Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think the simplest answer to all of this is a cage match.

Specifically, a Faraday Cage.

Magnus believes that Niemann is cheating via communication with a computer. Fine, let's completely remove the ability to communicate with a computer. Both men are searched on the way in. Heck, for fun lets have them play in tight sporting outfits so it's very clear what they are carrying and doing.

If Magnus destroys Niemann, he'll be able to pretty handily claim that Niemann can't win without communication to computers. If Niemann is competitive, or wins, it will be hard for Carlsen to make any more such claims.

And also, the sport will have a spectacle like we've never seen before. Tell me you wouldn't pay to watch that match!

View on HN

Fyi communication is not needed to cheat. Modern chess engines capable of high level play and assistance can be extremely small and concealable.

Yeah, we'll need them to don tight spandex clothing and walk through a sensitive metal detector on the way to their chairs.

Bend over and cough?

Not to spread rumors or anything, but this has gone over the top:

> A chess grandmaster has become the victim of an online rumor that he used a sex toy to defeat the world champion.

https://www.insider.com/chess-feud-hans-niemann-magnus-carls...

Satire is dead.

It was satire. It was originally suggested on a streamers chat as a joke that the streamer laughed at. Noone took it seriously

Just make them walk through a really big electromagnet and hope that neither has a pacemaker.

What if the pacemaker is the cheating device?

Stop the heartbeat in morse code of the next move. Communicate with the device via blood pressure

A pacemaker is cheating death already, so what is chess.

They use metal detectors on them already.

Surely competitive nude chess is a thing?

There still needs to be a way for the cheater to communicate input about the moves in the game to the Arduino.

The players should be required to strip down to their underwear and wear elegant tournament-provided kimonos and slippers.

Communication could be done entirely invisibly from an outsiders perspective. For example, embedded electrodes sensing when one clenched their jaw muscles.

My brother and I did this magic trick and convinced our grade school we had ESP... the mark tells brother a secret number. I put my hands on brothers head and without communicating I tell what the secret number was. It was just the number of times he clenched his jaw.

Put them in a room without window or any exterior interactions, 4 cameras in each corner, wifi/radio signal jammer, 10 minutes delay with livestream, I would honestly pay respect to Hans if he can still cheat in those conditions

Is wifi even necessary? Could one embed a chip which does chess inference somewhere in one's body?

At GM levels the matches are typically broadcast live and/or have an audience, so it would only require an observer to input the moves.

This can be counteracted by broadcasting with a delay, something I believe they already do. It may be the case that the delay needs to be increased.

Chess turns can take 20+ minutes sometimes depending on the time limit of the game, so that would be quite a delay, and then you would still have a problem with a live audience.

How about a 'turn-delay'... the broadcast field is always three turns delayed rather than a static time delay

Well if there's 3 rapid fire exchanges (trading Queens & Rooks for example) lasting 10 seconds total, followed by a 20 min move, then the broadcast would have to freeze frame on the 1st move in the rapid fire sequence, so as to stay 3 moves behind, with the last 2 "hidden" moves evident to all that the pieces will be traded.

Then you again require communication to the players, which a Faraday cage would solve.

If one was willing to go as far as devices implanted into the body, it's somewhat easy to imagine inputs via normal-looking fidgeting: toe taps, even perhaps clenching some body part.

While not trivial, it doesn't feel like the hardest part of that particular engineering challenge.

This being HN, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that they could build an OpenCV system to watch a match in progress over a weekend.

Arduino you ain't cheatin'? :)

How many milliwatts would you need to run Stockfish at ~2900 strength under classical time controls, and what's the smallest extant gadget in that power range?

(I'm assuming the I/O power would be negligible compared to compute, since it'd run at very low duty cycle).

We all know this is embedded in his glass eye. 500Gflops/watt gets you pretty far on battery power.

Wait, does he really have a glass eye?!

I saw this recently, so not only is it possible, but it's fairly simple: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html

I'm pretty sure they'd notice the large box and powerbank in your pockets on the way in if you tried that.

Fitting both into your shoes would be easy... which I actually know from experience, having put batteries into shoes for other purposes.

it's absolutely doable, especially for someone with the commitment of a chess grandmaster, but the main here issue wouldn't be having the processing power to calculate the moves, it'd be the input bandwidth to update the computer with the moves.

yes a cheater could have - for example - a subdermal implant that vibrates to update them with a killer mid-game line to go down, but, without the internet, it would be a huge uphill struggle to update the board with the moves. certainly not impossible, especially if you were very dedicated, but very, very hard to get right, especially without getting caught under such scrutinous circumstances

The set up of the board at the start is static, so even a very naive approach of "piece at square (nibble, nibble) moves to square (nibble, nibble)" only requires two bytes per turn. I would expect there to be IMMENSELY better ways to encode this state update if I wasn't a dunce, and the people making cheating hardware are very good at that style of compression.

