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Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

A key fact to understand in thinking about cheating in over the board chess: a strong player can defeat a much stronger opponent with just 1-3 hints per game indicating the strongest move. For example, most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player. Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.

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).

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> Also, clever cheating devices have been found in over the board chess competitions

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.

Now analyze a video of Magnus being wanded!

Why? Has Magnus admitted to cheating on multiple occasions in the past? No. He has not.

As a control.

You want to look for evidence that such an intense level of scrutiny is too good at finding signs of ill intent.

It's interesting speculation, I wouldn't say I was convinced but I did see what you meant.

is there any thinking on how many bits of information do you need to cheat, and how many can be communicated via thumper?

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 think a shorthand code would be employed

we're dealing with bits of info here, thats the shortest hand there is

Sure, but the number of bits is what I meant

Not many at all. For instance it takes a maximum of 6 bits to encode a given destination square on the board. This is probably sufficient, or very close to it.

Here's a relevant quote from Magnus regarding cheating:

"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").

yes but against magnus, who is supposedly two levels above Hans, this is not just a one move cheat, he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes, which is an awful lot of information to transmit.

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?

Carlsen has broken 3000 in blitz before... Unfortunately he's too good for it to mean anything I think.

> he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes, which is an awful lot of information to transmit.

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.

This is the opposite of what a computer-assisted player would do. Computer chess engines (generally speaking, somewhat less true of the latest generation) are not great at high level strategy but will never miss a tactic (micro level play).

That's outdated, now that we have deep learning the machines are great at high level strategy too.

>this is not just a one move cheat, he'd have to cheat + have a continuous absence of mistakes

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.

> at least one of the natural moves here is a blunder

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.

In any case, you would need a human operator who is a very strong chessplayer himself.

Magnus Carlsen has commented that Hans' mentor Maxim Dlugy "must be doing a great job"

https://youtu.be/c50PJmOj2-U?t=83

Anyone 1500+ can recognize the natural move--that's what makes it natural.

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.

> Anyone 1500+ can recognize the natural move--that's what makes it natural.

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.

> two levels above Hans

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.

Two levels if he isn't cheating. If he is, perhaps 3 or more. Recently magnus played hans on the beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1OBEY99inw

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.

Eh casual play has so many factors. I wouldn't put much weight on how badly a gm loses on the beach. For example, drugs could have been involved.

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.

have them play blitz (where the moves are way too fast for info transmission to happen), and see if the skill level scales accordingly?

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.

Well, even endgames with as few as 5 pieces on the board are beyond what a human can solve with memorization. I don't disagree that blitz is mostly pattern recognition and rapid tactical thinking, but that applies all the way down to the end.

It's true that some people are worse at blitz, but if Niemann's OTB blitz rating is as good as his OTB rating at slower time controls, that's evidence against him cheating ... at least in ways that materially affect his rating. I guess it would be possible to cheat with an engine tuned to your actual rating just to make it less stressful.

Sounds like not just the players need to be checked for cheating devices, but the audience too. Or the players have to play in a faraday cage without an audience.

It's not going to make the game more fun, but it's probably necessary.

At their level it's pretty much known what location / piece they're thinking about. For key moments, it may be enough to transmit the piece name only. And have some follow up for destination if they really need them.

From what I understand you only need one bit. The assistance doesn't need to be "move piece P to square S", but "this position is critical, if you spend extra time exploring here you will find a winning move".

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.

Just "e6" would likely be enough context in most situations. Sometimes only one piece can legally move there. Sometimes it's obvious which piece should move there once the position is pointed out.

I watched the livestreams of Andrea Botez's games in Vegas. Something I was really struck by is even though she's not a GM strength player, her mental board visualization skills are way up there. She did post game debriefs on the streams where she went rapid fire through hundreds of variations with her cohost just verbally. She'd go through them faster than the host could click to show chat at times.

Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.

