Hacker News Reader

Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com