Dear Chess World
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Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions. So, this is possible. Moreover, one needn't carry a device on themselves. A cheater may have accomplices providing hints, if they carry a device.
It will be interesting to see how chess tournaments, as well as FIDE, chess.com, and other major chess institutions react to this situation. The potential for cheating has now been brought to the absolute forefront of chess discussion. And Carlsen's actions have been questioned by FIDE in recent interviews, with FIDE staff condemning "vigilantism" of a kind.
Some set of resolutions seems necessary--perhaps standards for security in major chess tournaments, perhaps an alliance to share cheating or reliability data amongst major chess operations, perhaps a standard term in major chess tournament agreements that no previously identified cheaters (online or otherwise) will be allowed to play, and perhaps sanctions in some form against Carlsen (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges).
IMO, this reasoning potentially implicates every high level player. If it's possible that two hints can account for the difference between 2600 and 2800, and a 19 year old kid under heavy scrutiny can exploit this weakness without being detected, it seems assured that other more experienced players are also exploiting this.
It seems that might even be enough for Hans as a 2675 rated player to get an edge against 2800+ player without even actually cheating
Are GMs cheating against NMs because there's said skill gap?
After playing what seemed at the time like 'computer-type chess' - relentlessly accurate goal-seeking strategy, Deep Blue started to play far less obvious and riskier moves. Kasparov's prejudice that a computer couldn't play like that led him to believe that Bobby Fisher was hiding inside the machine with an oxygen tank and a sandwich.
I watched his later matches against Deep Junior, around 2004 (?) in New York City. Match was tied, in the final game Junior made a mid-game move that was surprising to everyone in the analysis room. They were using a different software to analyze the potential lines and not finding the advantage for DJ. Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley couldn't 100% agree that it was a bad move, but they said from what they can see it looked like a mistake by Deep Junior. Kasparov to a lot of time to ponder, and they accepted an exchange that would lead to a draw.
It was a very psychological moment in that era when machines were not clearly superior to the best humans.
If average player does 100 mistakes per match fixing 4 of them won't matter. But if great player makes 6, fixing even single one can be deciding
Software running in a smartphone can play deep games against each other.
Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting. They are more akin to text-to-image AIs but as though every single picture they produce is better than what any artist ever could produce.
Part of that is because Chess is easily defined (the win conditions are comparatively simple).
I'm rambling now and I think that's enough wall of text for a hot take.
Why would chess engines playing very well mean human chess stops being interesting? I don't see the relation.
And a computer performing a TAS isn't playing the game at all.
So many cheating scandals boil down to splicing, which is again not playing the same game.
Tools that don't hack the game are very often allowed and openly used.
However, TAS is very unlikely Computer Chess because the TAS is actually a composite of a vast number of individual human player inputs - assembled by in effecting rewinding and continuing the game over and over. The TAS is not a machine beating the game, but the effect if humans played the game as well as they know how. That's why they have "sync" problems during a GDQ, the playback device has no idea how to play, it's just robotically carrying out actions.
I think this is questionable. While we can understand the physical limitations of a human compared to an engine, we tend to alleviate the intellectual limitations. Just like an engine can deliver far more power than a human could ever do regardless of their training, a computer performs far more chess move computations than a human ever could, regardless of their training. It's just that our brain is biased toward alleviating computational cost, because we implicitly think "in the end, a human could as well play the same moves as a computer"
I do agree however on the premise that chess is a zombie sport, but I think it has more to do with the ease of cheating. If you consider cycling for example, there has also been cases of cheating with an electric engine inside the bike, and new cheating methods are likely to be developed faster detection procedures. And in this case "Bike engines are like car engines are to sprinting"
Why does it have to be humanoid? The chess engine isn't.
I didn't mean "humanoid" as in "C3PO sitting across from the player at a table", I meant humanoid thought processes.
As far as I know, none of the chess engines are humanoid in the way they determine the next best move.
For one, they are all using far, far more instant-recall capacity than any human, ever.
> its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.
Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?
They may preclude robots as players, but that's a post-hoc fallacy - "they require all players to be humans, so therefore robots cannot replace humans like in Chess".
Sure, and if you had android basketball players or soccer players, they would probably play the game differently as well.
> Which rule in football, tennis, american football, baseball, basketball or hockey requires humanoid players?
The totality of the rules put together tend to require that. For instance, in the NFL, whether or not a player carrying the ball is considered "down" depends upon their elbow or knee touching the ground, which implies that they need to have elbows and knees. Whether or not a catch is considered in bounds depends upon both feet touching the ground in bounds, which implies that they need to have feet. And so forth. Soccer has specific rules about the hands, feet, and head, while basketball's rules around dribbling specify hands and footsteps.
Obviously you could build a robot that looked like a dalek with a pneumatic cannon and design the robot to shoot a ball, and that robot would probably be better than human players at shooting baskets or completing football passes, but it wouldn't actually be able to play the full game according to the same rules that apply to human players.
But yes, people will continue to play chess, go and spear throwing because it doesn’t matter if something non human is better.
Are they? The throwing sports? How many people do you know who regularly follow shotputting or javelin (outside of possibly the olympics). How much do the top 20 javelin throwers in the world earn in sponsorship and prize money and how does that compare to other actually popular sports.
I have no doubt that chess will remain at least as popular as javelin or shot-put for the foreseable future. I'm just not sure that counts as 'popular'.
Why? That seems like a completely arbitrary line to draw.
In fighting games, most AIs are discredited and stupid because they have no reaction time. I don't know of any that name in a nondeterministic 10-15f of reaction time. It really complicated things.
E.g. I remember early 3rd party Starcraft AIs would beat humans just by micromanaging certain nimble flying units.
Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players. More like 0.1 if I'm feeling sharp.
The back of the envelope percentage calculation absolutely does not apply at this level of chess. In reality if Niemann were to play Magnus in 100 games, he would be exceedingly lucky to win one game.
I mean, you can look at the stats. They play all the time and while it becomes less accurate at the highest ratings (more so at the 2800+ level), 2400 vs 2600 does still result in something in the general range of 0.25. However, if it's 0.1 (like in your example) then my point is even stronger since it would be even harder to turn that into a win consistently with just 1 hint.
>Even at my own mediocre level of 1800, I definitely do not score 0.25 against 2000 rated players.
If you are noticing that at your level, it is probably either selective memory or specific to your play as ELO-estimated winning chances hold up well enough at 1800-2000.
(FWIW, I am 2000 USCF and an expected value of 0.24 vs a 2200 and 0.76 vs an 1800 feels quite reasonable to me.)
This window seems closed though. Carlsen seems to have no evidence. Where else could the evidence come from? All we have is character attacks. Even if justified, they can't prove that he cheated.
All we know for sure is that Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence.
100% serious question.
If he saw something unusual, like "Hans was messing with his shoe" or "I heard several vibrations coming from Hans during the game" etc.. that would be at least something.
It would be something. Magnus has given nothing.
If he'd heard the guy's damn shoe buzzing he would have insisted on a search.
This accusation hits many of the heuristic high notes.
That doesn't mean he definitively cheated. But to me, with ~15 years of chess under my belt, it does make this accusation credible.
I could name specific players who I'm pretty sure were cheating in my own game. I've sometimes had a quiet word with a ref and asked them to watch a particular player closely. I've occasionally had a louder word with a ref and asked them to enforce the rules that are in place to make cheating harder. But you can't pull something like this based off of nothing but your own feelings.
The challenge with this appoach of course is identifying a players strengths and adjusting for their preparation. Making 20 top engine moves in a row is not odd if both players studied that exact line before the match.
What's odd is making 20 top moves in a row on a bizzare line that nobody has ever played before that Magnus specifically prepared because he knew it was unusual (and engine disadvantaged) and unlikely to be in anyone's prep.
Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
1. https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/exclusive-shirley...
https://tomnew.medium.com/usain-bolt-lance-armstrong-and-the...
It’s only called “testosterone replacement therapy” when it’s prescribed by a doctor btw. Taking exactly the same course of medication in any other circumstances is called “taking steroids”.
In my quick research on this, the TUE process appeared to be quite strict, and definitely not an easy "you just need a note from a doctor" kind of thing. For example, in the NFL, the only example I could find where they'd give a testosterone exemption is if you had testicular cancer and had removal of 1 or both testes, which seems reasonable. I also found examples where both the NFL and FIFA had recently suspended players for testosterone use.
If you have any other examples or sources that counter this info, I'd be very interested to see it.
There are also faaaaaar more PEDs than the labs test for. The state of PED testing is completely unreliable, and you really have to be an idiot to get caught. But that’s only if your PEDs are actually prohibited, which they often aren’t.
Ball is in Han's court.
If they tell the truth, there is no libel, and they don’t need anybody’s permission to speak.
The most convincing candidate for such a device I've seen is an Illuminati Thumper Pro hidden in Hans's shoe: https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper. If you watch the footage of him getting scanned before his match with Alireza (and, crucially, before Magnus announced he was dropping), there are a couple of subtle things that are consistent with this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIulWkTHuu0:
1. He swallows (seemingly nervously) at 4 seconds shortly before his left shoe is scanned.
2. As the left shoe is being scanned, there are 2 beeping noises that at least to me, sound like they are coming from the wand, but are seemingly ignored by the wander. The same beeps do not repeat when his right shoe is scanned (that is, it's not just metal parts built into the shoes themselves). Two caveats to this part: First, I've heard differing opinions on whether the thumper will trigger metal detectors. Second, it's possible (even if unlikely IMO) that those beeps are not from that wand and it's just a coincidence that another wand or object beeped - since we can't see the wand in frame.
3. At 1:17 he starts nervously fidgeting with the credit card as the RF scanner gets close to his left foot and noticeably slows down when the scanner switches from his left foot to the right foot, and appears to stop completely as soon as the scanner is moving up away from his right foot. The RF scanner, to my understanding, would only detect devices that are actively transmitting which the thumper shouldn't need to do at all if Hans were using purely to receive engine moves/hints during the but the fact that it theoretically could transmit would explain why he'd be nervous about getting scanned anyway.
Of course none of these observations are proof but they sure look suspicious to me.
You want to look for evidence that such an intense level of scrutiny is too good at finding signs of ill intent.
e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone.
just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of training you could improve the info transfer rate?
"I would just needed to cheat one or two times during a match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better, or here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible."
Even just 1 bit - an indication to be careful - would be enough to boost the strength of a GM. An accomplice coughing in the background to let you know there's something to watch for. For a strong player - and there's no doubt that Niemann is a strong player, the question is just how strong - that's all they need to avoid making mistakes. GMs can solve insanely hard puzzles, because they know it's a puzzle and has a specific solution. Same thing with 1 bit of info.
Of course, realistically they could simply use Morse code instead of "bits" and transmit two squares (just 4 Morse "letters").
i dont have a horse in this race i just like thinking about things in terms of information theory since this is a remarkable applied case
another way to decide this - have them play blitz (where the moves are way too fast for info transmission to happen), and see if the skill level scales accordingly?
Perhaps a top-level player can jump to a higher level if they can stop worrying about coming up with brilliances in the macro strategy, and instead focus entirely on making their micro-level play spotless.
Blunders are exactly what a device like the one described would seriously help with. If the buzz means both "there is an only move here and it's not immediately obvious" and "at least one of the natural moves here is a blunder or very inaccurate" then you need to just send a buzz and you've probably cut inaccuracies significantly. That said, a very simple communication device like this is probably badly hurt by a 15 minute delay.
Interesting, I'm not sure if a computer has the ability to recognize something as a "natural move but also a blunder." It would require a very human-like way of thinking about moves, which computers don't generally have.
Probably the easiest case of "natural move but blunder" is anything that is a top 3 engine move when looking 3-5 moves deep, but losing significantly on deeper evaluation.
Also, this sort of categorization is at the heart of how chess puzzle collections are automatically assembled. A good chess puzzle contains an unnatural move that wins--the exact opposite of the natural but blunder. Chess sites scan their online play databases for these all the time, and serve them up as puzzles.
Any human 1500+ can recognize the natural human move. The way the computer thinks about moves is different.
I really don't believe that Stockfish can tell you "this move is tempting, but wrong."
I'm sure you could build something in that might kind of work, but until I see it I'm skeptical.
What does that even mean?
ELO gives you a statistical evaluation of how likely victory is for one of the player. Hans rating means he has non insignificant chance of winning against Magnus.
Hans can win without cheating as this last game proves. There is not a shred of evidence against him after all.
magnus completely destroyed hans in two games, as black. I think the ease with which magnus took hans apart in these beach games, presumably added to his suspicion when hans played so much better in the Sinquefield cup.
I do think Hans is cheating, but I think the proof will lie in statistical analysis of his games and demonstrating that he has an unusual (>3200 rated) propensity to clutch out specific moves. I think everyone suspects at this point that if Hans is cheating, its only a handful of moves per game.
Not a fair contest. There are plenty of top classical chess players who are weaker in blitz and vice versa. It’s a different skillset. Classical is all about preparation for the opening followed by some deep thinking in the midgame. Blitz is all about pattern recognition and the ability to simplify down to an ending where you can blitz out the exact solution from a database.