You don't have to imagine, check out any post match press conference or when players discuss over the board after the game.

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.

just watch this https://youtu.be/pUgvAoTzWBA and you will see what super gms are capable of

I saw a video a while ago.

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.

Half the reason people believe Hans was cheating is cause he couldn't do this for the game in question.

Yeah. This is why I think those people are full of shit.

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.

One move is 12 bits at most. 3 bits each X/Y, two XY pairs for source and destination.

You would only need one set of coordinates. The destination coordinates. Any high level chess players would only need that information to dominate.

Honestly I think all you'd need is the piece. There are 6 pieces, so that's 3 bits of info with room to spare.

You don't need something that transmits if you're searching for bug-like devices or any general integrated circuits with a nonlinear junction detector:

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.

That's a fascinating device.

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?

The wiki said that it doesn't work against shielded electronics, however who knows how accurate that actually is. I really enjoyed the anecdote about the US embassy in Moscow having diodes embedded in the cement throughout to make finding actual bugs much harder.

With that nest of hair I wonder maybe he disassembles the device and puts small parts in various locations, the most detectable in the shoe or "the pocket".

Someone familiar with slight of hand could comfortably scratch here and there while dropping pieces in a 'build' pocket.

of all the whacky theories I've heard so far this one stands out. Don't get too swept up in it

The first paragraph was mostly facetious.

The second merely suggests an unusually clever, yet plausible methodology.

I love it. The idea that someone would undergo training as a magician in order to cheat at chess is just hilarious! It’s not totally absurd though, given the history of cheating (as well as espionage) in sport.

The tricks people have pulled to cheat in baseball and (NFL) football are similarly amusing!

My favourite, "Apple Watch and Cheating in Baseball": https://blog.watchdoctor.biz/2018/10/29/apple-watch-and-chea... .

If anyone has other examples, I'd love to read about them; it gives me similar satisfaction as learning how a magic trick works.

Doesn’t seem absurd at all to me. There might not be as much money in chess cheating as other scams but someone could be motivated to just become known as one of the best chess players.

You've seen the film The Man with the Golden Gun ? A cufflink here, a pen there, that pack of chewing gum... assembled together could be a cheating device.

>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.

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...

You miss the vitally important point: they weren't needed in the game in question, so we don't even get to the point where fanciful theorising is relevant.

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.

> Magnus didn't play particularly well and Hans played ok.

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.

> 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.

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.

No, that is not how that works. An engine evaluation saying that a position is better for black does not mean that it is easier for a human to play that position. Easy to play and winning for an engine are orthogonal concepts.

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.

Yah, even to club level players, Magnus played a bad game. Hans had nowhere close to perfect play ( I think the stock fish analysis says it’s close to 70% best moves, which is equivalent to Hans rating ). As a club level player, it blows my mind how many people are siding with Magnus. : edit, typo

Understated part of Magnus’ play is that he may have been playing a worse line that should have pushed Hans out of theory, but apparently didn’t.

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.

Magnus letter explained that he claimed to notice Niemann's odd behavior during the game. That may have distracted him.

Tangent: any hack magician that uses that device deserves to lose their career.

As opposed to chess, magic is about lying and cheating. Everybody knows it and everybody is fine with it in magic, as you can see here in Dary's legendary ambitious card routine:

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."

Nonetheless there's a rough ranking of "acceptable lies", and a thumper - anything with a secretly complicit audience member, really - ranks near the bottom of that.

Even better, in that video he has a pack of gum that sets off the sensor, the security guard takes it, finishes the scan, and then gives it back! Obviously not proof of cheating but how hard would it have been to hide a device in that pack of gum?

Now I want to watch the tournament footage to see if he ever chews gum...

He chews pretty much the whole game

If chess TO are that scared of cheaters, they should just take each player measurements and provide them with their own clothing/accessories.

you missed the beads in the butt story

Deep cavity search livestreamed before match.

