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Comment by MikeTheGreat | Hacker News Reader

First, thank you to the poster for posting this - I haven't laughed this hard in a while.

Second - thank you to the person who actually made this. This is incredibly hilarious (just based on the project I'm gonna go ahead an assume they have an account here :) )

Lastly - I know that this is a joke project, but one thing I'm not understanding: how does the system read the current state of the chess board? The, er, Bluetooth/WiFi 'output' of the system is clear enough, but I'm not clear on how the current chess board is input into the system so that Stockfish can actually compute the next move.

(This is a semi-serious question - if you know I'd be curious to find out, but I'm not gonna lose sleep over this and I don't expect anyone else to waste time on it either :) )

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> Second - thank you to the person who actually made this. This is incredibly hilarious

Hey there, thank you, I'm the creator of this.

> I'm gonna go ahead an assume they have an account here

I have an account here, but I don't use ycombinator this much. Just got notified by someone that a thread about my project is getting some attention here

> Lastly - I know that this is a joke project, but one thing I'm not understanding: how does the system read the current state of the chess board?

It gets the state of the board though a manually inputted FEN code. Unless the user of this would hook it up with a camera and scan the board in real time, it's assumed that whoever is using this has someone helping them. So the helper would operate the backend, input the board, and send it to the end-user

So the helper operates the back end which sends it to, the back end?

So it’s somewhat of a B2B operation

an end-to-end architecture

Requires tight coupling and dependency injection

made my day

You could allow the chess player to input moves into the system through an anal sphincter contraction sensor.

https://www.e-arm.org/journal/view.php?number=1548

The actual implementation just takes them from the console.

If you were actually going to use this to cheat in professional tournaments, I imagine you'd just use the API of a chess website that is broadcasting the game live. Lichess has a free, documented, API for instance.

Broadcasts have a 15 minute delay to avoid this kind of cheating.

Typically not, though they did introduce one in the St Louis tournament after Carlsen withdrew.

I wouldn't be surprised if they became more common going forwards.

Agreed.

There are many legal reasons that they could not perform a body search for anal cheating devices, butt more importantly: human perseverance has shown that some communication devices will always be able to stay hidden...no matter how invasive the search.

You could fix the communication by putting participants in something like a Faraday cage, or lining the walls with lead etc.

However, if someone puts the actual chess computer inside their body, even those measures won't help.

15 minute delay doesn’t seem sufficient in a classical game. Spending 15 minutes on one crucial move is common and wouldn’t raise suspicion.

Give a little squeeze at the start of your turn, to indicate that you wish to request the next engine move, then sit there for 15 minutes appearing deep in thought until the answer is beamed to your behind.

Alternatively the device could stream all the moves with the move number encoded, so it could be entirely unidirectional and you wouldn’t need an input method. Just wait 15 minutes for the next move.

It would complicate the buttocol a bit but one could imagine having the engine predict the opponent next moves and propose different responses to them: if e5f4, then e3f4 – if c7c5 then ...

Why? You can just send the next move after the opponent made theirs.

How do suggest to send a move via Buttplug?

The same way it's doing it now.

Squeeze?

Anal sphincter contraction sensor...

https://www.e-arm.org/journal/view.php?number=1548

Or like with thumpers used in practice - you'd have an accomplice in the audience handling any required interaction. This is often used for "blind" magic tricks with audience.

For a second I thought you might be talking about Dune, the book.

In the proposed cheating scheme, you have an accomplice who reads the moves of the game as they're broadcast over the internet and then transmits the next move to you.

and they also have a buttplug but one with a squeeze sensor in it so they can send morse code with their sphincter

I believe the idea is an audience accomplice enters the board moves for you.

Maybe if there's a model with sensor data, they can implement two way communication through clenches? Just need to make sure to avoid having gassy food for lunch or else you might end up miscommunicating a bit.

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