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Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm not much of a chess person, much less a competitive chess person.

Can the "over the board" cheating potential be reduced with a 5 minute "tape delay" of broadcasting the game? Is that enough time to thwart the influence of an external signal?

Seems to me the only way this person can redeem himself is through over the board play under strict conditions ("Come dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals").

But I don't know if how long they're allowed per move, and if 5 minutes is enough time to thwart external influence.

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In blitz, 5 minutes totally would work, in classical chess I have my doubts.

The Sinquefield Cup (the tournament where the drama started) added a 15 minute delay which would be much more noticeable and less forgiving.

That's a question I was going to ask. Sure, not _every_ move is 5 min, but wouldn't a 5 min delay almost ensure any cheater would play mostly more than 5 min, each turn? (besides some simple moves, ofc)

Or is it that they only need to cheat at a few points where taking more than 5 min wouldn't be abnormal at all?

The latter. The article briefly points out that cheating on only a few moves can give one grandmaster a significant advantage, which makes cheating difficult to detect. In discussion of a previous article, some HN commenters suggested that even having a binary “be careful here” signal based on a chess engine could make a big difference.

So one could take on average ~5 min per move. On any moves they want help with, they could wait out the 5 min and have an accomplice send the signal?

Honestly, it does seem next to impossible to stop a dedicated cheater if any feedback makes it out of the room in a reasonable amount of time.

The delay would have to be a lot longer than 5 minutes. It's not uncommon for players to take 30+ mins on a single move in OTB chess.

Also, if your cheating device allows you to somehow input chess positions, then you wouldn't even require an external signal. Though it would be extremely impressive if somebody could pull that off.

Someone has already created a proof of concept for this: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html

Depends on the game type and cheating type.

If blitz type game where players have <5 minutes to decide a move, then yes, delayed broadcast might be effective. Other game types allow for >5 minutes per move so tape delay would be ineffective since cheater could just stall.

Cheating type also matters. There's external help (friend in the audience communicating 1 or more bits of information via auditory, optical, radio, or some other signal), and there's also internal help (raspberry pi zero + battery and pressure sensor embedded in your shoe or something). There are so many ways to cheat that it's hard to enumerate all of them let alone prevent all of them.

It might work if there are no spectators live in person. Otherwise you can easily have someone in person relaying the information to a computer, or you have to search everyone, not just the players.

If it happened, I don't think it happened realtime.

Given sufficient notoriety and money involved, it would be possible to just hire someone to essentially run a training model of alpha zero against moves specifically selected to be likely to be made by Magnus, and then all you really need is memorization of key scenarios (which for a good chess person should be no problem) to identify the right move to make.

That specific scenario is just considered normal good prep - they will even play games against people who "play" their opponent's openings. That's all well known but you can't memorize enough to make a major difference.

I don't think that what you described is cheating.

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