Or lock them in transparent cube for week before match naked... So many solutions that specially person like Carlsen should be open to.

Mandatory prematch laxatives

> Many people might assume that a cheater needs guidance every move, thereby requiring a potentially more obvious cheating mechanism. That is not the case.

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.

A bunch of grandmasters have now talked about the psychological aspect of even just wondering if your opponent could possibly by cheating, and second guessing if a bad looking move by your opponent might actually be a brilliant engine line.

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

Won't they run into the same issue playing strong players? A weird Magnus move might be a blunder or a brilliant line he calculated?

Are GMs cheating against NMs because there's said skill gap?

To some extent yes, but humans tend to make moves that follow some kind of reasoning or logic. When you play a strong opponent, it's possible that you won't see the next move that they play, but once they have played it, you can deduce the logic they used in order to make it. An engine move on the other hand can easily reject the standard strategies and can appear highly irrational. When you see this kind of move, it becomes easier to suspect cheating.

yes but the computer is just so much more powerful, as well as it makes seemingly weird moves more often, as well as it can get itself out of a "bad" line if pushed that way much easier.

I've definitely experienced that, playing mahjong against a guy who was behaving oddly in the European championships. But all you can do is have strict referreeing and stricter penalties for anyone who is caught cheating even once (which seems to be missing in the chess world given the player in question's record). You certainly can't try to retroactively impose a vigilante penalty that FIDE haven't.

IIRC Kasparov was psychologically defeated by Deep Blue with the exact opposite of this play.

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 thought his primary complaint at the time was that they were reprogramming in the evenings in response to the day's games, providing a lot of grandmaster human input during the tournament. I could be wrong there.

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.

That doesn't scale down the skill level. At top level of just about any thing the difference between player is decided by few mistakes (by that I define less than optimal action).

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

Eh, if you make 96 mistakes to your opponents's hundred, that tips you from even to advantaged.

Hot take, but chess is a zombie sport.

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.

Chess engines have outclassed humans for about 15 years now. Yet chess is more popular than ever.

Why would chess engines playing very well mean human chess stops being interesting? I don't see the relation.

In a similar vein, Tool Assisted Speedruns for video games can always outperform human players, but TAS streams and youtube videos don't get nearly as many viewers as real humans running. And human speedrunners caught cheating and using tools etc. have drastic hits to their popularity after they're exposed.

A human making a TAS isn't playing the same game. They're playing a version with slow motion, rewind, memory inspection, etc.

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.

I'm actually on the whole more interested in a TAS. I would often watch a big fraction of the TAS block at a GDQ, and only RTA for niche cases where I especially care about that game.

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.

> Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting.

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"

And yet the audience for chess engine tournaments is basically 0, while millions(?) watch human tournaments.

This has 100k views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nmCHW73-ec

Didn’t we just learn that Hans Niemann is apparently just a front-end for a chess engine? ;)

what if Hans is not human, but an advance AI cyborg? maybe he's not communicating with a chess engine, he IS the chess engine. Maybe his name is an anagram for the word Enigma or something.

I like commented games between engines, this has more than a million views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wui0YweevtY

Machines can throw objects faster, further, and more accurate than humans, but field sports are still popular. It's interesting not because the object goes far, but because it's being done by a human.

There isn't yet a humanoid robot that can autonomously play those sports, though.

I don't know, Voight-Kampff tests don't seem reliable.

From what I've read on this exact topic w.r.t. robotics, there are a few select places you could probably replace humans with a robot using current technology, and achieve almost perfect results. Kickers in American football, free throws in basketball are two such examples.

You could just put a robot on a basketball team, take a pass from the tip off, and shoot a 3-pter. Like Air Bud

Ain't no rule says a robot can't play basketball.

