The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman | Hacker News Reader

The Full Chess Cheating Report of Hans Neiman

chess.com

444 pointsjonwachob91460 comments

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1]

The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted to cheating on chess.com. The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me. Perhaps it is a good thing that this scandal is highlighting the issue, and given how widespread cheating may be, perhaps chess tournaments both online and physical need to take cheating much more seriously than they apparently have been.

There is also an interesting analysis of Hans' rating improvement history, his over the board tournament performance and key game analysis, and a rundown of key moments in his game against Carlsen in the Sinquefield cup. Each raises concerns.

Chess.com's report also makes it clear that Niemann lied outright about his history of cheating in post-Sinquefield interviews, as he admits in communications with chess.com Fairplay staff to much broader cheating.

All in all, the report raises many concerns and it seems reasonable for the chess community to demand much higher standards of cheat prevention and detection across competitive venues. How long might cheating issues have gone on merely rumored vs fully investigated or acted upon, had this intrigue not developed due to Carlsen's withdrawal from Sinquefield '22?

[1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage their ratings progress over time carefully, so as to stay in acceptable ranges of engine move correlation, rate of improvement, etc.

Does engine correlation actually prove anything though? Some of the 'statistical analysis' that has been posted on twitter regarding it in the last week has been against hundreds of engines, so 'engine correlation' seems to mean "the move made matched against at least one engine that would have made that move" I think?

Chess.com explicitly states in the report that that sort of methodology does “not meet our standard” for cheating detection. If they don’t feel comfortable using it, I certainly don’t.

I don't think engine correlation necessarily proves anything, on its own. It's worth remembering, though, that chess.com's report a) presents more than merely raw engine correlation, and b) its correlations do not seem to match against hundreds of engines.

But even with all the evidence presented, "proof" is a tricky thing. To what standard would we be trying to prove a claim?

Does this report prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Niemann cheated? I'd say no, but others may disagree.

How about to a preponderance of evidence? Perhaps. But even that is hard to say when no one has yet presented a rigorous defense or set of counterpoints.

In any case, my post wasn't meant to say that Niemann cheated per se. I have no idea, and chess.com themselves may not be able to actually prove whether he did. But I found the report interesting, even beyond the current issue surrounding Niemann and speaking to potential cheating in high-level chess more broadly, and if you re-read my post, I tried not to state anything definitive about whether Hans actually cheated or not.

1) You can look at the "strength" of individual moves. Someone who plays at 2000-level normally but magically coughs up 2600-level moves when in trouble is probably cheating (watch some of the live chess streamers--you'll regularly see this in real time). Computers are quite good at estimating the strength of a move after the fact.

2) Quite often there are certain "play lines" that computers will play that humans simply can't find over the board.

For example, a computer can take a defensive "play line" that is littered with traps with only a single non-losing path for 30+ moves and work it out really quickly (there is only one non-losing path to take so it prunes the search space mega fast) and play it perfectly. A human playing such a line is almost always cheating--humans simply can't run those kinds of lines in real time.

If you look at computers analyzing even the highest end games, you see the humans making quite a few mistakes that the computers will spot and take advantage of immediately. Someone who walks down these kinds of paths regularly is a statistical anomaly.

That having been said, given the current crop of computer-trained chess kids, it IS possible that we'll grow a prodigy that can run those kinds of lines. However, it doesn't seem like that person exists, yet.

> Computers are quite good at estimating the strength of a move after the fact.

Are you sure? I’ve never heard of such a program.

He's just referring to the fact that after game is over you can let your program stew on any given move for a weekend or more before reporting back on how strong it was or wasn't.

But standard programs like Stockfish won’t tell you how strong a move was. They’ll just tell you how much it changes the evaluation.

E.g. if you initiate a queen trade in a straightforward position, on the next move I have to take back my queen; any other move will show a gigantic evaluation drop by the engine. But that doesn’t mean it’s a particular strong move — even an absolute beginner will play it. Thus it’s of no value for determining whether the person who played it is cheating.