It's not going to make the game more fun, but it's probably necessary.
As these players are on timers there is a race against a clock. So if you know where to focus your time/effort you can easily gain an advantage.
Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.
They remember all the variations they consider, and they've considered most of the variations their opponents have calculated, so the variations aren't new branches, they're just pointers to spots in the game tree both players have in their heads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY
They put a number of mid-game positions on the board, and Magnus was able to guess the players, tournament, game number, who won, what the next few moves were. Who was playing on the table next to him. What their moves were.
First, those people should look at his YouTube. Obviously he's capable of analyzing games. To think he'd be incapable of analyzing a game he just played? What? It makes no sense.
To think that someone, even if they were cheating in every game, was not a 2600ish rated player and to perform like Hans is just ridiculous. Every 2600 player can out analyze anyone who is a 2100 player (Botez).
The argument doesn't stand up at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector
I am very far removed from anything related to Chess, but if they want to get serious about this they should hire people who specialize in the federal-contracting adjacent field of TSCM (technical surveillance countermeasures).
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tscm+tech...
I also think that people putting a lot of focus into shoes or other clothing articles underestimate the motivation and capability of people to use the traditional "prison wallet" method of concealing things.
Wouldn't putting the electronics inside a conductive case hide them from it? Maybe it's hard to get an antenna out if you do that though?
Someone familiar with slight of hand could comfortably scratch here and there while dropping pieces in a 'build' pocket.
The second merely suggests an unusually clever, yet plausible methodology.
The tricks people have pulled to cheat in baseball and (NFL) football are similarly amusing!
If anyone has other examples, I'd love to read about them; it gives me similar satisfaction as learning how a magic trick works.
I felt silly for even thinking this, but seeing as you've mentioned it. It would be so hilarious if true considering he has offered to play naked[1] to prove his innocence!
1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-07/rising-chess-star-off...
Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok. This was not an example of a superhuman intelligence passing hints to overcome Magnus at his best.
Everyone says this, but do you really know? Those statements are after-the-fact observations of engine evaluations. They don't speak to the amount of mental work that Hans would have had to put in to play optimally (or 'ok' as you say) in those positions.
You might find yourself making the same remarks when looking at the post-game analysis of any top player against an engine. Everyone crumples eventually against perfect play.
Yes, they do. When Magnus makes poor choice - not giving himself an advantage or playing moves giving black an advantage - it makes it easier for black. That’s the whole point.
Putting your opponent in positions that are better according to the engine but only with engine-like perfect play is a strategy at the highest levels of chess. Because the move is objectively worse, it won't be played, because it's not played, your opponent won't know it, because they don't know it, you'll play it better, then you win.
I don’t totally buy Hans didn’t prepare the weird line, but it’s worth calling out; it’s at least marginally possible that Magnus out himself in an unwinnable position on purpose, but couldn’t convert it.
https://youtu.be/w4iu5FMaR2o?t=71
Edit: At the grand finale at 7:51 he says it again: "I haven't cheated yet, but it's coming up."
Or lock them in transparent cube for week before match naked... So many solutions that specially person like Carlsen should be open to.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-marcel-duchamp...
When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.
Also, I agree the “math is tiny“ but the talent, work ethic, luck, etc. required to separate oneself from the good to be great is *enormous*.
[UPDATE] Turns out you can get dental implant hardware on eBay:
I have some smart light switches in my house that don’t contain batteries and aren’t wired to mains. They’re powered purely by the force of pressing the switch. A bite-powered receiver might not even need batteries. Okay, maybe I’m getting too crazy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
in the last 77 years, I imagine this type and similar technology will be much more miniaturised and effective.
No internal power supply. Very important distinction.
"The device, a passive cavity resonator, became active only when a radio signal of the correct frequency was sent to the device from an external transmitter."
But the Thing was a transmitter. A receiver could be entirely passive and very small. It could easily fit in a dental implant. (There have been reports of people hearing AM radio broadcasts through their fillings.) But the risk of detection would be very high.
It really seems to me that everyone is overthinking this. Hans has admitted to cheating and just says he didn't cheat here. The idea we should give him the benefit of the doubt seems really odd. It doesn't really matter to me whether he cheated in this specific tournament - he shouldn't have a place in the chess world.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVzSXsZ10I&t=3291s [2] in the sense that every move for an extended period covering multiple tournaments was exactly the top engine move - way more accurate than any human ever
source? sounds like bs to me
The best players in the world, these 2700+ rated players have:
1. Played many many positions many times over and have incredible recall of those general positions.
2. Know how to analyze a position/state of the game at any given moment and have a better "feel" for who is advantaged and/or where the greatest strengths/weaknesses of black/white are located.
However, none of them have the power of chess engines, which analyze singular moves (or poll a db) for the hundreds/thousands of possible outcomes 1, 2, 3, ..., n moves ahead (this is why the best engines are strictly better than humans at this point), so unless a player has both played and committed to memory the exact line being played in a game, the best they tend to get to is "having a feeling" about the state of the game (please forgive my oversimplification here, chess fans)
Now if a 2600 rated player - someone who's still easily in the top 1% of chess players and incredibly capable player of the game - were to be playing a game against a 2800 rated opponent, but had a computer tell them "Hey, this one move is critical" without being told the exact move, they would almost _certainly_ become heavily favored to win. That "feeling" about a position is now irrelevant. There are only a few pieces that will be likely moved on any given turn, and now you can narrow down your own analysis to what is different about moving any one of them in particular because you've been given advanced warning that the most-likely-to-be-played moves will result in wildly different consequences n moves later.
These are hours-long games. Taking 15-20 minutes on a turn is not unheard of, and doing so on a turn that is proven-critical can make all the difference.
Or so it has been described above us.
I can't think of any effective way to curb online cheating in chess. Ultimately, online chess with money prizes shouldn't really exist.
Did he steal it? Not necessarily — it’s entirely possible that he got a higher-paying legit job and saved up for it, or inherited money from a relative, or got it legally in some other way. He shouldn’t be convicted of a new crime with no other evidence just because he committed similar crimes in the past.
However, it would be entirely natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation of the facts, and to avoid trusting that person.
This is basically what happened with Hans. He has been caught cheating multiple times, and then had an unusually fast rise in rating. Is that rise impossible? No. But it’s consistent with cheating, and given his history, cheating is the simplest explanation.
So it would be totally normal for Magnus to refuse to trust such a person even though it can’t be conclusively proven that he’s still dirty. But even then, Magnus agreed to play against him, until further circumstantial evidence came to light and it just got to be too much.
So, is it possible that Hans is clean? Sure. If that’s indeed the case, do I feel sorry for him? No. He made the choice to destroy his own reputation when he cheated multiple times. If he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt now, it’s on him.
Coming back to your analogy. So now imagine this person suddenly has a new shiny car but he also has the Title and registration for that car. Not only that, someone reported him to the cops and the cops said that the car is not stolen. He also has income tax returns that show that he has a legit source of income. Would it be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft is the most likely explanation?
In his over-the-board match, he didn't have a laptop. He didn't have a friend giving him moves. He didn't have any communication device. He was mostly looking at the board or into the distance while he was playing. He was scanned with a metal detector. So we know he definitely didn't use any of his earlier methods of cheating if he even did cheat. Carlsen's statement confirms that his preparation wasn't leaked or hacked. I count these as evidence of him not cheating with his usual MO.
But in your analogy, it's completely possible for the guy to have used his usual MO to steal the new shiny car.
Now of course I'm not saying he didn't cheat. It's possible he used some other sophisticated method of cheating. But it would not be natural for a reasonable person to assume that theft using his usual MO is the most likely explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfPzUgzrOcQ
For reference, Magnus at his best does a 70% match with engines, and between 70-75% is historically enough to earn you the World Championship. This guy is consistently over 80%, come on.
Reminds me of Lance Armstrong: a mediocre 90's cyclist that suddenly becomes the best in history, in such dominant fashion that I think everybody suspected something, but without proof you cannot do nothing about it.
If you are a top player and cheat, you would only require a couple of decisions here an there in complex positions, and the games would be still at roughly 75%. But if you don't fully understand the line, or you're not in the zone, and the engine suggest something crazy (but winner) you need all the following moves.
Based off of their previous behavior of stealing cars? Yes it would absolutely be the most likely explanation. Under such a circumstance, it would simply mean that their skill at stealing cars has improved to now include forging documents, and possibly bribing police.
Given their passed behavior, the objective is no longer for you to prove guilt, but for them to prove innocence. It is illogical to continually approach accusations of theft, or cheating, under a neutral assumption when a pattern emerges.
If you own ten chickens and come out one morning to nine, and a pile of feathers next to a fox, you have your culprit. Should you wander around demanding to see feathers each time another chicken goes missing before you blame the fox sleeping at your doorstep? The fox is there. There are fewer chickens. The easiest answer is the most likely.
There is enough certainty for the alternative to be inconsequential.
If he has a history of stealing cars AND his new car is hot wired? Possible it's legal? Sure. Let's not twist our hands about a grand theft auto charge, however.
This is a hilariously inaccurate description of magnus. He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously. It's not like he has a history of temper tantrums or petulant behavior; he's an upstanding custodian of the mantle of world champion.
By whom exactly? He has a large fan club on the internet and uses modern social network very well but I don’t think there is a wide consensus that he is better than Kasparov at his prime. I personally don’t believe him to be better than neither Fischer nor Botvinnik but that’s only me and is impossible to verify anyway.
And no, his opinion against his own opponent after suffering an embarrassing defeat poorly playing with white doesn’t hold much credibility.
Maybe a better metric would be running both players games through a computer to see the "%best move" metric?
Due to computers being common place now, Magnus would absolutely destroy that metric compared to older eras. Chess has changed a ton in the past 10-20 years due to computers, being able to analyse lines. And now Magnus is known for playing "Ai Lines" which is the kind of stuff the new ML models do which tends to be pretty bonkers and un-human but gets long term results.
Just because magnus is a world class expert at chess does not necessarily mean he is good at detecting a cheater. Furthermore I would argue that taking an experts “gut feeling” as evidence is a terrible argument.
The phrase you used has a well-known meaning. If that wasn't what you meant, then you shouldn't have used it.
Magnus may not be great at spotting a cheater, but his expertise in this game suggests that he could be, and adding that fact to an existing body of evidence isn't even close to committing an appeal to authority fallacy. To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.
OP:
> He is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived. His opinion on what it takes to play high level chess is worth taking extremely seriously.
- A: Magnus is a great chess player
- B: Magnus claims cheating because "gut"
- C: Therefore Hans cheated
The argument rests solely on the fact that since he's an expert his word should be taken "seriously," heavily implying that Hans cheated.
> To bring up that fallacy here is just lazy thinking.
I disagree and you're not going to convince me otherwise with statements like this one.
As for his "gut" feeling being part of the argument, you're not quoting anyone here; you are again intentionally misrepresenting what others are saying.
If you're going to analyze an argument someone else is making, be honest about it or there is really no point in discussing anything with you.
you're not quoting anyone here; you are again intentionally misrepresenting what others are saying.
If you're going to analyze an argument someone else is making, be honest about it or there is really no point in discussing anything with you.
Humans are mentally fragile.
We're not talking commodity expertise, this person is literally the best to have ever done his craft. And has show the ability to "legitly" lose to others.
You know appeal to authorities are not always logical fallacies right? It can be, but it's not a "haha you quoted someone therefore you are wrong". Heavily invested and repeatedly successful individuals can be great sources for information on heuristic endevours.
> magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest
Except it is verifiable that he talked about leaving the tournament before even playing him. Therefore his suspicions and problems are older than the result. Also you might be overestimating how much chess players care about losing at that level. They play constantly against each other and most have pretty equal head to heads. Magnus usually is a bit ahead like 5 victories to 3 and then like 15 draws against most of them. Losing once against Hans is not gonna make someone cause all of this.
> His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.
By FIDE sure, not by people online whose knowledge of chess comes from the first Harry potter movie.
Most things that are called that are not.
This would be a fallacy:
1. World’s best player (to have ever lived)
2. Therefore his opinion is correct
This on the other hand is not a fallacy:
1. Ditto
2. Therefore one should take his opinions on this matter extremely seriously
It’s not fallacious since it doesn’t pretend or present itself as a derived fact.
Is this a joke? He literally does have a history of being a sore loser.
He absolutely does. People forget because he so rarely loses a classical game. But he almost always shows petulant behavior when he loses an important classical game.
I lost all respect I had for him. If you don't have foolproof evidence, you take your loss like a professional.
we can't accept Magnus's testimony on this point, but we can understand that Magnus can consider it himself to be evidence, and he's simply telling us that's what he's doing.
I also think Magnus believes he has additional information about the extent of Hans's cheating, and that's what he can't share without Hans's permission, probably Hans's logs of his online activity that chess.com has, or something like that.
But is it hotwired? That's speculation from someone who just lost a race to them.