Kickers have to sometimes tackle, run fakes, kick onsides, deal with mishandled snaps or holds, and adjust for the conditions, like wind or how the opponent is trying to bother the kick. Plus the kick is from different parts of the field, unlike a free throw. But it doesn't matter, since someone taking a free throw has to be already in the game playing. There's no designated FT shooter.

At some point, being able to score 3 points from unlimited range just breaks the game of football to the degree that an increased risk of mishandling a bad snap/hold doesn't really matter, and you won't ever need to kick onside, either.

> There isn't yet a humanoid robot that can autonomously play those sports, though.

Why does it have to be humanoid? The chess engine isn't.

Chess is a game of symbol manipulation. It isn't played in the real world and its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.

> Chess is a game of symbol manipulation. It isn't played in the real world and its rules don't require human bodies the way field sports do.

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".

> 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.

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.

I don’t really think you can compare those though; robots are crap and easily beaten at most physical sports. I mean, as far as I can find, there is not even a bipedal robot that outruns humans (there is the cheetah robot but it has 4 legs ; that’s like having a dog or, you know, cheetah compete against Usain).

But yes, people will continue to play chess, go and spear throwing because it doesn’t matter if something non human is better.

Why is bipedal required for running, but neuronal is not required for chess? These lines are arbitrary.

Exactly. Also people still watch bicycle race while they stand no chance against a motorcycle. Or woman soccer despite man would win easily.

It’s not required, we just don’t allow anything else because it would no longer be interesting at all. That’s the point. Same why we don’t watch grandmasters play computers; they lose. But humans vs humans is still a good watch.

but field sports are still popular.

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'.

If they're popular enough to be in the Olympics, they're popular enough to be called popular.

Yeah I know what you mean but human chess is much more exciting because you can see themes appear in a player's strategy. You can sort of follow what they're thinking. Computer chess is next level precisely because the computer has decided that is the best move, but it's not part of some kind of narrative, it's just based on the engine's analysis.

Isn't that way more beautiful? Pure brilliance and perfection. There is no emotion in the machine making dumb mistakes. There is no fear in the machine questioning his move. Is there some kind of video of a GM analyzing an engines moves step by step? Can they even understand every move without seeing the whole picture?

Yeah, in a way it's more beautiful I think, but only in some abstract sense because it's still above everyone's heads. What's missing to make it interesting to watch is that narrative I was talking about, and that's a distinctly human feature of gameplay. I don't know if there's a video of GM's analyzing engine's moves, mostly because I think that's literally what the engine is for. And I don't think they can understand every move, which just goes to show how strong engines are. It's like alien tech strong.

>Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting.

Why? That seems like a completely arbitrary line to draw.

Seriously - go play a fighting game.

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.

That's fairly counterintuitive to me. The easiest avenue for an AI to gain advantage over a human is reaction time and accuracy. E.g. an AI that reacts in microseconds will never be beaten on pure reaction by a human given that there's a floor of some 50-100msec for a human to be physically able to react to stimulus.

E.g. I remember early 3rd party Starcraft AIs would beat humans just by micromanaging certain nimble flying units.

I typo'd a bit so maybe it didn't get across. I meant an AI with human reaction time.

> (or Niemann, if concrete evidence against him emerges)

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.

What hard evidence—exactly—do you expect Carlsen to be able to produce? Alternatively, imagine anyone in a similar position. What hard evidence can anyone produce in situations such as this?

100% serious question.

I don't expect him to produce evidence, but I expect him to say more than "I suspect he cheated"

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.

Magnus has produced what he can given the situation and has staked something of extreme personal value—his legendary near-2900 ELO—on it with his move-1 resignation.

If he'd heard the guy's damn shoe buzzing he would have insisted on a search.

Blah. Magnus has given nothing. Could have still insisted he was searched. He didn't. Magnus has anxiety.

Playing cheats can do that

I don't disagree, but it doesn't mean he cheated or continues to cheat.

No one doubts he cheated. The only doubt is when. Sure, people deserve second chances, but not necessarily a chance to become champion.