It’s entirely possible that chess.com has access to more sophisticated software that can estimate the strength of players (they sort of allude to this with their “strength score” metric) but AFAIK it’s not publicly available and not clear how it works, or whether it can evaluate individual moves as opposed to the game as a whole.

I think it's more a question of whether, given more time to calculate, the software changes it's choice of move to something else.

I'm haunted by the possibility that humans might (at least half) catch up, too. When I look at how AI beats humans, I can't help thinking that AI shows us that human narcissism holds humans back. We don't want to look stupid, or mediocre - we don't want to make moves that are hard to explain the value of clearly.

In Go, we can't make ourselves spread our moves around the board as much as we should, we tend not to choose a maybe good move elsewhere over a clearly powerful move where the board is developed, for example.

Maybe there's a pattern to the moves AI chooses that is also a pattern humans can see without running every line; we're just reluctant to choose moves that we can't clearly justify in the shorter run.

> Does engine correlation actually prove anything though?

It probably doesn't, and for many reasons, both because the more engines you add the greater the chance of falsely accusing someone (so an analysis that features hundreds engines is probably worthless), but worse than that, you can manipulate the result of the analysis through the selection of engines

There's a number of topics about that on /r/chess, like https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xtwzfe/fm_ingvar_joh... https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xtwzfe/fm_ingvar_joh... etc

But anyway this isn't the analysis that Chess.com does anyway

Am not a statistician, but at least in an online analysis I saw, seems like correlation can effectively identify players who are playing too much like a computer. Because they don't just run correlations on Niemann, but on all the top players, and do comparisons (and for certain long stretches of tournaments, Niemann's is playing way, way above how anyone else has ever played).

This is video explains it pretty well, and seems like a very compelling argument (at least to me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjtbXxA8Fcc - and just know that the woman talking is a bit hard to understand because of her accent.

... oh, and to address your point about 100's of engines, my first thought was that are only a handful that everyone uses (Stockfish?) (and also, just guessing, but I get the impression that most top engines recommend similar moves, but again, just a guess!).

They are referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xqvhgh/chessbases_en...

Ah, have to admit, this is a very good counter argument, calling chessbase's methods in to question. And it's surprising that chessbase does not always do the same analysis for each game, that its nodes aren't setup with the same set of chess engines (although, again, maybe most top chess engines suggest similar moves??). Hmm...

... also, not sure I agree with his opinion that for each move that is analyzed, LetsCheck will return 100% if any engine returns 100% (and there could be multiple computers that were used, each with different engines). The point of the analysis is to determine if a player is playing like a computer, and the user may himself have multiple chess engines open in order to confuse the cheat detection. But again, am not an expert at chess engines or statistics, so am not sure what effects checking multiple engines has...

... also, he says that "Ken Regan's scientifically valid method has exonerated Hans by saying his results do not show any statistically valid evidence of cheating." This is very confusing, because Chess.com post has basically said the opposite (maybe Ken Regan's analysis is referring to a different subset of games?). Guess nothing is definitive. But at this point, I still lean towards Hans cheating (on top of this analysis, there is also a lot of circumstantial things he did that to me indicate he might have cheated, which is too long a topic to go into).

Not anymore than elevated testosterone levels are "proof" of performance enhancing drugs. Engine correlation is a marker and when combined with other markers, can be meaningful.

What it mostly shows is that Hans move strength is unnatural.

Further evidence to support this is that he often plays bad moves. That is, moves that are considered blunders, with a high frequency. This is either an attempt to cover up the engine moves or representative of his actual capability. For instance, the report mentions that in a post-game analysis he suggested a move that would be an obvious blunder. When the interviewer pointed this out, Hans wasn't fully convinced until he was shown the engine analysis. So he also is showing a habit of deferring to what the engine suggests.

>The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me.

Not to me. When the stakes of winning are so damn valuable, sometimes literally so, it would be patently stupid to not cheat and increase your odds of winning.

Remember: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught. If you're never caught, cheating is completely legitimate.

These aren't games of pleasure, played for the sake of playing chess. These are games played for the sake of winning. Prize money, ELO, fame and renown, etc. When the only thing that matters is winning, you gain nothing by playing honestly.