> piece at square (nibble, nibble) moves to square (nibble, nibble)

Chess notation is very compact, you don't even need to say where the starting piece was in most cases because it's implied by the move.

If you have 2 rooks on A1 and H1, and the move says rh4, only one of your rooks can legally make that move. However if the move was rc1, both rooks could make that move so you do need to disambiguate.

presuming that the cheater communicates with the system through some form of physical pressure, they could probably use a modified Morse code re-optimised for the frequency of letters in chess notation. according to wikipedia[1] this already exists and was developed for telegraph and radio transmission of chess games, although I have no idea how well optimised it is

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_notation

That suggests a fun strategy for Magnus or anyone else playing Niemann: do lots of moves where there would be ambiguity in which piece was moved.

Now however Niemann is entering the moves, he's got more to type and more places he might make a mistake.

this is one of the reasons it may be best to find another method.

one I thought of is to rank all the squares from most-used to least-used, then assign each of them a Morse code, simplest first. 64 squares is 2^6, so the maximum length input you would ever need is six. given a usage frequency for each of the squares, you could calculate your average input length by the sum of all len(square_code) * square_frequency divided by 64.

assuming all squares are the same frequency (1/64), it's just the sum of all len(square_code) divided by 64, which I believe comes out at 322/64 = 5.03125, although I could be wrong about that.

this makes your maximum necessary input per move 12 bits, but your average will be lower, depending on the frequency distribution of squares. (ignoring castling and en-passant for a moment) this is 2 bits more than using a piece+target square technique

just make sure to x-ray everything.

0]: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html

>t's absolutely doable, especially for someone with the commitment of a chess grandmaster,

would that same someone be able to pull something like this off on their own, or would they need assistance building/programming/etc? At that point, how many people need to be involved before it becomes a secret too big to keep, or dead bodies start showing up within the cheater's orbit?

I'm almost certain that if you gave me a month and a half decent budget I could whip something together. I sincerely doubt this is beyond the scope of one committed and somewhat intelligent person

plus one more programmer/engineer should be enough, the rest of the supply chain can be oblivious to the purpose.

In tournaments that have broadcast without delay you don't even need a computer. You can have a script reading the game and calculating at home. You just need to receive signals which is a way easier task. As you don't need to do input nor the actual computation.

You joke, but the only tournaments Hans has performed well in (2700+) are coincidentally the ones where the boards are sharing the moves live online. He performs at a 2400 level when the games aren't available online.

The same happend at Sinquefield cup: 3050+ performance with no delay in broadcast. About 2640 performance once security measures were introduced (and he was very very lucky to score 2/6 as he was completely lost in 2 of drawn games but his opponents has unusual mental lapses allowing him to escape).

It's a small sample size of course but it's a pattern, not an exception.

What do you have to back this up? A comment on a Twitch stream? Don't be a joker.

I think the answer is not that difficult really. All Hans Niemann's moves, all his games, are public information.

People can analyze them and form their own opinions about whether he has been cheating or not. The question "how" need not even be considered.

Carlsen has of course already looked at the games, with the experience of having preiviously looked at millions of games between humans, and millions of analyses from computer engines. And he must have realised that Niemann has achieved something unique, he has conducted many absolute masterpieces, sometimes one after the other in the same tournament, while being rated 2400-2500. Performances so perfect, that no other human has ever accomplished.

Hypothetically speaking, why doesn’t someone make a proof of concept. Cheat. Have an exhibition and try to get away with cheating. Best way to tackle cheating is to invite people to give it your best shot.

Someone has. It was posted here recently [0]. Different stakes to be sure, though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32729105

Thanks for the link! I agree there needs to be many more safeguards from cheating but I'm really not behind Magnuson on this one. Poor sportsmanship at the very least going on.

Also from a game theory point of view, it doesn't make much sense. Magnus would have nothing to win from such an encounter but a lot to lose. In his position I would never take such a deal.

Whether he is cheating or not, it doesn't make much sense for Hans either. Only one and unlikely outcome would be in his favor.