Who are you, or anyone else here to decide that? Sounds extremely arrogant, even for Magnus to try and decide such a thing.

Entirely possible, but a hell of a thing to throw away your reputation over.

FIDE doesn't rate the Champions Chess Tour, but even if it did the format isn't classical, so his quest for 2900 is doubly unaffected.

I appreciate the correction, thank you.

Doesn't than line of thinking mean that anybody can accuse somebody of cheating when they unexpectedly beat them?

No, it means that the reality of catching cheaters in chess is fundamentally heuristic if you don't manage to catch them red-handed.

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.

Niemann have admitted cheating before when playing online, so Carlsen is just not making this up about any random player. There is a history of cheating.

Also Carlsen didn't accuse other players of cheating the other times he's lost

The sample size for that is absurdly small. (Carlsen only takes single classical losses seriously, since rapid/blitz is too random.)

There is no smoking gun, but there is a lot of smoke. The ease with which Niemann pulled out of the hand a couple of brilliant moves, without spending too much time thinking about it, on an unusual line, is highly suspicious.

Questioning him at the tournament would have at least given Niemann a chance to prove his innocence.

That probably would have been even worse of a shit-storm. You think you are rational and will ask good questions, but if you are not a trained journalist, and you haven’t prepared, you will most likely only ask really dumb question that do nothing except cause more drama.

Innocence is never proven, only presumed.

I expect people to hold off the public allegations if they can't prove anything.

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.

I believe you could have an engine look at the historical games of a player and identify the "strength" of each move. How strong (in terms of elo) does a player have to be before they find a certain move? How often do the top players find moves that greatly exceed their own elo? Does Hans find top moves more frequently than his opponents?

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.

All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".

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...

Usain Bolt is another interesting case. Commentators have made a pretty compelling case based on the circumstantial evidence that he was doping, but due to weaknesses in Jamaica's anti-doping program it's likely impossible to prove one way or the other.

https://tomnew.medium.com/usain-bolt-lance-armstrong-and-the...

A huge number of (male) athletes across all sports are doping now. Testosterone deficiency is a medical condition, and taking “testosterone replacement therapy” is explicitly allowed by many sports. Even if it’s not allowed, it’s not really possible to robustly test for, because in some forms at least it’s simply increasing the levels of the same hormones that your body is naturally producing. Same goes for human growth hormone. Just take enough to put your levels at a very high, but plausibly natural level and you essentially can’t fail a drug test.

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”.

Which sports is TRT specifically allowed? The only one I know of is MMA, but I'd consider that marginal as a "sport". Are there others?

FIFA call it a “therapeutic use exemption”, which basically anybody can get with a note from a doctor. A lot of other sports have similar exemption processes. I know the NFL does too.

> FIFA call it a “therapeutic use exemption”, which basically anybody can get with a note from a doctor.

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.

You can’t find examples because the treatments are part of the players private medical records and are not published. But it is as simple as getting a doctor to say that therapeutic use is required.

Is trivially Easy to test for TRT. Taking testosterone shuts off your body’s LH and FSH production and those can be tested. These can be biologically mimicked with hCG and HMG but those don’t chemically show up on LH and FSH tests.

LH ratios aren’t a robust test, aren’t accepted by any governing body alone as far as I’m aware, and are only a very weak indicator if you’re only testing urine. Testosterone to epitestosterone ratio is still the gold standard, and to fail that test you need a ratio about 3x above normal. The efficacy of these tests are also highly impacted by when the PEDs were last taken, and that’s true for all classes of PEDs, not just the bio identical ones.

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.

Not quite. There is still a possibility that Niemann will admit cheating. If he actually cheated there may be a time—in years or decades rather then months—that he fills with remorse and admits it (hopefully with a detailed description on how he did it so we can verify). If however he didn’t cheat, we will probably never actually know the truth.