Magnus is just refusing to invest time and energy (and rating points) to play against someone he doesn’t like, which is absolutely his right. Nobody has the right to force Magnus or anyone else to play against them.
I think resigning on move 2 might just be investing rating points to avoid investing time and energy... not avoiding investing them.
Was this tournament also FIDE rated? I genuinely don’t know and can’t find that information via google.
I guess it hasn't come up much since the personal loss of losing a game is usually pretty great at a high level. Maybe we'll see such rules after Magnus' resignation.
Magnus just recently quit a tournament and resigned a game in another one, storngy suggesting that you are mistaken.
For exemple, Carlsen had to play at least one move for the game not to be forfeited and I’m fairly sure he is running afoul a sportsman behaviour rules by resigning on move one but the tournament isn’t pressing because he is Magnus.
Dude probably trains with computers regularly. He has a better memory than 10 average Joe's combined. He's been the absolute #1 of the world for what, 10 years now?
He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
I personally take his suspicions very seriously, though I agree that evidence has to be presented sooner or later.
Do you have a link to this? Proof that this player has cheated in the past would be the strongest evidence, I believe, he'd do so again.
Having cheated in prior history is not a question, but the extent and recency of the behavior is.
Disclaimer: don't know much about chess, let alone professional chess.
I admit that it is a trickly problem, and I agree that Carlsen's behavior here is not beyond reproach. Withdrawing from the tournament only after having lost a game makes the statement much less impactfull since one can not discount the possibility that he's just being a rather sore looser. I would personally have respected his decision much more if he had followed his impulse (again, referred to in his statement) to withdraw as soon as Niemann had been invited to the tournament in the first place.
I would say there is more than a cheating history and a single game that triggered Magnus. However, most of it has a possible explanation. Like, I would be very nervous if you put me in front of a camera at 19 years. Are these arguments together strong enough? Hard to judge.
That just shows that he is fallible, which I empathize with.
Also don't forget the bishop blunder by Nepo in the world championship against Magnus. That was a 1800 level blunder trapping the bishop. Nepo is in top 5 GM list.
The fact of the matter is that all GMs including Magnus have the potential to make blunders.
To be clear, I'm not saying this to make a claim that this is definitive proof of anything. I'm pointing out that the theory that Magnus simply blundered away the game doesn't hold water. Niemann had the advantage—as black no less—for essentially the entire game against someone who is widely known for being capable of grinding away nearly-perfectly for extensive periods of time.
I agree but Magnus also plays bad games once in a while. So it is not quite clear from a sample size 1 and a std deviation of infinite.
There are a number of comments here which promote the idea that this is simply sour grapes by Magnus and totally uncalled for, and I find those perspectives to be overwhelmingly uncompelling.
Magnus only matched the top engine move 43% of the time, which is quite low for a super-GM. Hikaru said he'd bet money that it was Magnus' worst performance in any game in the last 3 years.
If the evidence shows that Magnus played badly, we do not have to jump to the conclusion that actually he was playing badly on purpose, for the intent of trying to detect a cheater. He himself wasn't even stupid enough to claim this.
No, instead, I am going to trust other grandmasters opinions that he was merely playing badly.
(Sorry for the dupe reply, too late to edit my other comment)
Of course he played near-perfectly for 27 moves. That's what it means to be a 2700 (or even a 2500, if you think his recent ratings growth is the product of cheating). Virtually any high-level game will look like that - the players playing mostly perfectly, with on average one or two significant mistakes, but sometimes not even that.
The interesting thing is the one party MORE qualified than Magnus and the other grandmasters to detect cheating is the chesscom statistics team and they think Hans has cheated online recently and didn't admit to it. Still, there's no smoking gun that proves the OTB matches were fixed, Hans can be innocent at least in those specific circumstances, but if he's been guilty in online chess recently is it truly fair to make the world champion play against him OTB?
>He wouldn't risk his whole reputation for nothing.
It is pretty important to realise in terms of Magnus's mindset he has given up on defending the world championship and doing anything other than achieving 2900 elo, the highest rating ever achieved. He is a champion, and that is his goal in life, he wants that rating in a way most people can't fathom. If he proves Hans Neimann is a cheater, Han's win's against Magnus are void, and Magnus's rating goes up. Imagine being the world champion and having your dream drift further away because of a known cheater beating you when they're at a disadvantage, what goes through your head? What goes through your head when you think of how many people COULD be cheating and making getting 2900 impossible? What can others do about the spectre of chess cheating, the world champion, doesn't stand up?
So what I'm saying here is, I wouldn't be super confident that Magnus wouldn't throw his reputation in the trash to become the greatest chess player who ever lived. I think he would absolutely throw away his reputation, but not for nothing.
Still people literally know the chesscom cheating team. IM Danny Rensch is the face. I would say there is a fair amount of respect for that team within the community, as well as a healthy scepticism. If anything they probably get more criticism for ignoring cheating than for taking action.
It’s a tough gig, chess cheating is very hard to prove.
Here is the first interview I could find from a 10 second google:
https://www.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-th...
The money quote:
" My practice at home is with the computer. When I study chess with other people, we always have a chess board. But on my own, it's always at the computer. "
No more evidence is required. The quality of Hans Niemann's moves, recently as well as during his rise from 2400-rating three years ago, is enough evidence against him.
Either he is a good as Stockfish, or ...
I'm not sure why someone would respond to dozens of all comment threads, but the different tones of voice, presented familiarity with the topic, between posts are disconcerting. I've never accused anyone of being a bot or shill (nor am I now) because I've seen starry-eyed true believers of just about every cause, idea, and entity, but this behavior is exceptionally unusual.
at the time I read this and replied, your comment was top of the stack. without reading the full comments, i'm already reading your comment as someone that's got their knickers in a twist rather than reading a substantive comment. so hopefully that's what you wanted?
Ctrl+f gives false positives for name mentions, and searching the html is just as easy. Benefits of having spent so much time dealing with css style/class related bugs, I guess.
From my experience I'd say it's something like 5 comments in 5-10 minutes will trip you up.
You wouldn't need to crawl for your own dataset, it's available on Google's bigquery https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... and slightly older 2006 to 2017 dataset is available on kaggle for direct download https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hacker-news/hacker-news .
I don't think it's too surprising that some people have strong opinions about this matter either.
The strange thing to me then, is that with regards to this Hacker News thread, it is fairly split in sentiment if you look at the total number of comments in either direction, but if you look at unique commenters it overwhelmingly swings one direction.
My question from that premise is, why is that the case? Specifically, I've never seen a hacker news thread with 250+ comments where a single person or a handful make up such a large percentage of the comments. The human effort required for such a thing is significant, and obviously that can't scale forever. I'd be surprised that with tiktok and youtube videos with 30000+ comments, if there's ever been a case of a single person responding 3000+ times.
People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.
Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.
50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.
No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?
If he's 2400, he can still analyze. This leads me to believe that the dude is just trolling. IDK. I haven't watched all his interviews, but he seems like a troll.
None of us know for sure and it’s all speculation at this point. He could be trolling. He could be cheating. At some level he lied in his apology interview. He has not acknowledged the statement chess.com made in which they accused him of lying and cheating more often and more recently than he admitted. There’s just a lot of suspicion and sometimes where there’s smoke there is fire. My guess is he is a strong grandmaster that desperately wanted to be a super gm and took some shortcuts to get there.
To do the second, you need to still be extremely good at chess. Way beyond the level required to do any type of analysis.
"Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement."
You'd still need to calculate, if you're "just cheating a little"
Throwing suspicion over your career is great way of destroying it, and what for? trolling?
What you suggest is akin to being a cop and trolling other cops by doing suspicious things to pretend to be dirty cop... for jokes?
I don't really like the guy TBH. I don't watch his interviews because I don't think he's funny or entertaining or informative.
I'm just saying, he says a lot of weird shit - but other GMs do, too.
I'm not saying he's trolling by cheating ???
in his case it would be to pretend to cheat so everybody looses their shit.
being edgy , wierd or socially anxious is not trolling when its not on purpose.
"It feels like"
Do you see no irony here?
I know a little bit about the situation (though not an expert - I haven't researched it a ton, just tried to think critically about the situation) due to the fact that yeah, drama is entertaining. But I also think what the WC is doing is disgusting - he is using his position of power to harm someone, and doesn't have much evidence, really, none at all, other than him saying "trust me."
Also, the parallels between this and political discord are really interesting to me, and I wish I were smart enough to boil that down on a sociological level and express myself but unfortunately I am not.
I didn't know anything about Hans until Magnus dropped out of the tournament and this all started. I follow chess, and I didn't even know (consciously, I am sure I heard it and didn't take close note) at the time that he beat Magnus, until he dropped out.
I probably should not care too much, and do something more useful with my time, but it is super annoying to me that people are spreading misinformation to such a degree and no one seems to really care that that this can really impact someone's life.
On top of that, I strongly do not believe that someone should be branded for life due to their past actions.
If other world top-50 players even think Hans cheated and got away with it, it creates an open door for lots more unscrupulous players to look for their own cheating schemes. We need to stop being so focused on a 19-year-old child and start asking chess organizers some hard questions about what they are planning to do to guarantee clean chess.
1. Ramp up anti cheat across the board. Stream delay, collect metrics which trigger an INTERNAL review at a certain threshold, etc.
2. Give players a process for lodging a suspicion of cheating. Part of this would be working with FIDE, not starting public drama. Fine them if they break the rules of that process.
Good god yes, I couldn't believe they didn't have a stream delay in the original Hans/Magnus game that kicked this off
If you get caught cheating, even once, you should be banned for life.
Otherwise we end up in a lose-lose situation.
It’s almost impossible for Magnus to prove Niemann cheated on that game.
It’s impossible for Niemann to prove he didn’t cheat.
But shouldn’t matter. He was caught cheating before, he shouldn’t have been allowed to compete again.
I don’t remember Ben Johnson or Lance Armstrong getting a pass
Edit: Replies seem to focus on my examples. Forget about them. Proposition stands. If you are old enough to compete you are old enough to be banned for life if you cheat. Online or OTB.
I don’t think chess is as bad as cycling. Doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but gives some perspective
I agree with other comments here who suggested zero tolerance policy. Cheat once and get banned for life. I remember as a kid, watching hours of cricket. Then I found out some of my heroes were fixing matches. I stopped watching that day. No fan wants to see cheats and match fixers and other bad characters. That is what politics is for!
If he was caught in a FIDE event then of course a ban should be permanent, much like athletics.
My guess? Over 30%
These seem like fair qualifications to your proposition.
As for codification, criminal leniency for juveniles, which is widespread, gets you pretty close.
For chess to have its own codifications, I think, as Magnus clearly does too, that they need to generally up their game across the board. All the way from detection, investigation, protocols/procedures around suspicions, accusations and hearings/tribunals … and then the penalties can be codified.
I don’t know what’s in place now and what its history is, but Magnus is either chucking a massive rage-quit for losing or telling the chess world they need to get serious and catch up quick vc (or why not both I suppose).
For NM and above, one time caught should get you banned for life
Protecting the game is far far far more important than protecting the individuals
For NM and below, I guess one warning would be ok. But nothing more than that.
I do not want to suggest anything here, just side note that there are cases in cycling when someone was cheating and than suspended/relegated but without life ban like Alberto Contador in Tour de France 2010.
Niemann doesn't have to approve such a thing. It falls on the accuser to prove that the accused is guilty.
I know this isn’t proof he cheated, but it doesn’t do him any favors when he’s already under suspicion.
Edit: Way back, decades ago, in Warcraft 2, I became strong enough to regularly get accused of cheating by people who weren’t familiar with me. However the converse side of this is I was extremely accurate at detecting actual cheating.
He simply wants to avoid going through that, which imo is understandable.
When you have proof of cheating the sport's authorities take action (not individual players). When you don't you let the games go on knowing some folks are getting away with it sometimes.
If you look at FIDE's statement, they basically said they were made that Magnus did this and they're using "sophisticated" techniques to prevent cheating. I don't think that is a responsible way to act, given that this presents an existential threat to the sport.
With today's system, there is no way to get proof of cheating, without catching someone red handed, and there's no way to bring awareness because FIDE is either not interested, incompetent, or both. Also, there might be a lot of cheating in chess, and it could be just an ugly secret that they're protecting.
you assume that cheater is stupid and uses cheats for every move in every game.
If you use engine as a crutch to stop you from blundering and suggest moves that you understand, combined with adhering to steady but not explosive growth in elo points,you most likely end up undetected.
Someone who can play as bad as Niemann does on his bad days could never beat Carlsen legitimately in my opinion.
Yes, he most definitely is and the rest of your comment doesn’t disprove that in any way.
Magnus isn’t trying to be judge, jury and executioner. He has just decided that the guy is irrevocably a cheater and as a sentence he will never play a game against him again.
1. It is solidly within the realm of possibility that a person who spends all his time devoted to succeeding in tournament chess would be able to devise a cheating method that cannot be easily detected by standard protocols
2. It is impossible to prove a negative, so it is impossible to disprove Magnus' claims
With these things being said, it is both possible that Hans didn't cheat and we'll never know for sure, or that he did cheat and we'll never know how. Given these facts, the most productive analysis would be to find just how unusual Hans' performance, both in the game and prior, really was.
