournament in his last attempt, which makes this whole thing pretty interesting.

Hans didn't play engine perfect lines when beating Magnus in the Sinquefield Cup, though he obviously played extremely accurately.

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Ignoring the lines (and any cheat at this level would be canny enough to avoid the top few engine moves), there's something seriously off about Niemann's analysis - shallowness and incoherence covered over with bluster. Even Ramirez seemed disdainful of his reasoning about his position against Firoujia tonight.

It's pretty grim for him if he really didn't cheat. He won't be invited to a tournament involving Magnus again.

Seconded re: Neimann's analysis. Specifically, he stated in a post-game interview that Carlsen had played the same Nimzo-Indian g3 line in a prior tournament, even though that never happened.

For the sake of the sport, I hope Neimann didn't cheat, but I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1981206 (a blitz to be compared against https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=2372960 from 2 days ago).

Yeah, but Move 6 is different and it changes the whole dynamics of the game.

Prior to Move 6 this is a well known line with 700 hundred high level games, and Magnus (apparently) never played the line with 6.a3 before, so I find Hans's claim extremely dubious.

Still not an evidence that he cheated, but I agree that sum of signals e.g. prior cheating ban on chess.com, incoherent after game analysis without engine help and in general never being worse against 4 Super GMS and having a winning position against all of them does not paint a good picture. Something smells, but we will probably never know.

Edit: corrected move#

Good catch. I was searching for a game without Nf3, but this is effectively a transposition.

One minor point folks aren't mentioning that I think works in Neimann's favor - Carlsen is known for enjoying the Catalan, and the opening in the game was essentially a Nimzo/Catalan hybrid. This fact makes Neimann's supposed pre-game prep a bit more palatable. Everything else (postgame interview, past history, Twitter antics) seems to work against Neimann though.

My question is - if Neimann did cheat, how? Doesn't seem like something that can be done easily in an OTB tournament.

You could stick the computer in your shoe, like the submission suggests?

Or you could swallow a buzzer? The input could come from someone who watches the board from afar?

They metal detected & RF frequency detect before the round 4 match.

RF detection before a match seems useless, unless the device is in constant communication.

I don't know enough about those devices and metal detectors to be able to tell whether that's effective mitigation. Could one make a device small enough to be hard to detect?

There are rumors that Carlsen's prep got leaked and that Niemann knew what was going to played the morning of.

Although this is pure speculation, it seems to be a more plausible and satisfactory explanation if Niemann did in fact cheat. It would also explain why Carlsen would withdraw from the tournament rather than continuing.

Did Magnus ever played 6.a3 line before in this well known Nimzo variant? The Game with So doesn't have it.

Are you accusing him of cheating today despite the 15 minute delay and heightened security?

The 15 minute delay was introduced after the Magnus game.

We are talking about the Firouzja game.

No, the accusation is that the sum of signals doesn't look good.

It's binary. Either he did cheat today or he did not. If he did not then who cares what his post analysis looks like after drawing the #4 player in the world and being +3 at some point. The only reasonable analysis is to declare him a cheater today or discard the interview. To say that the interview would point to him cheating vs Magnus but not today is nonsense.

You can always say 40% cheater, 60% non cheater in this one game, but this updates the priors for future game considerations. At some point the priors will be such that the belief in the risk of cheating (which needs not be more than 50%) will cause the player to not be invited.

I don’t think this is right. The idea seems to be that his post-game interview shows he didn’t understand the positions very well despite playing them accurately, so he may have cheated. But a) today there was a huge amount of extra security and specific scrutiny on him, b) he drew despite having a substantial advantage at one point, and c) a bad interview where he fumbled some stuff would be a nothing-burger if it hadn’t come after an accusation. It seems much more likely that this is a swirl of confirmation bias, not sound adjustments to priors. No one seemed to think his play was suspicious before the Magnus tweet and now everyone is reading tea leaves.

I got "busted" in school for "cheating" in an assembly language lab. I fumbled explaining the code to the TA, and he thought I had copied code from someone else. Explaining and performing are two different skills, it's very possible to be able to do things that you can't describe.

I agree that he probably did not cheat vs firouzja. Even vs Carlson my money is at most the line magnus wanted to play somehow got leaked. It’s hard to imagine getting live engine support otb at a modern tournament.

Right. But the specific point in this thread is that his horrible analysis after the Firouzja game was suspicious, which doesn’t lend any weight to the accusation unless we’re also claiming he cheated in that one.

Why is it hard to imagine? It's easy to imagine him getting signals from the audience for example which can be done in multiple ways. I am not up to date with the state of metal/RFID detectors but simplistic ones they use at chess tournaments are probably possible to game as well.

It’s easy to imagine almost anything. The question isn’t whether he could but rather whether he did. I’m challenging the reasons many people believe he did, or likely did.

The point is that people keep bringing his post game interview today which is only relevant if he cheated in today's game, when security and scrutiny were at their highest.

So called Bayesian analysis frequently goes awry because of its ultimate dependence on assumptions (priors). But you don't even bother to do a calculation.