Cheater or not, he is A LOT more likely to lose to the current best player in the world. He won't gain anything from it. If he is a cheater odds are even lower. If he is honest and loses it would be devastating. If he is a cheater, it is a lot better for him to not take the deal and deny any wrongdoing.

With chess, at that level of play, you can't decide which player is better or worse by judging from a single game. Only the aggregate between many players playing between each other can tell you that - ELO system achieves that. So them sitting in a faraday cage naked after an X-ray and playing a single match would not tell much. If they played a whole lot of games against each other, it would more or less work but that is impractical and ridiculous.

This comment is beyond playing fast and loose with reality. It’s actually counter factual.

Pr Kenneth Regan who is the leading expert when it comes to cheating in chess did indeed do a statistical analysis of Niemann performance during the past two years [0]. He found no indication of cheating whatsoever.

[0] https://en.chessbase.com/post/is-hans-niemann-cheating-world...

As I wrote in another comment, I find it ridiculous to consider some Pr Kenneth Regan (a weak chess player actually) a leading expert on cheating, and to hold his opinion above the opinion of Magnus Carlsen, who has analysed Niemann's games and also faced him in tournaments.

Why?

He is not some Pr Kenneth Regan. He is actually a recognised expert on statistical analysis when it comes to cheating in chess and has worked for FIDE multiple times. Plus it’s not like it’s only his words. He actually published a very valid engine based analysis of Niemann performance in the last two years. Is the issue that it’s showing the opposite of what you would like it to?

Meanwhile Magnus is actually a player in the game involved and the losing one at that. He has zero claim to objectivity.

> If Magnus destroys Niemann, he'll be able to pretty handily claim that Niemann can't win without communication to computers. If Niemann is competitive, or wins, it will be hard for Carlsen to make any more such claims.

I don't think that's very conclusive.

The thing is, there's still an element of luck[1] in chess. A lower-rated player can beat a higher-rated player, and a higher-rated player can dominate an even match.

[1] luck, not chance.

They are human beings. People underestimate the human factor in chess. Someone can simply have a bad day or fall apart under the pressure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_197...

a more recent example of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen_versus_Nepomniachtchi,...

>If Niemann is competitive, or wins, it will be hard for Carlsen to make any more such claims.

Niemann might be cheating, but still capable of playing 2700+ without cheating. They can both be true.

>Heck, for fun lets have them play in tight sporting outfits so it's very clear what they are carrying and doing.

>And also, the sport will have a spectacle like we've never seen before. Tell me you wouldn't pay to watch that match!

Magnus wearing one of those Speedo swimmer speed-suits would be worth the price of admission without the chess just for the sake of absurdity.

Some of the cheating rumors/theories involve devices inserted or implanted into the body, so tight body-suits wouldn't even suffice.

I attended the EM wave propagation lectures years ago at my Uni, so my knowledge is rusty, and the following might not be something that is true in practice.

The faraday cage tries to equalize electrical field potential over space. It does so by allowing electrons to move more or less freely, typically inside a metal mesh.

But

a). metals (unless we use superconductors) have electrical resistance

b). electrons themselves have rest masses (i.e. don't accelerate infinitely quickly in response to force).

So, the movement of electrons is not instantaneous, therefore the electrical field cannot be equalized ideally. in effect we achieve attenuation of the signal, and not its complete blockage.

Secondly, the mesh must have some relation to the signal frequency (the wave-length), probably at 1:1 or 1:2 ratio. At some frequencies (terahertz, infra-red, visible, xray) you'll need pretty much a solid box to attenuate those.

And there's obviously tech which you cannot block/attenuate, like neutrinos. Producing and receiving such signals is however non-trivial and requires particle accelerators and large cavities filled with mineral oil and bulky detectors, so we can probably skip this :). Gravity waves belong to the same category.

You can also probably try to send and receive particles, like electrons or alpha particles if you use non-solid meshes.

> At some frequencies (terahertz, infra-red, visible, xray) you'll need pretty much a solid box to attenuate those.

The width of the walls scales relative to the wavelength of the frequency you're trying to stop. So it doesn't take much to block all useful signals.

You should realize that aluminum foil blocks visible light signals.

> You should realize that aluminum foil blocks visible light signals.

Yup, I mentioned the solid box earlier - a non-mesh metal container.

Reading through some more material, it seems that there are ways around it - one can use a static electric field to send signals, e.g. switching it on/off or changing its intensity. I suppose the differing el. charge of the opposing walls of such a cage/box would create en electrical field gradient within such box, which is easy to detect, if one's goal is sending some low-bitrate signals.