A few things could be determined:
1. How many other high level players have a history of cheating? Have any players who have once cheated in a lower stakes match later been proven to have cheated in a higher stakes one?
2. Based on improvement per game played, how unusually rapid was Hans' development in the past 2 years? Are there other players which have progressed as rapidly as he has despite having progressed slower earlier in their careers?
3. Do all the engine correlation analyses that implicate Hans not fire warning signals when analysis any other game by confirmed non-cheaters? Do they signal cheating in a similar way when analyzing games of proven cheaters?
Since this statement is itself a negative, you've presented a paradox, because if it were proven true it would then be false.
It is easier to prove a positive since it requires only the "smoking gun" to be made apparent. It is much harder to disprove a negative because it requires hypothetical smoking gun that could have caused the effect (Han's beating of Magnus) to be disproven. Since we don't have a record of every electromagnetic and sonic wave which passed through the room the day Hans beat Magnus, disproving the cheating claim is likely impossible.
If we're being pedantic, which your initial response struck me as, there are again true statements with no proof, and this isn't a paradox, it's Gödel's first incompleteness theorem (which is specifically different from the liar's paradox you mentioned, precisely in the difference between what is true and what is provable).
Hans has a string of games at 100% correlation[0], meaning he's playing perfect games. Past players who achieved this later went on to admit to cheating[1]. Magnus knows this because he owns part of chess.com and presumably sees the data.
Magnus has a lot riding on his statement. He wouldn't make it unless he was sure.
Further, even if he didn't see it people notice when GMs get bans as their accounts turn inactive (which they had in this case).
It's cherry-picked games and it doesn't compare to the "engine correlation" of other high ranked players against similar opponents. I would not rely on it as evidence that Hans is "clearly cheating."
The part about correlations has not been retracted AFAIK. I agree that there's a need for a baseline though, there is one example on her recent twitter feed but more samples are needed to get a better picture.
I can recall several players on discussion boards analysing my statistics and explaining how I was clearly cheating because it was impossible for a human to play like me. Humans, they said, just weren’t that accurate.
One cheat-detection algorithm even “caught” me one day, and I was promptly banned from that server. Confused about what had happened, I sought out the server documentation online so I could see what they had used to “detect” me. My crime, it turns out, was scoring too many kills per second.
I keep this in mind whenever I see another person accused of something similar. Sometimes people have just put in more effort and study than we choose to comprehend.
It’s not impossible to believe someone could be just a sliver faster.
While I personally disagree with the comment I am replying to regarding reaction times under 120ms, the issue at this World Championships was more likely that the reaction timing was wrong ...
At any rate, a 19 year old ranking a couple hundred points below the world champion for the past decade isn't going to have enough practice to use that as an excuse. So no, it's not the same thing.
The only way to certify their level is through strictly controlled competitions. eSports and chess do the same.
On the other hand, as my skill level increased in FPS games it became more and more obvious when one of my opponents was cheating. So IMO you can trust Magnus' ability to accurately estimate the chance of Hans cheating, but you can't trust his motivations for making the claim.
Aside: When you combine high skill levels with cheats that were designed first and foremost to avoid detection, it becomes almost impossible to do detect them. For example in FPS games "aim-bots" are crude compared to "hit-scanners" that simply auto-trigger when your crosshair happens to pass over a valid target. Combine a hit scanner with a player who already has top tier accuracy, and you get super-human accuracy. Let the player enable and disable the hit scanner in real time and they control exactly how accurate they are without any conspicuous appearances. You'd have to (externally) record and sync the monitor's output with a camera that monitors their mouse movements, and even then you'd need EXTREMELY accurate timing - most likely a capture rate higher than the monitor refresh rate.
His rating plateaued around 2300 from end of 2015 to mid 2018. Then in the last 2 years, I believe his improvement from 2400 to 2700 is the most rapid in history.
If you compare his rating with other young players like Duda, Firouzja, Gukesh - then his rating increase looks very unique.
I'm not aware of any chess prodigies that have followed a trajectory quite like this. So maybe Hans is an unusual talent. Or maybe, he's receiving computer assistance.
I have games, as a 1400-1600 that are perfect games.
Everyone has games that are perfect. Everyone. Not just GMs or Super GMs. I have at least a few perfect games and I'm half the rating Hans is.
The games analyzed also have crazy blunders by his opponents.
Where does Hikaru say he only has a 100% correlation game one time? I've seen lots of examples of other players having such games.
His games against Magnus were exceedingly high.
THE FIRST GAME Hikaru opened when he tried to check his games was 100%. He opened a random fucking game!
Also, your anecdote doesn't prove anything.
for reference, magnus carlsen's correlation score at his peak averages around 70% (according to the video)
Here is a blunder that Feller played on move 13 just over a month ago (https://new.chess24.com/wall/news/grandmaster-blunders-mate-...) - this same guy managed to draw against Magnus Carlsen in 2008, in a game where Carlsen also found the moves/mannerisms of his opponent highly unusual.
One thing is it was a very long and rambling video and probably didn't do a great job of motivating examples rather than just getting bogged down in them for a while, so the summary doesn't really say how the examples support the central claim, but that may be the fault of the video honestly lol...
Also a few basic errors like writing "medium" where I'm pretty sure I said or at least meant "median" and in one case, I'd have to go back and watch this to be sure, but it seems like the summary says something is better in B than in A when I was saying it's better in A than B. The summary definitely touches the right content but I'm not sure it's correct.
Also funnily I have a tendency to sprinkle the word "like" liberally(for better or worse) and the summary copies some of the sentences verbatim, starting with "Like..."
(completely off the topic of cheating in chess, sorry...)
This is how they find accounting fraud as well.
Further, clearly the analysis wasn't so irrefutable given that they admitted faults with it after others pointed out mistakes[0]
0. https://twitter.com/IglesiasYosha/status/1574308784566067201?
Me, as a 1600 player, have played some 0-0-0 games on Lichess. I didn't cheat. I just play a lot of chess games and during those games, my opponent was really bad, so I had a perfect game (according to the engine).
Link?
I did have one game where I didn't know the theory except a very vague recollection in the beginning. I actually thought I had blundered in that game and was trying to figure out what I'd do if my opponent made a certain move — they didn't find it, I ended up winning material in a tactic and they resigned — I was in complete shock when it came back 100% accuracy (and I definitely did not see the engine response to the move I was worried about, which was the best move).
I'm only around 1600-1700 on chess.com.
Not taking a position either way on Hans, but I have no doubt he knows far more theory than I do (and I do know some lines 20+ moves deep), and correlating with an engine is not impossible even outside of book.
Engines often play moves that are counterintuitive and weird, but nonetheless good. This is because they can evaluate large trees of tactics in a way that humans cannot.
If a human finds a natural move that is just as good as the engine move (in terms of evaluation), they are still playing accurately, but they are uncorrelated with the engine. Playing accurately is not a sign of cheating. Playing many engine moves is a sign of cheating.
You can find more discussion of it on reddit, but the threads are generally all over the place.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xofl99/one_of_the_10...
We don't know! That's why this is an incomplete analysis. A comparison against other players of his caliber would answer that question.
100% correlation to an output that can be tuned doesn't seem that exciting
I thought the video very much did make that case. A single known cheating game had a 98% correlation (Sebastien Feller Paris 2010), other GMs have generally at most 75% average correlation. The analysis had more than half a dozen games with Niemann at 100% correlation. If that's cherry picking, it seems like there are a lot of cherries to pick.
The first 4 are the most interesting, having same sample size of 4000. But across the board players tend to have little distinction between choosing moves between 0.0 & 0.1, except one player
The discussion on /r/chess is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
Basically the mistake that is easy to make is that we shouldn't ask: "what is the probability that Hans plays five tournaments like that in a row?", but "what is the probability that someone will play five tournaments like that in a row?". Even if we correct for the fact that there are probably more Minecraft speedruns happening than GM tournaments, odds of 80k just seem a bit too low to call it evidence.
If this were the case, I think we'd see younger players more likely to get these 100s more often as they're learning from chess engines.
Does anyone familiarized with the topic know if this makes sense?
Given this, we will be left with cheaters getting caught rarely through obvious slips in op-sec (device falls out, gets picked by a detector through unlucky occurrence)
or
We will be forever accusing people of cheating. They will deny it. We will ask them to explain why they made certain moves. They will fail to explain themselves sufficiently... Are we here yet?
Airport security won't find my 0.1mm knife, and it's not a problem if they don't.
In short I'd not bring airport security in this topic
I imagine Magnus is telling the truth about that.
But accusing someone of cheating without any concrete evidence doesn’t sit well with me. It creates a situation where it declares all exceptional cases impossible. It’s impossible for growth. It’s impossible that someone could lose to a weaker player.
I suspect that people are able to say “even without concrete evidence, this is astronomically unlikely and the simplest explanation by far is that they cheated.”
Nevertheless, it all just doesn’t quite sit right with me. There’s something manifestly unpalatable about saying, “they cheated because surely nobody could ever do that.”
Please don’t see this comment as something that warrants explanation for why the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I’m not really interested in the merits of this specific case. I’m also probably doing a poor job communicating this feeling I struggle myself to understand.
If a position has 1 winning move out of 10, you have 10% to nail it even if you are a bozo. I'd say that as a good player you'd do better than random. So while unlikely he might have just got lucky against Magnus (if we want to assume the impossibility of him just having become good).
I agree with parent that the accusation is terrible. 1) it comes from someone in a position of power, 2) it comes from someone who is party injured in the matter (saltiness factor) 3) is completely unfounded as of now. There are just suspicions and theories. 4) it's playing with the accusation without committing to it, kinda like "ill commit only if it's convenient to me". 5) his prior cheating is immaterial. Especially as a child. No one cares that he "has cheated", the point of the matter is "did he cheat in this instance".
Is it bad optics that the guy beating Magnus as an underdog is a known past cheater? Yes. Is it relevant to "he beat Magnus here"? no.
Innocent till proven guilty
Magnus Carlsen didn't say Niemann cheated because he won but because he did so without being fully concentrated.
Magnus is setting the right example by refusing to play Niemann
Ok. If someone kills a person at 16. Should the killer be in prison for life?
Your comparison with murder is ridiculous. First of all, teenage murderers are regularly sentenced to life in prison. A murderer is deprived of fundamental human liberties--Niemann is deprived of being able to compete at the highest competitive level in a tabletop board game, without suspicion.
(Considering that people become more or less aware about their responsibilities and consequences of their actions at about 15 yo, he is now 4 times the responsible age he was at 16.)
If you believe this, its because you aren't looking. There's tons of explanations online of how it could be possible. Go look at /r/chess.
For those two reasons, I think that any such "pretty adamant" statement can be discounted.
Does that seem fair or reasonable to you? Sure no man can be as good as Magnus, he is clearly cheating in some clear undetected way, right?
Maybe in USA. In Europe some countries even have special sentences for young adults (older than 18 less than 21). Here's for Germany:
"The maximum penalty for any crime committed by a person under 18 (or a young adult under 21 who is treated as a juvenile) is 10 years"
If you murder somebody at 16, you shouldn't be a free man at 19. Three years is not enough time for somebody to mature and mellow.
Imagine if he is a generational talent and one of the best in the world, are you really ready to deprive him any future just because he did stupid things as a kid?
Is it entirely fair to the actually repentant? No. But does it keep out the false-repentant? Yes.
It is immoral to close every redemption path to a former sinner.
I stole stuff at 12 and at 16. I shouldn't walk into a walmart now at 30 and be searched when I leave.
Just relax.
> No one is searched when they leave stores.
In fact there are stores which will ask to search your bags and check your receipts as you walk out the door, and may ban you if you refuse. You probably realize this and are feigning ignorance.
Anyway, what's really insane is the way you're bouncing around this thread giving so many people such low quality replies, like the one directly above where you try to gaslight karamanolev by falsely claiming their comment was unintelligible. It really seems like you have some undisclosed stake in this matter, because you're not being fair or civil to many of those you respond to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32989622
>> You should perhaps actually engage with criticism and disagreement if you want to post here.
> Make me.
It is probably a mistake for me to respond to you at all.
In the US, they can ask - but no one can force you to do anything.
Then everyone will think his students are cheating when they perform well!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_baseball#Congression...
And the umpires are the dirtiest cheaters of all and always win.
Most recently, superstar San Diego Padres player Fernando Tatis Jr. was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for steroid use. [1]
[1] https://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/steroids_baseball...
Could you elaborate, especially on billiards?
I had heard a 99PI episode about baseball cheating, but thought it was more isolated incidents and not general disrepute.
I enjoy playing pool but know nothing about the professional scene or cheating.
With baseball, a lot of high level players have gotten caught or admitted it, and have said that it's widespread. Jose Canseco admitted to cheating and claimed as much as 80% of players use steroids. He specifically accused Alex Rodriquez, which was later proven true. Allegations like these from admitted/caught cheats might be attempts to justify themselves, but personally I think cheating is and has been rampant in baseball for a very long time. It's still fun to watch though.