The event might be binary but our knowledge isn't. You may think he is likely cheating but you're not sure. You won't declare him a cheater but you will be suspicious.

What is the reasoning of people accusing a player of the OTB cheating? That he somehow (with the help of a computer?) got up to +3 at some point against said #4 player, but then decided to stop cheating?

If he is that 'bad' to draw a +3 position, how did he achieve this position in the first place?

Seems ironic to ask this on a post where a guy's cheating device malfunctions causing him to lose. There could be limitations which prevent him from cheating completely accurately

No, not ironic at all. Said device was extremely unreliable and failed to win even 2 games - while the person you accuse of cheating has improved from 2400 to 2700 in about 2 years. Pretty reliable cheating device he had, only to fail at the crucial moment.

Also, consider this: Nakamura knows that the position is good, but does he know it before he sees the evaluation, or after? Because it is a fact that when top player knows it is +3, he can explain why it is so good. But just looking at the board, without knowing the evaluation, he might have a very different conclusion.

I don't know about his game yesterday with Firouzja, but the rumor is that Magnus thinks Niemann got hold of his opening preparation before the game, which would put him at a huge advantage.

This is not the point. The point was that he good enough to nearly beat the #4 in the world if he wasn't cheating.

Everyone has their good days and bad days. Elo rating estimates a probability of an outcome, and even with 2880/2680 it is far from zero.

this guy is right

No GM would be stupid enough to cheat playing 100% engine lines, they of all people know which engine lines would look particularly suspicious. All they need to know is to avoid any serious blunders, and play some important moves here and there, and that's enough to get a serious advantage at this level.

It turns out that "Clever Hans" was reading subconscious body language cues from Magnus

background for anyone that didn’t get this joke:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Do you have a source of Magnus accusations? He seems to have withdrawn relatively quietly, perhaps consciously trying to refrain from cheating accusations.

Hikaru was less reserved on the other hand. He called Hans's post-game interview analysis sub-2700 level after Hans Neiman badly mis-evaluated several positions.

His tweet included a video of a famous interview with Jose Mourinho saying “if I speak I am in big trouble”

Yeah I think he's being very professional instead of just throwing out accusations; let the arbitrators call that.

I'm not at all into chess (only through the odd HN post where I get out-nerded left, right and center), but I can imagine it ends up being a very analytical thing, where the experts or analysts can spot whether someone is playing like a human or a computer. And I also think they can't add "noise" (e.g. human mistakes) to it either, that'll either throw the computer off, OR it'll look "uncharacteristic".

Not a member of this forum, but wanted to help a bit here.

First off, computers are (especially in complex positions) ridiculously stronger than humans, like your average family car can't keep up with a Ferrari. In less complex games (like an endgame with fewer pieces) top-10 players can definitely play 20 perfect moves in a row, in an attacking game that's harder. A player like Niemann is not really expected to reach that level in a game like this.

A second point is how much time you spend on each move. If you play a move with big consequences (say sacrificing material, or violating a principle) you would generally think longer. A computer doesn't see it that way and might spot "instantly" that this move wins material 7 moves down the road, where even a World Champion will check his analysis before playing that.

So playing too perfect and playing too fast in critical positions are both red flags. In Online chess, they often use this to grade your moves, and flag you if you go over certain thresholds, especially if you have a lower "rating".

Hans Niemann did both of this (too fast and too good) and then after the game was not really able to explain his thought process afterwards. None of this is hard evidence, but they are red flags, and if you add that Niemann has been caught before in online chess... that's so many red flags it would make the CCP proud.

Hope that helps a bit! So no, there is no very analytical thing, which does mean we need to be a bit careful and leave the option open that Niemann maybe just really liked this move on general grounds, got lucky it worked, and has learned of his previous mistakes. It could definitely happen.

Nothing really throws the computer off. It is objectively much better than any human at evaluating any position, not just the types of positions computers get into.

Magnus didn't make an overt accusation: it was other chess experts who read that into the circumstances of his withdrawal &c.

Esports has a nice overview of the most prominent reactions:

https://esports.gg/news/gaming/hikaru-nakamaru-on-carlsens-w...

I think it is important to notice that Magnus actually didn't make any actual accusation.

It doesn't sound like Magnus has made any accusation, right?

He has done absolutely everything you can do to accuse somebody without actually crossing the line into directly accusing them. His meaning could not really be more obvious.

(My bias: I think Hans' analysis is pretty dubious, but if it were anyone other than Magnus I would give these accusations little credence. I think we who are not in the know should be giving Hans more benefit of the doubt than people generally seem to be giving)

Yes, because he's far too professional to do that without ironclad proof.

And even if he had ironclad proof, he might still not go public.

If he had ironclad proof, he'd hand it over to the arbitration committee / judges; it's not very professional I think to accuse people directly, even with proof.

I'd say the video attached to this tweet is rather clearly insinuating some accusation though I haven't been following this saga.

Withdrawing from the tournament is the loudest accusation you can make without words. I'd rather believe Hans on this https://youtu.be/GSLM1K6O6aU?t=1507

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