I don't know much about chess, but it seems like Niemann now has to either maintain his performance in Chess without cheating, or cheat to maintain it if he can't without - in which case he could still be caught.

That's not true. Both he and Chess.com both say that they have evidence to the extent of Hans' cheating. Both have asked Neimann for the ability to speak freely without threat of libel.

Ball is in Han's court.

This doesn’t make sense.

If they tell the truth, there is no libel, and they don’t need anybody’s permission to speak.

Apparently this (the idea that telling the truth is necessarily not libelous) is untrue in some jurisdictions? Or perhaps they fear that they are not 100% correct?

Very interesting. I don’t really understand chess beyond the basics but when I think of sports the difference between good and great really seems to be, in baseball just a hit or two per week, in American football a running back who has the vision to cut decisively a second or less before another running would.

When you see it consistently the difference seems enormous, but the math … is surprisingly tiny.

“or less” is doing a lot of work in that first paragraph. Running plays typically only last like two seconds, maybe four if they get to the second level (linebackers).

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*.

You're right: the hint doesn't even have to be a move. It could also be an evaluation "it's better for white", or even: "there is a winning combination" which might be enough to get them to focus on finding it.

What's the possibility of a dental implant as a cheating device?

As an electrical engineer currently in the process of getting a dental implant, I would say it's definitely doable. But it would present a pretty serious packaging challenge, particularly the power supply.

[UPDATE] Turns out you can get dental implant hardware on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/272267166511

Considering it only needs to be powered for a single match it seems very possible to me with over the counter components.

It's a pretty straightforward calculation, which I don't feel like doing right now. But I think Stockfish is going to be pretty power-hungry at the grandmaster level.

I'd be thinking more "radio" than "computer."

What about a wireless receiver instead?

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?

A receiver that size is borderline trivial but extremely risky because the transmission could be detected.

what about powerless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

In 1945 the Soviet Union gifted a wall hung artwork to the USA embassy which passively transmitted audio signal from the room with no power supply or active electronics.

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 power supply

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.

Perhaps play naked in a Faraday cage?

this is really the only way (maybe not naked, but change into preapproved uniforms)

ok but why not, let's do it the classic greek way

Eve Babitz played artist Marcel Duchamp* naked. Perhaps clothing optional? ;-)

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-marcel-duchamp...

you’d need a cavity search too (seriously)

What do you do about subcutaneous implants?

MRI scanner.

You could still run a chess engine offline on a decently powerful phone that would beat high rated players afaik.

Run an emp in the room before starting the game?

Finally, a practical use for tactical nuclear weapons.

Where are they getting a phone from in this hypothetical scenario?

With no visible or audible audience either.

You don’t need a faraday cage if you suspect he gets the moves from outside. Just put a 20 minute delay to the video feed and don’t allow random people in the room.

he could be sending info out of the room by clenching whatever muscle. Need Faraday cage.

Well, a vibrating device can be anally inserted. So maybe the Faraday cage is enough, unless we will be doing cavity searches.

The St. Louis chess club provided more checking / scrutiny than any other OTB tournament I have seen. How would you improve their process? Honestly would love to hear.

the TSA airport x-ray scanners, would they do a nice job of finding devices internal or external?

It seems at a minimum they could go through the same level of security as it takes to board a plane: remove shoes, back-scatter x-ray, etc.

Daniel Naroditsky[1] said at the St Louis chess club specifically it would be pretty easy to cheat OTB no matter what searches they do. He said there is a balcony which the players have access to when they walk away from the board which has a clear view of the car park and you could have an assistant signal from there at crucial moments. He also cited a case of a player who was definitely cheating OTB[2] and was never caught and where no mechanism was ever found.

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

Word, I hear ya, a cheater is always gonna be a cheater. … But, honestly, we are going through a strange transition in chess. I’m not very familiar with online chess, so I take that sort of cheating lightly. Was surprised that online games can effect OTB ratings. I’m guessing FIDE, USCF , and other orgs will start separating online vs. OTB ratings as a result of this friction.