Note, however, that steroid use was made effectively illegal on a federal level in the United States in 1990. The 1991 date above references a memo from the commissioner that states that illegal drugs are "strictly prohibited". Steroids are mentioned explicitly, though they do not have to be, seeing as how they were in fact illegal.
You can read the memo here: https://www.espn.com/espn/eticket/format/memos20051109
He cheated as a minor in online play. He has never been shown to have cheated as an adult or in OTB play. Someone needs to prove one of those things before he can be blacklisted for being a cheater.
>He cheated as a minor in online play.
Certain kinds of cheating are not actually cheating? Or between 16 and 19 a switch flicked in his head and suddenly he's clean?
Maybe Hans did cheat OTB, maybe he didn't, but the tough part about reputation is it is very hard to build and very easy to break. And Hans had proven to the world that he would cheat.
I personally don't think Hans did cheat in that particular tournament but at the same time I don't think he deserves too much sympathy. Cheaters literally destroy the game, and Hans at the very least was a cheater.
And the best player in the world could cheat, too, reducing their mental load and taking it easy.
Both cases would likely be exposed by the cheaters getting lazy.
It is possible that some people can reach quite a high level but top out in their natural abilities well below the absolute top of the game and be incentivized to cheat to break through their personal, natural ceiling.
Even worse than "some people are cheating to make it to the elite level" would be "everyone at the elite level is cheating, you can't compete without cheating".
I did broadly equivalent stupid shit when I was 12, 16, 19... I don't think I mellowed out until I was 25-30. 19 is young, 19 year olds are generally still in their peak stupid teenager years. Crime stats back this up: https://pinkerton.com/our-insights/blog/age-crime-curve
If anything someone who is already known to cheat “just because” is even more likely to cheat when there is something to gain.
As for cheating and stakes I think it all depends. His claim is he cheated when he was 16 to boost his rating so he could player higher level opponents on stream and boost his career. If you accept that claim it would make sense that he rationalized it that he was just cheating to get to his "true" Elo and stopped cheating once he got there. Now Chess.Com seems to believe that he cheated beyond that but they haven't specified more at this point.
It sounds like he's saying he cheated to get to where he was going faster, but that he would have gotten there eventually so it's fine.
It would be like Armstrong saying he only cheated during trials and training.
https://pinkerton.com/our-insights/blog/age-crime-curve
(Yes yes I know, Pinkerton are evil. they have the best plot of this correlation I could find. The crime-age correlation is the strongest that exists in the entire field of criminology.)
I see the pattern forming. He clearly has improved his play since but he could also have improved the cheating technique, as others pointed out, just needing a hint or two in the most decisive moments of the game. Has he not cheated against Magnus it's a pity that he got accused with no proofs.
This is equally true of a 19 year old.
Classic "have your cake and eat it too". If you want to play in tournaments with adult prizes then you should expect adult consequences for misbehavior.
And if you also agree with Magnus that cheating is a major problem then him singling out a single player who happened to beat him in OTB chess, as opposed to asking for wholesale changes for the past so many years to tackle cheating more seriously when he owns one of the top chess organizations and has partnerships with nearly every other chess organization, seems like him just being a sore loser.
I don’t need to defend Hans’s cheating to point out that Magnus’s response has been ridiculous because it’s entirely focused on 1 individual player as opposed to the actual large scale problem of cheating in chess. A guy who happened to beat him OTB in a game where he likely did not cheat at all.
There’s a world of difference between holding a personal opinion that X is probably true, and agreeing that X is an established fact.
> Magnus’s response has been ridiculous because it’s entirely focused on 1 individual player as opposed to the actual large scale problem of cheating in chess
From the letter: “I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over the board chess.”
It's not proof, but it is evidence.
You're refusing to see this, by the way. You're capable of understanding what I said without me saying it.
Most people just don't like Hans. They don't like his personality, so they have motivation to pile on. See this comment that has been linked EVERYWHERE: https://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=80630&start...
Nevermind have people shot down this dudes analysis, but he says in the post "But, if you will permit some editorializing, despite Niemann's claims that "it's impossible to play under these conditions," he gives every indication of quite enjoying the attention."
What fucking garbage that is a smear on the face of chess.
They seem to be saying that such behavior can confer an advantage — that to seem to be cheating is itself cheating.
I say we carry on like normal. Either Niemann's success falls apart, he messes up and gets caught, or we find out he's actually onto something brilliant.
Let's say you arrive home with your 2y/o child and are greeted with dog shit on the floor. If I asked the 2y/o who shat on the floor they wouldn't be able to answer, but you could easily deduce that the dog did it. Why? Because you have an immense bank of experience concerning everyday causality that the 2y/o doesn't have.
Magnus has a bank of human chess moves in his mind, that we don't. He knows that the dog shat on the floor.
And keep in mind that Magnus has not thrown this accusation around in the past, even in the face of defeat.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows...
Thanks
Moreover the live coverage showed an Hans way too relaxed about moves with 100% accuracy he was pulling.
He could also not give an explanation about of his moves in the game in an interview.
This, coupled with Magnus complaining about low security standards in the tournament make all the things very suspicious.
The problem is this was true a month ago. And a year ago. And 2 years ago. If he should be banned by reputation then it should have already happened. If they do it now they just weaponize cheating accusations.
If FIDE or Chess.com or whoever wanted to ban him from events for his past behavior--or players simply wanted to ostracize him by refusing to play in tournaments with him--they needed to have banned/ostracized him for that behavior. I don't think anyone would complain if Niemann were caught cheating and then permanently banned. That's what Carlsen implies he's after and it's fine.
In contrast, this is "well, you cheated in the past, but we're going to let you play, unless you play really well, in which case we'll assume you cheated". This is just not a sane way to go about it, and creates the scenario in which Niemann is playing with a sort of externally-imposed skill cap. An accusation has to come with evidence specific to that accusation, not some hazy combination of past history + unease with his play. This all sounds like a slow-motion tantrum, which Carlsen can get away with because he's Magnus Carlsen.
Exactly.
Unlike Hans history of cheating, Magnus does not have a history of baseless accusations when he loses (which he has on many occasions).
If Hans did go to all those extremes to cheat OTB it’s really surprising he would do so while playing black against Magnus Carlsen in an otherwise kind of pointless game.
The consensus among the top GMs was that Hans’s postgame analysis was way below the level you would expect from a player of his rating, never mind a player near Carlsen’s rating (which is much higher)!
The quality of players post-game interview varies widely. Some clearly don’t put much thoughts into them because they would rather go home. Niemann is in good company here. That was nothing particularly exceptional.
And if you don't want to and just would like to go home, fair enough, but then you really shouldn't give an explanation which is wrong!
It's a pattern with Niemann too, he's infamous for saying only "The chess speaks for itself" after beating Carlsen with black once before.
I think the parallel with academic cheating is accurate.
You clearly have never been through a four hours math exam with open questions.
There is no obviously correct answer. There is the way you tackled the problem and the myriad of other ways you could have done which might be more or less obvious, easy or correct.
It’s the same with chess. There is the line you played, the line your opponent played, the other lines you could have played which you did or didn’t consider, same with your opponent. Some of them you considered seriously, other you didn’t. Plus all the things you missed but didn’t matter because your opponent didn’t go there.
Also, you seem to believe chess players are doing post-game interviews because they want to. It’s not the case. It’s a mandatory part of participating in the tournament. Most of them would decline them if they could.
And yes Niemann is infamous for hating post-game interviews and always giving poor answers which is why I’m surprised people actually base their argument on this.
It's an exaggeration to say everyone hates post game discussion. Magnus used to dislike it somewhat, possibly - it was hilarious how Norwegian newspapers tried to turn him into a celebrity in those days because hey! Chess superstar! And it all fell flat because he was so unbelievably boring at the time, lol. He got more social confidence as he got older (and the media got better too, getting people who actually had a clue about chess to talk to him).
But these days, the young GMs are on twitch for heaven's sake. From a social and media standpoint, Niemann is perfectly competent, a lot more so than Magnus was at his age. It's explaining his play he avoids. So yes, it's suspicious. I'm equally surprised at why you would think people would just overlook this.
This is nothing like the Carlsen-Niemann case.
They absolutely were blundering much more than they did vs other opponents, showing a far lower quality off play than usual. Also I believe you didn't read much about his championship match. Remember how the games were moved to a different room, and why?
I thought you were talking about the Candidate's tournament. As for the championship match, it's not generally believed that Spassky severely underperformed anyway. He won several games and put up good fights in the draws and losses.
>I believe you didn't read much about his championship match
I am quite familiar with the surrounding circumstances, including the pre-match negotiations. I do not see how any of this "mentally unbalanced" or "broke" Spassky, unlike (arguably) Larsen and Taimonov. Furthermore, he's generally been commended for his behavior as a consummate professional and a "gentleman" in the circumstances.
I wonder if you are as familiar with chess (the game, professional play, and its history) as you lead on to be, posting all over this thread.
If you think about it: Magnus, is Magnus. He has an aura about him. People make blunders playing against him they wouldn't against others. This is known. Magnus is ALSO very good. But that "aura"... doesn't hurt him.
If for whatever reason, Hans saw far enough ahead, to not be worried... and Magnus hadn't, what does that say about Magnus?
He mentioned Hans wasn't nervous, in comparison to Magnus he had nothing to lose.
I won't defend his prior cheating. I will say: Prove it Magnus.
---
I'll draw a parallel to a game I have played at the national / international level. Bridge.
Bridge has had a TON of cheating scandals. People knew something was fishy. But they took the time, watched the videos, and figured out what happened.
Recent ones during the time I played:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantoni_and_Nunes_cheating_sca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_and_Schwartz_cheating_s...
A whole article on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_bridge
... I want the smoking gun Magnus. Not your gut.
I wonder if "bridge supercomputers" as a cheating method has been tried. I assume the percentages on finesses working, etc, are easy enough for the experts to learn that they're not very worthwhile.
Interestingly, the computers would to MUCH better on defense. Because as you bid, you speak about the distribution of your hand, and your partner does the same about theirs. (Even in negative inferences.)
And trust me: Good opponents will use that information, already.
So far, bridge has found the smoking guns because honestly: The cheaters have sucked at cheating.
If they bothered to actually encrypt their signals at all, they would have been suspected, but not caught.
---
To answer the question: Even today. Good players will know the answer to when to take which finesses. Where good, is probably around Life Master and a bit under.
Other than that your guess is as good as mine as _how_ he could have received said assistance, I've seen some wild theories.
A micro-vibrating motor in his shoe, buzzing morse code? f4 to g5 for example?
1. The trope of the 'Depraved Homosexual' has a long established history in pop culture and cinema. Anal beads as the choice for cheating would fall, comfortably, into that trope. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DepravedHomosexu...]
2. Chess is full of VERY smart people. One of the most common ways to insult a smart person is to call into question their sexuality; hence why we have to have entire movements related to calling out anti-lgbtq+ statements like "that's so gay". [https://welcomingschools.org/resources/stop-thats-so-gay-ant...]
Anyway, combine those two things, and you get your answer. It's because the world hasn't really evolved at all in the last 30-40 years, outside of what we have been forced to do by law. It's easy and socially acceptable to call a man gay as an insult, so in a roundabout way, that's what we're getting with the anal beads talk.
I sort of laser focused on this last week when I heard this theory for the first time. It just struck me as so. . . odd. Why would that be a thing? That's what I came up with.
The key takeaway is that if you have someone assisting you (entering the information into the computer) they only need a very simple way of sending a signal - which could be a "do something unexpected" or "this move is crucial". And you'd only need a time or two in a game to get the edge, assuming you're already skilled at the game.
The simple fact is that computers vastly outcompete human chess players. And not just big and expensive purpose built machines but the kind of computers everyone has access to.
Furthermore at the skill levels these players are you don’t even need constant handholding from a computer. A few hints at key moments would be enough to basically shift the balance in someones favour.
So if someone wants to cheat all they have to do is to receive a few bits of information from an accomplice. The question is not even if someone cheated in that particular game, but if cheating is possible.
We can imagine all kind of spy gadgetry one could use to communicate those few bits. People have two hangups with many of them: they can be found in a security screening, or they sound too sci-fy.
The vibrating anal beads combine three properties: - they could transfer the few bits of information needed to tilt the game in favour of a cheat. - they are not too far fetched. You can buy them right now commercially. - they would be very hard to detect by security arrangements. It feels very unlikely that players would agree to the kind of invasive probing which would be necessary to detect one.
So it is not that people think that this particular player in this particular game actually used vibrating anal beads. It is more about the idea that someone could cheat at chess with covert communication methods.
https://illuminati-magic.com/products/thumper
Some of them seem small enough that they won't trigger a metal detector. Currently they don't constantly scan the playing hall for wireless activity, which is what you'd need to detect this in use. I bet they start scanning for wireless transmissions soon, though.