It's detectable (i.e. the fact of using it), but the communication scheme itself can be encrypted or encoded, so plausible deniability can be employed.

Electron rest mass is negligible to other effects. Notably electron rest mass adds to the same effect as inductance. You can calculate the effective inductance of a piece of wire coming from the electron's rest mass, and it is several magnitudes smaller coming from the actual inductance coming from generated magnetic of the same electrons.

Match in swimming briefs inside Faraday Cage would have absolutely record viewership

This is a terrible mythbusters way to test a hypothesis. What’s the variance and how many samples are needed for say 95% confidence in disproving null hypothesis?

WCC is a dozen+ rounds. Even then if you were watching it in the 9th game, it may appear the one player is stronger than the eventual champion.

The funny thing is that at this level, if a player is told they are losing or winning in a very complex position, they are often capable of figuring out how they are losing or winning precisely. The bits of information a top player needs to cheat are so few that for the average viewer it is inconceivable.

Definitely don'forget that even a single bit of extra information halves the space space.

Some porn site suggested a naked match

Why not just let him play and run analyses on the moves? Surely they can, for example, input all the moves into known chess engines and see if there's a match with the alledged cheater's moves. Then the match will be annulled and the guy ousted.

That'd be really funny. Chess then became all about making a good move, but not too good, lest it may accidentially match with a chess engine and get you disqualified. The meta would then to put the opponent in a spot with only one viable move option: They either get disqualified on the spot, or slowly suffer because they now lost an important piece. I was never really good at chess, but even when playing async games with friends over gameknot(?) I'd often used the "if opponent does X, do Y" feature because some moves were just obvious.

Also, from what I gathered, you can instruct most chess engines to supply you with a list of moves for the current board state. So instead of picking the best move all the time, pick another good enough move to avoid your suggestion.

That's pretty clever actually.

It's much harder than it sounds. Firstly a top level player will match the top engine move 65+% of the time when playing legit, so it isn't that unusual to have a run of quite a few engine moves in a row (especially since they aren't independent, some positions are easier to play than others).

Second, as Magnus has said in the past, if he has the ability to consult an engine at a single point in the game (of his choosing) he would be unstoppable. The reason is that in each game there are relatively few 'critical points' at which the result is decided.

Faraday cages don't block many types of communication, for example visible light, sound or low freq magnetic fields. And there are organic non metal receivers for that (eye, ear, bird magnetic navigation)

a chess cagematch in leotards would be pretty funny, I'm in favor of this idea

How much of all this could be just building-up the hype that'll end with a bigger payday for both? You may gladly pay, and I'll bet they'll happily take the money you'll now pay.

I think both of their reputations are forever tainted (at a minimum), so if that's the goal they've misplayed their hand significantly.

How is Carlsen's reputation tainted? Honest question.

I would have thought that chess fans would have seen this as a brave and perhaps even virtuous move?

It's unclear how, or even if, Niemann cheated. The evidence is, at best, circumstantial: a win by a slightly weaker player, playing black, in a line that should have been impossible to prepare for.

So some see him as throwing a tantrum after an unexpected loss, and blaming it (implicitly) on cheating. We can't know if he's right, and we may never actually know. In the absence of confirmation, some people will think less of him for that.

Carlsen is seen as having drawn unwilling participants into his drama (he withdrew from a Swiss style tourney this forfeiting several games), he is seen as passive-aggressive for not making any direct allegations, and there is an arrogance around Magnus believing he knows better than the chess community and organizers about how to deal with former cheaters when they have quite obviously chosen to forgive and trust Hans.

I’m sure some people think Magnus is very brave and courageous for what he’s doing but my general impression is most people don’t approve of Magnus’s methods.

Thank you for explaining!

Okay now that Magnus has made a direct allegation and is telling everybody clearly about how he doesn't want to play with Hans in any future tournaments, everybody loves him again. The negativity you saw towards him I think was purely just that he was being passive aggressive and not talking to anybody and just dropping out of tournaments randomly. It was just a bad way to go about things.

Now you'll see the Magnus hero worship you expected.

He ruined two tournaments in a row, first by withdrawing from the middle of a round robin tournament and second by intentionally throwing a game. If Niemann now ends up qualifying by less than 3 points the guy in 9th will justifiably be extremely upset.

>I would have thought that chess fans would have seen this as a brave and perhaps even virtuous move?

There were many people who defended him withdrawing from Sinquefield but throwing a game is just embarressing, especially in the qualification stage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com