Chess tournaments could use the services of already existing casino anti cheating experts. But I imagine that would be very expensive and not feasible for most events.

I can't think of any effective way to curb online cheating in chess. Ultimately, online chess with money prizes shouldn't really exist.

> most chess experts agree that a ~2600 rated player with 2-3 hints at key moments per game would be expected to beat a ~2800 rated player

source? sounds like bs to me

Chess is not a game where there is always one right move, but where positions are threatened/protected to a greater/lesser degree, and the _value_ of those threats/protection can only be realized much further along in the game.

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.

If you wrote a computer program with 3 bugs, how long would it take you to fix the bugs if someone did / didn't tell you where the bugs where?

You don't know there are exactly 3 bugs to start with. While in chess, esp if you're experienced, you know what your possibilities are. Just need to pick one.

Or so it has been described above us.

chess experts do agree on that, they've all been saying it on various youtube channels, i was even irritated when I saw it written here cuz I was like "you're just repeating the same stuff I've been hearing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVzSXsZ10I among other places.

200 points difference means a 25% chance to win, so I doubt just 1 hint is enough to bridge that gap consistently. Many high level games are won by grinding out a small advantage. I'll take a 2700 with 3 hints against a 2800 though.

The "200 points difference means 25% chance to win" breaks down at the highest levels. It works fine near the middle of the bell curve -- i.e. 800-2000 Elo -- but once you get to 2200 Elo you are talking about the >99th percentile. For example, I don't know of a single 2400 player who can score an average of 0.25 against 2600 players.

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.

As an example of this, until the Niemann game Magnus had a 53-game win^H^H^Hunbeaten streak. Prior to this he had a 125-game unbeaten streak. Many (most?) of these games were played against competitors within 200 Elo. Many of these were played against the 10 next-best chess players in the world.

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.

So hitting a 1/100 chance means he is cheating? 1% is slim, but far from impossible.

First, I said he would be lucky to have a 1 in 100 chance. Second, absolutely nobody is saying that's the only reason to be suspicious of this game. Regardless of whether or not you believe Niemann cheated, if you think the fact that he won is the only claim in this accusation you simply aren't paying attention.

It's not just the winning, it's also how he played

I disagree with the second paragraph but not enough to get into a public debate about it. But it is worth pointing out that Carlsen's 53-game streak was a non-loss streak, not a win streak. Many of those games were draws.

You are of course correct on that point and I have edited my comment.

>I don't know of a single 2400 player who can score an average of 0.25 against 2600 players

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.

The Elo system is calibrated so that that the expected value from playing a player 200 points stronger than you is 0.24. This is true independent of the strength of the players. If you are scoring 0.10 against players 200 points stronger than you (that would mean, for example, 1 draw and 4 losses over 5 games) but maintaining a stable rating, then you must be crushing players that are weaker than you and/or doing very well against players at your level.

(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.)

Is the current ELO accurate though? How many fide rated games were played over covid?

Elo is not an acronym.

Indeed. It stands for Extra-acronymic Language Object.

Elo assumes that performance across n^2 players fits the logistic curve model of n players. There is no reason to believe that assumption is remotely accurate and that Elo would ever stabilize. Players often avoid playing lower rated players, for this reason.

I don't think people are saying that it cannot happen, just that you need to prove it instead of hurling empty accusations, especially when it can destroy someone's career. I personally think it sets a bad precedent if every top player immediately starts crying "cheating!" when beaten by a lower ranked one.

…by a lower ranked one who is already a known cheater.

He did cheat in online chess. Other than that, what do you mean "known cheater"?

Surely he means just that; i.e. Hans Niemann is known to have cheated in past games (these were online games and it must be noted that Niemann maintains that he has never cheated before or since the and never in an "over the board" tournament).

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