You missed a large part. Some of his moves were "somewhat suspect". However, he was interviewed after the game with Magnus and he really could not explain why he was making the moves he made. Even the interviewers were almost laughing as he gave his "analysis" for his own moves. He played off his top engine moves as just getting lucky, while at the same time stating he didn't make other moves because they would have weakened his position (when in fact it was the other way around), while also stating he made other moves to strengthen his position (when in fact it was weakening).
Nothing he said made sense. He is playing against the top players in the entire world, and he can't really describe his games. This is super genius territory, and yet he just claims his skills to mostly just be based on luck.
But when you have all these factors happening during one game, statistically it is not probable.
That's the majority of the players in the Sinquefield cup. Even Levon, who was initially skeptical, has since reversed his position.
As is tradition in chess, no one says "He cheated" they say things like "his moves were better than one would have expected" or "superhuman" or "I felt like I should trust my opponent over my calculation".
The next step is to place that mild suspicion in the context of both his history of admitted cheating, his unwillingness/inability to explain his remarkable moves post-game, and the additional context of many other games played in the last few years with _extraordinary_ accuracy. Now something that could be explained by just a very strong game appears very suspicious.
That's a mere gut feeling, how on earth is Niemann supposed to defend against such a vague allegation? Magnus is a world-class competitor not only in chess but also in fantasy football and even quite decent at poker, so it stands to reason that he knows a thing or two about statistics and game theory. I was hoping he'd have far more concrete evidence than what he shared in this statement (like maybe he was playing a game that he'd deliberately prepared to test how long Niemann will take to compute certain hard-to-spot key moves; even that would still be extremely vague, but at least give Niemann something to concretely address). He is such an outstanding brain that I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he needs to produce concrete evidence.
In the end Magnus hints that he has more to share, and I hope he will do so soon. Otherwise I don't see how we could get to any sort of satisfying resolution here (short of Niemann suddenly confessing, which seems unlikely, and we still don't have evidence that he has anything to confess at all).
1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?
2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.
Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.
Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.
yes, the tech is there
But yes, I agree that Carlsen should have just refused to play Hans after Sinquefield
It is extremely easy to cheat online. You just open an engine on your computer.
For OTB, you'd have to be really sophisticated, and most likely have a partner assist you. And you still have to be really, really good at chess - Hans, even if he's cheating, is still a 2600 rated player.
It is several orders of magnitude harder, so way less opportunity, and the risk is much, much higher. Hans would have to have nerves of steel, for sure, to pull it off. Not saying it is impossible.
But there's no evidence he cheats OTB, either.
Yes, they are. The Stockfish game you can install on your iPhone would beat Carlsen almost 100% of time.
Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.
I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.
What a waste of intelligence.
It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.
I mean chess960 seems to be on the up, no? FIDE had their first ever world champs only three years ago (where notably Carlsen still made it to the final, though did end up losing to Wesley So)
But I did lose all interest in chess years ago when I realized the same thing: at the top level it's not about thinking but about memorizing (at the least) openings.
I believe go is too complex for the human mind to memorize strategies? Human mind, not computer.
Scrabble is a fun game to play with kids, or sometimes with adults, and having a bigger vocabulary is an advantage. But competitive Scrabble means memorizing the dictionary of allowable Scrabble words. It's just a different game. There was the story a while back about the Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French but memorized French Scrabble words and won the French-language Scrabble World Championships: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378...
And that's fine - competition spurs invention to find any advantage possible. But to me it'd be more impressive to see someone play an obscure Scrabble world, and then when you ask what the word means, they're actually familiar with it, rather than "eh, it's in the word list".
If Hans is cheating (possible, especially given his past) Magnus should act and use his connections in the Chess world to catch him cheating.
Suspicion is not proof.
Using his reputation as leverage can work to destroy Hans's reputation, but there is a high risk of collateral damages.
He should be smarter than that.
But general anti-cheating measures should be taken. What are those I don't know.
Problem solved.
If he draws, he's cheating.
I know it's unethical, but what I'm saying is it's not impossible to catch someone cheating. Another idea I had is to telegraph different moves from a game, to a live broadcast. Imagine they just show their faces and then a 2d diagram of the board. Then you see what happens to his play. This only works assuming he's not using an implant or a thumper in his shoe.
You are assuming that his goal is to somehow uncover Hans cheating.
On the other hand if his goal is to highlight that in his opinion the security arrangements are not sufficient to be able to tell if an opponent is cheating or not, then he is doing that just right.
He spoke up and the competition in question introduced anti-cheating measures right the next day. That means there were things they could have been doing but were not before.
> Magnus should act and use his connections in the Chess world to catch him cheating.
How do you propose that could happen? Life is not a TV show with Perry Mason moments.
Chess engines are an integral part of the Chess world now, players a training with them, to analyze and prepare. I would not be surprised if many players tried to "enhance" their rating online with such an engine.
Chess.com probably has stats about this behavior.
My gut feeling is that online cheating is very common, and thus, saying that someone was caught cheating online is not a very strong proof that he also did it over the board.
Even if Hans really did cheat, if there is no credible evidence you can’t fault him. And IMO it’s not enough that he cheated many years ago. Right now all the criticism he’s getting is unfair because it’s based on speculation.
I mean, Magnus is so much more better player than Hans that even if Hans didn't cheat he would probably be worse in rematch. But in all sports sometimes underdogs win. In couple yt videos i watched it was said that Magnus played bad game and that Hans already gained an advantage in opening. Hans said that he prepared opening play but if he is indeed a cheater he maybe used engine just for opening. We'll probably never get an answer if there was cheating or not
But if he cheated a lot more (as Magnus seems to allege) then he'll also lose to others he used to beat easily.
EDIT: I think a big issue with chess is this "perfection" mentality. Magnus cannot make a single mistake or lose a single game without it being a big show. Hans beating Magnus this one time, even though he was playing against black, should basically mean nothing - Magnus can probably beat Hans 10 times over. If Hans was beating Magnus 10 times it would be different - but also if he was on a streak to Magnus 10 times he would be playing with a lot more scrutiny.
Lets assume just for the sake of argument that Magnus has insider information from chess.com making him 98% certain that Niemann is cheating.
Why would he hand him a game that's going to be watched worldwide, where Magnus has nothing to win. Since if he wins we really still don't know anything one way or the other. But he also has everything to lose. If Hans is cheating and manages to pull off something again, then Magnus is cripeling his own reputation.
Magnus seems to be doing the right thing here, which is voicing his concerns, refusing to play him, and asking Niemann for permission to speak on the matter fully. Niemann is doing what you'd expect of a cheater, which is to stay quiet, dismiss the discussions, having difficulty explaining his plays, and pretty much just holding back from letting chess.com or Magnus divulge what information they have from the inside of his bans.
To be clear, I'm not supporting either side of the debate, I'm just stating that people are throwing in numbers in a confident and convincing tone without understanding what those numbers mean.
Would a thoughtfully designed device be detectable via the pre-screening methods at OTB tournaments? You only need to send a few bits of information to swing a chess game.
It reminds me of other cases in cycling or athletics...
Let's hope the truth also triumphs this time.
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If Niemann is really God's gift to chess, it'll be obvious to everyone soon enough.
It was a similar case where cheating was theoretically possible and alleged, but could not be proven. Only difference is that the Mike Postle case was a far bigger statistical anomaly.
"Niemann is an admitted chess cheater, and has cheated even more than he has admitted to, per Chess.com's recent statement. Cheating destroys the game and I refuse to play against known cheaters. I will not play Hans Niemann or any other known cheaters."
Are you referring to the concluding paragraph?
Ultimately in the fullness of time they were all proven to be correct.
It is dangerous, because people who do that know exactly they will not be able to provide evidence for their hypothesis to be true, but the other side won't be able to provide evidence either. So they rely solely on their convincing powers, and persuading others into their own belief system instead applying to reason.
I think, if at all, that all just proves one thing, something that scientists knew all along: if you want your thesis to be true, you will start interpreting reality in a fashion that supports your hypothesis. We don't do science like that for precisely this reason.
After all this, I think Magnus really ridiculed himself with this. His strongest evidence is "he wasn't tense"? Really, though?
"I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective."
---
Personally I don't think that's strong enough reason to convince me that Niemann is a cheat. However, I would love to see more evidence before I change my position on this issue.
Given he has admitted to cheating before, the "is a cheat" test is arguably satisfied. Whether he also cheated here is a different question.
With how Hans responded to Carlsen's unorthodox opening and his history, it made Carlsen unsure and wrecked the rest of his game. And given Hans couldn't even explain his moves later..
I don't know the details as to whether that claim is credible. Is this correlation really any more for Niemann than any other grandmaster of similar strength? Are the analyzers cherry-picking data points that fit the narrative? And of course it is possible that Niemann is legitimately that good.
Reddit's /r/chess has loads of viewpoints and speculation, if you want to read more there.
(https://en.chessbase.com/post/is-hans-niemann-cheating-world...)
The counter to that is that it looks likely that a clever high-level player could probably use an engine once or twice in a game in a judicious way and not raise statistical alarm bells. But still, Ken's work tries to suss out things like that--e.g. does the player in question make good moves in 'key' positions. Plus, continued use of such techniques over time would leave a statistical trail.
Honestly, Magnus' statement of, "well, he beat me and it didn't look like he was thinking hard" is pretty thin. Magnus knows that Hans has a history of cheating in online games when he was younger and to me it feels like he's just seeing ghosts and deep into confirmation bias territory. Especially since the game in question took place at a high-level tournament with rigorous anti-cheating scanning, etc.
So here we have a whole bunch of the world’s best chess players and chess.com believing that Niemann repeatedly cheats, in addition to Niemann’s own admission to cheating in the past, and Regan taking the opposite stance.
Magnus, Ian, and Hikaru at the very least have pretty openly (given the legal threats flying around) said/implied they believe Hans cheats, and chess.com has very explicitly said this.
Maybe not all of their comments and beliefs focus on this particular OTB game, but that’s not how you catch a cheater, since it’s rare to find a smoking gun. You look at a pattern of behavior. Hans has cheated in the past, and many top players believe he is cheating in some way, in at least some games, on a continued basis… which is why Magnus refuses to play Hans, and why we’re even having this discussion.
He implied that maybe it would not catch it. I don't read it as a "likely", especially given the fact that he said he doesn't think Hans cheated in this case.
Don't let the statisticians convince you that they know what they're doing either. Statistics, as a discipline, is essentially predicated on the principle that the objects of study do not know that they are being observed. Without this assumption, the domain is now more accurately described as game theory. Statisticians will happily and confidently ignore this and draw very wrong conclusions as a result.
There is no such "principle" in statistics. Statistics is based on statistical methodology, i.e. formulas, models, and techniques that are used in statistical analysis of raw research data, which is collected, organized, analyzed, interpreted and presented. The Hawthorne effect, "a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed,"[1] arose from analysis of a statistical study.
> Without this assumption, the domain is now more accurately described as game theory.
Game theory is utilized for decision-making in strategic environments where rational agents interact with each other. Statistics, on the other hand, is employed for reasoning in non-adversarial settings where the samples are assumed to be generated by some stationary and non-reactive source.
> Statisticians will happily and confidently ignore this and draw very wrong conclusions as a result.
Contradiction. You've already claimed that statistics is "essentially predicated on the principle that the objects of study do not know that they are being observed." Yet now you're claiming experts "confidently" ignore their discipline's "essentially predicated" principle.
First, I have not invalidated the discipline, I have said not to trust statisticians who are clearly acting outside the bounds of the fundamental assumptions of statistics, and that statistical methods DO NOT function on adversaries. Consider the following two scenarios:
1) Alice and Bob are sending messages to each other in a lanugage I don't understand, and I, using statistical methods, wish to find out what they are saying.
2) Alice and Bob are sending messages to each other and don't want me to gain any information about this messages. I, using statistical methods, wish to find out what they are saying.
In scenario 1, I am likely to succeed. In scenario 2, the consensus is that I'm fucked. In just about every way. I can't tell what they're saying, I can't tell that any message that I have discerned is meant to mislead me, or doesn't carry some additional message hidden in the entropy of the message that was meant to mislead me. I can't tell if the communication is just noise meant to distract me, and if we want to talk practically, I can't even tell if they can communicate. Basically the only inference that I can draw is that they can't communicate faster than the speed of light.
Here's another example: Gerrymandering. The scenario is that one party has a clear advantage in terms of number of representatives vs proportion of population. We must establish whether that number was arrived at fairly, or by cheating. We assume that the party in charge of drawing the borders knows what tests we can perform, because that is always the assumption that you give to an adversary.
The adversary has a very simple (though potentially computationally expensive) algorithm to run. Check all possible border configurations for both advantage and your cheat detection. Pick the one which maximizes advantage which does not pass the cheat threshold, or just whatever your utility is.
Statistics needs the assumption of good faith in order to operate. Anyone who uses statistical methods when that assumption that cannot be made is at best a bad statistician.
I think this is the essence of your argument. This can be defeated with counter-example. Test cheaters are adversarial to any detection of their cheating, yet statistical analysis can expose the cheater without much issue.
In this case, statistical methods cannot positively identify no cheating, and the extent to which they can identify instances of cheating, it is because the observed party was not acting adversarially.
The algorithm i presented anove for gerrymandering is very general.
I don't see how that is possible
> but it does not salvage statistics.
Statistics does not need salvaging.
> Originally i claimed that what happens is it becomes game theory. That was a bit of a simplification, but it is illustrated by your example.
My cheating statistics example is a counter-example that defeats your argument.
> In this case, statistical methods cannot positively identify no cheating,
That is the entire point of cheating statistical analysis, to determine if cheating occurred. If cheating is not statistically identified, then the analysis shows "positively" that cheating hasn't occurred.
> and the extent to which they can identify instances of cheating, it is because the observed party was not acting adversarially.
Statistical analysis of cheating does not involve direct observation, and any cheater is adversarial by definition.
> The algorithm i presented anove for gerrymandering is very general.
On the contrary, it is not only specific, it does not support your argument. Politicians are not statisticians, and the depth of statistical analysis is notably shallow and has a single factor, party affiliation.
Statistics is a very old and complex discipline. It is technically a branch of mathematics. In advancing the argument that a biased statistician can produce incorrect results, or that statistics can not accurately study adversarial subjects, the underlying fallacy to these arguments is hasty generalization. As laymen, we can not invalidate an entire discipline or even speculate the limits of such a discipline based on such very specific and synthetic circumstances.
It is known that it's not technologically impossible. There are ways to do it, some of them rather outlandish but not infeasible.
Unfortunately, that's as far as it can go. Either you start doing something really extreme to ensure that players can't cheat (that aforementioned strip search, making them play in a Faraday cage, etc), you'll never really know.
Even worse than that, the cheating may not have gone on during the match. It could have been as simple as old-fashioned spying: studying what preparations Carlsen had made, and learning their weaknesses before the match even starts.
You can't really prevent that. The best you can hope for is for a chess expert to opine that this move seems like an unlikely thing for a human to play without the assistance of a computer. Carlsen is just such an expert, but obviously his opinion alone is much too biased.
How is that even "cheating"?
I'm not saying it's likely. I'm just explaining what I meant. Those preparations are private, and getting inside intel is cheating.
Remember that we are not giving him the death penalty, we are just trying to establish which scenario is more likely. It is important to be able to render most likely judgments based on incomplete information. Its not a courtroom.
That's not to say he should be allowed to play, but only to note that live play is kind of a different ball game compared to doing it online. Online, it's you alone in a room (with a second computer). Similar cheating over the board would require some kind of hidden communications device, and probably an assistant.
That's a distinction without a difference.
Come on. You people need a heart.
So yes, if you have admitted to cheating in chess in the past, you lose certain privileges, such as competing in world chess championship.
Where is the proof?
There's a reason why things like this are in different categories.
I could have been an alcoholic for years, but I shouldn't be branded as one forever to everyone I meet, etc.. it's just wrong. Totally immoral.
- Hans was walking weird (something in his shoe)
- He was making weird movements
- He was distracted, or similar, indicating he's messing with some device
etc... then sure.
Magnus did not say these things, and that is telling.
What I believe happened is Magnus (someone who has presented a lot of anxiety in the past - see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR-4_ouXUV4 but easy to find other examples) was really nervous that Hans may be cheating, and that impacted Magnus's play (he played a very poor game).
This is, however, irrelevant. Hans Niemann is a chess cheat. Allowing him to set the narrative to "I've only cheated online" is the same as allowing him to set the narrative to "I've only ever cheated while wearing green clothes".
Carlsen specifically mentions that there are Niemann details he can't or won't reveal. Niemann could release him from that confidence, but I think Carlsen's reputation is strong enough that doubting this doesn't seem reasonable.
Personally, I think shading Carlsen, in isolation, seems misguided to me.
I agree, but that's mostly where my frustration with Carlsen is rooted. He had the choice with how to handle this - he went out of his way to choose the dramatic route.
He better have some conclusive evidence to back up the hurricane-sized shitstorm he's whipped up here. If it turns out the entire chess community got manipulated by a single rockstar and his badly-hurt ego, it would be hard to take the sport seriously again at a professional level.
Also in the public setting he wouldn't even need any device on him, he'll simply have an accomplice showing signs.
Playing a match in a big venue like MSG that holds numerous other events would make doing this easier. There are concerts there for example that involve bands setting up a lot of equipment. Get some of your chess team members to take temporary jobs on the crews setting up some of those shows and you might have a good chance of sneaking your chess cheating equipment in.
I think what you want to do with this kind of match is play each game in a different venue, and the players do not find out where the venue is until it is time for them to be taken there (on transportation arranged by the organizers) for the game. The player's teams are not told where the venue was until after the game.
If a player is going to cheat then it has to be done via something entirely contained on/in the player.
Maybe even have some of the games played on the move. E.g., the players are driven to an airport, board a chartered jet, and play their game in flight while the jet just flies around over a wide area.
Bands travel with their own crew, so they'd have to get hired on as a roadie (which is not unskilled labor) where ever the tour was put together. Not so simple, because once you see the date at MSG, it's way too late to get on that crew, and if they do get on a crew, how would they know they're going to play MSG before the manager does?
I'm not certain, but I assume MSG is a union shop, so a local hire to work there would require joining the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (ISTSG), and being a productive member for years before having enough seniority to be able to choose where they want to work.
Promoters and event organizers hire temps (you'll notice young people wearing black shirts with "SECURITY," emblazoned on them at shows, the only unskilled labor available), but the first time they'd get to be on location is during the event, and they have to work.
While your plan sounds simple enough, the reality is it would not be possible even with years of preparation. You can volunteer in public theater or go to work for an event provider to further understand why, but I'll just tell you. There is too much competition from all the individuals that have made a career out of it as well as the exponentially larger group competing to land their career. How many chess team members have a degree in theater arts, film/video production, recording arts or communications? How many of these graduates do you think are able to make a career out of their degrees? It is insanely competitive. My understanding is to, say, get into set design at a venue in New York City, you'd need a Masters degree in set design and a metric shitton of luck.
I also watched Niemann's games in the Julius Baer Cup, and he certainly has an uncanny ability to switch on some form of an afterburner against people like Aronian, Ivanchuk, Pragg and Duda. Perhaps he is that talented, but I can understand that the top players do not feel at ease.
On the other hand I'm not too happy about chess.com turning into some form of credit rating agency for top chess players. If I were above 2500, I wouldn't play there. Too much to lose if their proprietary algorithms misfire.
As a European, I'd certainly issue a GDPR information request for my cheating score, followed by a deletion request for all personal data.
In my opinion, it's more probable that Magnus is not just a chess player anymore. He is a chess tycoon that has a huge stake in chess business and a huge fanbase. And he is using that power frivolously.
The best way to catch this type of activity would be by detecting the presence of the equipment itself, such as with a nonlinear junction detector. This is a piece of gear that generates a small number of strong, spectrally-pure RF signals and listens for distortion products that indicate the presence of semiconductors nearby that are acting as mixers (which they will, whether they're designed to or not.) You can find anything from a hidden bug to a rusty rivet on a gutter that way. Even so, an NLJ sweep is no guarantee of success. The active devices in the transmitter and receiver could be biased into hard conduction or cutoff except when being used, for instance.
People have joked about "anal beads," but the fact is that a buttplug would be a near-flawless platform for such a communication system. You have the fine muscle control needed to transmit your opponent's moves to an accomplice via any number of pressure or motion transducers, and obviously you have the ability to perceive electrical or mechanical impulses received in return. If X-rays are ruled out for safety and if cavity searches are ruled out for modesty, detecting something like this would be a challenge for the highest-level government TSCM teams.
Adversaries knew and invited him believing it would make him blunder, but it seems Blackburne actually played better while drunk.
For one thing, the fact that Carlsen is making this statement now and not weeks earlier is embarrassing.
For another, the evidence he presents is disappointingly weak. I can understand being suspicious of online games. Fair enough. But the evidence for cheating offline is:
1) Rapid progress in OTB chess. This rapid progress is still much less rapid than many other players and involved Hans quite clearly spending nearly 2 years only focused on chess during and after the pandemic. 2) Him competing as black in a way only a handful of players could. I’d argue there is almost no one who stands even a 10% chance of beating Magnus as black OTB. But, if all the GMs playing Magnus had a 0.1% chance, then there’s a 1/2000 chance he loses, and the loss is not likely to be to one of the top players simply because there are far more non top players. 3) Lack of nervousness. Well, it’s hard to see how Magnus would be beat by someone who was nervous. On 1 hand, Hans had nothing to lose and be nervous about. On the other hand Magnus had a ton of pressure on a quest for 2900.
At the end of the day, Hans didn’t play a brilliancy to beat Magnus. He simply played normal decent moves. The game itself presented no evidence of cheating.
It took Hans about five years to go from 2300 to 2500 rating, and most of that was pre-pandemic. Increasing your rating gets exponentially more difficult as your rating increases, which is why there are so few players who ever make it to the 2700 level or even the 2600 level. Most players at this level who spend multiple years in a rating lull never significantly increase their playing ability (there are countless examples, but look at someone like MVL for a typical example). There are only a small number of cases of people who reach Hans' level who have staircase looking ratings progress graphs at the 2500+ level.
Hans' recent rating increase is far from proof that he's cheating, but it is definitely extremely unusual.
Why?
How can people act like the evidence of online cheating doesn't affect the likelihood that he cheated OTB? This is the exact same person playing both games.
Circumstantial evidence is still evidence
I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann
Chess.com / Magnus is waiting for Niemann to respond.
The first mistake was still choosing to play when he had reservations once Hans was invited. The second mistake was quitting the tournament and messing up the standings once he lost. The third mistake was making an insinuation through a tweet. The fourth mistake was resigning in two moves his next game with Hans.
Even though Hans is suspicious and untrustworthy, Magnus is taking on himself the authority to be judge, jury and executioner. If he is concerned about cheating being an issue, proactively bring up the issue, don't do it re-actively.
Hans claimed he studied against Magnus' opening because Magnus had played it a few months ago. It turns out Magnus has never used that opening in a recorded game. The dialog has now changed to "well by move 20 the board state became identical to a previous Magnus game" but Hans didn't say he spotted the similarities at move 20, he said he studied that specific opening.
"I was uncomfortable with how he played because he has a history of cheating so I quit"
Which is entirely reasonable, if you think that cheating is an "existential threat" to chess itself.
If he wants to follow through on this, we better see some damning evidence. If this entire hubbub was for nothing, the chess community as a whole is going to have egg on their face.
Perhaps a person knows they should have done more sooner, but still chooses to do what they think is right when they make a decision.
Who are all the other cheaters that Magnus has quit against?
Why is the only cheater he has publicly made a show of having a problem with in all these years the one who recently beat him OTB playing black?
"His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do."
This isn't just "I got weird vibes" or something, this is the professional analysis of someone who has spent a lifetime analysing particular board states, the overall flow of the game, and the psychology of his opponents. He may have his hands tied in terms of what exactly he can say at this time, but the telegraph here is that he suspects cheating because of specific, observable factors in how the prior game(s) went down.
And those factors may ultimately be too subtle to be judged by anyone other than a jury of other top-tier professional chess players, but ultimately that doesn't matter, if it's enough to trigger a more thorough investigation then concrete evidence will emerge one way or the other and show Carlsen to be right or wrong on his hunch.
Tennis players and Chess players are expected to be granted absolute silence.
Is that an inconsistency? I don't think so. It's part of the expectation of the sport. Sport is in general a weird type of impure competition. Sponsorships, TV contracts, etc, all contribute to mixed priorities.
So no, I don't think it's appropriate to equate Poker and Chess in this regard. Their best practices can be evaluated on their own measures.
As much as TV would make you think so that's mostly a myth. It was probably more so the case in the past but now it's at most a very minor part of the game, and most (typically all) of your edge comes from better card playing.
A huge river bluff is viewed in the lens of 'I've represented a range which includes strong hands, and I make money if I get a fold X% of the time while increasing the call chance by Y% when I do have a good hand in this spot' and not 'I'm going to unnerve him by throwing money to make a bad decision'.
You think the players being uncertain whether or not their opponent is cheating is a good thing for chess? The game would crumble.
I would assume that I'd have absolutely no chance of winning against either even with a handicap.
I think as the skill differential becomes greater you have a better chance of identifying where the "master" screwed up allowing the neophyte to win. But it sounds like Hans and Carlsen are too close in skill (at least in this game) to identify a flaw in Carlsen's play that was able to be exploited.
And perhaps Hans went in expecting to lose and played loose and free and surprised himself with a win.
The issue is that will he get that chance at all?
Also, Hans has won some great games in short time controls.
Sinquefield Cup arbiters already sent a press release saying they found no evidence of cheating.
Magnus' intuition is not evidence, full stop.
Hans' play itself is not evidence, full stop.
Only actual evidence of cheating , the means and methods used, the conspirators, are sufficient.
By all means, the court of public opinion is for all to own, but Magnus is already "flat out wrong" by the actual standards of competition.
I think the unspoken truth but also the thing both chess.com and Magnus are hinting at is that Niemann has cheated a lot more than he lets on, perhaps his entire stream was built on cheating, who knows. But chess.com can't just start sharing information like that, and they are walking a fine line just with their public statement where they affirmatively assert that Niemann is underplaying the reality of his cheating. Magnus probably has insider information from chess.com but is bound by NDA and this is also why he's now challenging Niemann to give him permission to speak on the matter.
> So again:
>- MAGNUS has NOT seen chesscom cheat detection algorithms
>- MAGNUS was NOT given or told a list of “cheaters”
>- and he is and has completely acted 100% on his own knowledge (not sure where he got it!) and desires to this time
>I will also address a comment made to this post about Ben’s (Perp Chess) podcast and say that, yes, some top players (not Magnus!) have been invited at times, under NDA, to see what we do… and by extension, they also saw some reports of confessed cheaters (there were many more cheaters - but we only share those who confessed in writing, and only privately under the NDA). Magnus and the team from C24 are not on that list.
You know:
>Hans get ze Flammenwerfer
My chess.com rating is only 864 and after making a move that won me the game my opponent said they were going to report me because "I played an unusual tactic."
It's taking all the fun out of the game.
Edit - to clarify that cheating being on the agenda is a sad state of affairs, not that Carlson calling it out is sad.
I'd say the vibe of the community seems to be a general distaste for drama, rather than taking a particular side.
I'm taken aback at the manner in which these accusations have been made. I guess that Magnus felt that the only way he could force FIDE and tournament organizers into action was with a big, public, shocking act.
It feels like a black eye for chess no matter the outcome. Either Niemann is proven guilty and professional chess has to grapple with that hit to its integrity, or the situation isn't resolved and the question of Niemann's (and pro chess') integrity is left open indefinitely.
I don't know to what extent Magnus has pushed for anti-cheating measures or increased scrutiny of Niemann behind closed doors, but I'll be very disappointed if it turns out that this public spectacle could've been avoided.
Inexpensive technical countermeasures like the metal detecting wands are reasonable enough, but probably not enough to stop the reputational harm that cheating scandals do to the entire sport.
I guess "over the board" chess means an IRL chess game.
Can someone explain how the fuck someone would be able to do this and not make it obvious? Why is this being continually glossed over?
Am I dumb?
It doesn't even have to be that complex, for a super GM even just a simple signal that indicates "this position has a crushing move, spend extra time thinking on this move" is enough to significantly improve their performance
Unless you catch the method of cheating directly, it's basically impossible to definitively determine if someone was cheating from a small number of games, they could just have gotten lucky or have been especially prepared in a given line like Niemann claims to have been
This reductive approach to looking at cheating will just end with both of these shmucks sitting naked in an empty room, surrounded by an audience of a single referee who's job is to stop them from physically attacking one another. If he wants to accuse someone of cheating, he should do it - otherwise, dragging someone in public and refusing to make public statements doesn't reflect well on his professional integrity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_bridge
Bridge is an imperfect information game so the opportunities are much larger, but something similar can happen in chess.
Whatever the case is, I don't think a public crusade is the right option. If he had conclusive evidence of him cheating during the match, he wouldn't have made such a protracted statement on it weeks afterwards.
Still could be correct, however. I suspect that Carlsen has certain knowledge of Hans cheating at games later than 16 but not the one he lost that hasn't been revealed yet.
In Magnus' statement he specifically spoke of how he felt, Hans felt. This shows how much information beyond the 64 squares that chess players take in.
I'd argue the opportunities are larger in chess, because "what to do" is much more concretely correct.
Bridge has its own problems... and people will cheat as long as there are physical devices. (Fantunes / Fisher-Schwartz) Imagine if they used any simple encryption algorithm, they'd be fishy, but impossible to catch at that time.
BBO is the future for bridge IMHO.
Chess, will become an in person game with nobody else but the arbiter, players, and cameras in the room.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
- "Such a technique was used in the 1980s construction of the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Thousands of diodes were mixed into the building's structural concrete making detection and removal of the true listening devices nearly impossible."
Hans has performed well in tournaments where there was no live broadcast. What's the explanation?
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/sep/20/carlsen-v-niem...
* a hair of defined length placed in a bowl or glass of water and vibrations at the resonant frequency of that hair would produce visible ripples around the hair. * distant noise such as car horns honking, bass from a passing vehicle blasting dubstep, construction noise, etc. * laser beam through the window visible only with particular contact lenses * a bone-induction speaker or thumper (vibrating device) embedded in them or replacing a tooth * thumpers that can be put inside the soles of shoes that would not be detectable with a regular metal detector
My impression is that the technology is there. If the incentives are high enough, someone can find the way.
Once a cheat, not always a cheat ... but you built the reputation of being a cheat and that's all on the cheat.
It's on the cheat to literally bend-over backwards (lol) to assure people they have changed.
I want to emphasize, that it is disgusting regardless of Carlsen being right or wrong in his suspicions, it isn't really important, and I would stand by it even after Niemann being proven guilty. This really should be simple: either a player is caught cheating and then he is banned (or awarded a prize, or whatever this particular federation does with cheaters). Public statement must be given by federation and/or organizers, after which players may be allowed to speak up. Or a player isn't caught, and then you keep your fucking opinion to yourself (except of informing the arbiters, of course), however great champion you may be. In fact, the greater you are, the more responsibility you have, and even if you are borderline sure the opponent has cheated (but have no legal proof) — you really should be mindful of possibility that your are mistaken, and of what consequences your (however "legally non-binding") allegations may bear, given how prominent you are.
I.e., this is an issue that must be dealt by organizers — not players, not reddit users and surely not youtube bloggers.
Otherwise, what happens is that somebody totally innocent (and I'm not talking about Niemann — the point is, that it really could have been ANYBODY) can be publicly executed on a whim of a great King of Chess. Seriously, just think about it. A person's whole carrier may be ruined, he may be driven to a suicide, just because… Magnus has suspicions? Does it sit well with you?
Also, all of this is far beyond the question of if a suspect has cheated in the past. I mean, I think it's fair to say that refusing to play somebody who the federation/organizers do not ban, can (and should) be considered ill sportsmanship and be frowned upon — but this is just my personal opinion and means nothing. This said, I guess it should be acceptable that one may publicly refuse to play a person who is known to have cheated in the past (or for any other reason — and the criteria of refusal being potentially arbitrary is why I find this problematic). But then you kinda should make this statement before you play them, or at least make a note to yourself to do it after the tournament has finished, instead of throwing a tantrum just after you lose a game to that person (a game that you played really poorly, according to many respectable experts in the field, by the way… which isn't the point of course).
But, obviously, one cannot (and shouldn't) be expected to make the best and most moral decision all of the time. Which is why this should be handled (and even enforced) by the arbiters/event organizers/federation. And it would be too kind to say that it wasn't — it was literally the opposite of that! They were throwing fuel to the fire all way along! This is obscene.
(Honestly, I didn't expect them to do well, because we all know what FIDE and chess community in general are, but there still are degrees to how bad one could manage the situation, and they did it awfully bad.)
Obviously there's more information that isn't being disclosed, and until the definitive information comes to light we're all going to be left in the dark.
Nonetheless, addressing this statement, it basically reveals that Magnus couldn't trust Hans before the tournament and especially the game they played in which Magnus lost as white.
Essentially, there isn't a game where Magnus loses to Hans and doesn't see cheating. He'd probably suspect cheating even if he won so long as there was some "unusually good play" from Hans.
So, excluding cheating as a possibility, the probability of Magnus strongly suspecting cheating given that he loses to Hans, however unlikely, looks like about 100%.
I haven't been following this closely (so please correct any details), but Hans's defence of how well he played in the game seems consistent with him playing unusually well and Magnus's observations. IE, Hans claims that he happened to prepare the opening Magnus played because he was trying to think of ways Magnus would play unpredictable openings, which is something, AFAIK, Magnus tends to do. It also seems plausible that Hans would prepare much more for the game against Magnus than anyone else. That combined with some luck and having a good day all seems consistent with not only winning unexpectedly but a relatively unusual demeanour.
And on the demeanour points Magnus makes, can we take a moment to imagine being him in the game: already suspecting cheating, running into someone who seems prepared for your "unusual/unexpected opening" and then being down as white ... what would you see on the other side of the board? How could you not read into any tick or gesture? Moreover, how focused are you? Would this not be the set of circumstances where you're going to play unusually badly? My vague understanding is that Magnus did indeed make some blunders in the game. The question for me is how well did Magnus play relative to his own level?
Overall, on the general point of cheating, Magnus is probably very much on point. His unilateral action on this seems on par with World Champions thinking they're as big as the game itself, for better or worse. On the specific point of whether Hans cheated in this game, I think that "innocent until proven guilty" is the only thing that will keep things together because if Magnus is wrong and Hans is bullied out of the game because of this then it will only contribute to the ugliness of a cheating crisis not remove it, IMO. That a cheating accusation is as ugly as this has been already is already a black mark against all those involved in managing the sport. Should it turn out that Hans did cheat, for instance, it's not a good look that the undisputed world champion had to or felt he had to forfeit a tournament and a game in another tournament to make his point.
Otherwise for the sport of Chess, it'd be a sad sport indeed if exciting and unexpected moments like Magnus's loss to Hans can't exist in it and the difference between "great" and "cheater" is whether you get help from a computer before or during the game.
At the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, I made the unprecedented professional decision to withdraw from the tournament after my round three game against Hans Niemann. A week later during the Champions Chess Tour, I resigned against Hans Niemann after playing only one move.
I know that my actions have frustrated many in the chess community. I'm frustrated. I want to play chess. I want to continue to play chess at the highest level in the best events. I believe that cheating in chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game. I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over the board chess. When Niemann was invited last minute to the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, I strongly considered withdrawing prior to the event. I ultimately chose to play.
I believe that Niemann has cheated more - and more recently - than he has publicly admitted. His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective.
We must do something about cheating, and for my part going forward, I don't want to play against people that have cheated repeatedly in the past, because I don't know what they are capable of doing in the future.
There is more that I would like to say. Unfortunately, at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly. So far I have only been able to speak with my actions, and those actions have stated clearly that I am not willing to play chess with Niemann. I hope that the truth on this matter comes out, whatever it may be.
Sincerely, Manus Carlsen - World Chess Champion
Carlsen is all but accusing Niemann of having cheated against him. Why can't he go the extra step? Is this something his lawyers have advised him to do? (I don't have a dog in this fight)
It's also a gambit to get Hans to say something like "sure, Carlsen, say whatever you want" which could be used as a defense in a defamation case.
There's even a hint that Carlsen has evidence of cheating that has yet to be revealed (but not this game).
Remember that statements of opinions, including opinions that are analyses of previously disclosed facts, are protected from defamation claims. Defamation can only consist of a damaging false statement of fact, or the allegation that you're aware of specific undisclosed facts like that to support your opinion.
Other countries have vastly different statues, and in some cases true statements of fact can be defamation (if they were not widely known, I believe).
You could call out Lord St. Buggering-Little-Boys, complete with films, DNA evidence, and witness testimony, and still lose (and be on the hook for legal fees).
If I were Neimann I would actually sue now.
Plus, a very strong implication thag he did so at the Sinquefield Cup.
Neimann may have something.
(I'm not a lawyer, I just nerd out on this stuff, happy to be corrected).
He hasn't said anything beyond provable facts, and let people read into his actions what they want.
Suing someone for defamation because they resigned to you in a tournament is going to be a pretty high bar.
I now wait to see if FIDE will do what they should and sanction him but I am not sure I have faith.
What's the big appeal of chess? We (as humans) can't beat computers. It's probably useful for further research, but I see absolutely no value in (human) competitions.
Or we should abandon rowing as a sport because we now have 9hp Honda outboard motors?
Of course, everything depends on "the market" - if people want to watch human chess tournaments (or cycling tournaments), they will... but I suspect with time it will either have to become a hilarious, anti-cheat porn or it will die out. I'm rooting for the latter :-D. I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.
I rather doubt that. Go was thought to be much harder to solve, but AI has caught up there, and with techniques that will probably generalise to any similar games.
Chess is far from solved, either. AlphaZero's play has actually led to the emergence of additional theory.
Chess also has the added bonus of providing a lot of interesting puzzles for those interested, they can sit and analyze lines with engines after the games as well or watch Agadmator on YouTube analyze it. It's fun!
I agree that puzzles are fun, but cheating will be a problem for the competitive part. And I think it will degrade the appeal to watch/follow.
The best players in the world can still go toe to toe against three of these things, unless they choose to intentionally avoid high flying shots. In which case this bot wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZtowNHhrQ
This is completely incorrect. We have fully solved chess with 7 pieces, and 8-piece tablebases are in progress. The initial chess position has 64 pieces, and solving gets exponentially harder as more pieces are added.
> We (as humans) can't beat computers.
We can't beat cars at races either yet competitive foot races still exist.
But the competition in chess was never about the computers, it's about the players. And that's true for many sports, otherwise we'd only ever watch the Olympics.