Games are just games, they don't have to mean the same thing to everyone. The way you view them tells more about youself than about the games.

The question is one of incentives and motivations.

Am I playing chess because I love chess? To have fun? In that case, cheating is counter to my goals (unless I enjoy the act of cheating itelf, but that's getting besides the point).

On the other hand, is chess simply a means to an end? Am I playing chess because I want to win something? If so, cheating is but one of many possible decisions I can undertake to increase my odds of winning.

Where professional games are concerned, where money and fame are at stake if you lose, cheating is downright inevitable and certainly not something to be surprised about.

I don't disagree at all. But there are people who just want to play the game by the rules. There are people who won't cheat for moral reasons. There are people who lack competence to cheat. There are people who are risk averse. Cheating should be expected, but you were implying every single person has more incentive to cheat than not, which just isn't true. You could even argue most people are in fact cheating and I might even agree with you, but without evidence it's just slandering, something even the world champion should be reprehended on.

>but you were implying everyone has more incentive to cheat than not,

I am implying that because that's inevitable in a situation where winning is so much more important than simply playing. Again, these aren't games of pleasure, games "for fun". These are games with valuable stakes on the table.

Even Magnus himself can be argued as playing to win in order to eventually obtain the famed 2800 ELO or whatever the magic threshold number is. If evidence comes out that Magnus cheats, it would be a shame but I wouldn't be surprised either.

In situations where the ends justify the means, the means will include cheating.

If your attitude about chess competition was applied toward you in all of your routine irl activities, you would be extremely unhappy.

The cop does better in his job by meeting his quota of speeding tickets, so it objectively makes sense that he would issue you a speeding ticket every day with no evidence and over your strenuous objections... except you wouldn't object because the cop is working the system rationally. Yeah, right. Anyway, the lawyer you hired to work through this issue in court would of course inflate the number of hours he worked on your case, because why wouldn't he, he'd be an idiot not to!

Can't wait for you to apply for you YC investment, you make a great business partner, so rational and all.

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another.

Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy off the ladder, so be it. If a cop is feeling particularly irate and/or is hard pressed to satisfy a quota with frivolous speeding tickets, so be it. Contractors inflating their hours is par for the course.

Life ain't all sunshine and flowers, it's also dirty and ruthless. Nobody's a saint in this plane of existence.

> Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another

Totally unfair. Some of us succeed by being dealt unreasonably good hands at birth.

This is sociopathic rationalization for poor behavior. It isn’t true. If you are a compulsive liar and cheater, perhaps you will justify your immoral behavior by deluding yourself into believing that everyone else is doing it too- but it is not so. We are not all behaving this way.

It's also the sophist Thrasymachus' central point in Plato's republic: "Justice is serving the interest of the stronger".

You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

You also fail to understand I'm not passing judgment on such behaviour. Rather, I'm saying we need to take into account the ruthless nature of reality if we don't want to get screwed over ourselves.

Calling evidence of Neiman cheating a surprise is an honest and naive understanding of reality, one which leaves you wide open to cheating thrown your way that you will never realize because you never expect it.

Nobody is a saint, much less when achieving victory is so heavily incentivized as in professional games.

> You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

That's a total non-sequitur. Perhaps no-one is perfect (though frankly I doubt it), but that doesn't mean that cheating more means more success than cheating less.

Cheats definitely exist. But many of them end up doing worse than people who live more honestly, as we see here.

Cheating might work if you have nothing to lose. Example: you are supposed to be present in an online lecture as a formality, there is no interaction and nothing to gain by being in it. Sure, people are likely to join, mute and do other things.

However, for serious real life situations where stakes are high, risk of ruin is too high. This is not rational. In fact, those stars have to align for the cheater, not the honest ones.

(I still don't think Hans cheated OTB and chess.com is being ridiculous)

I'm just happy to say that most people that I call my friends don't share your vision of what it means to have a life well-lived, or how they define success, or have lived with this attitude of dirt and ruthlessness being necessary.

He didn't say it's a good thing, nor that he approves, just that it is unsurprising that people (attempt to, and sometimes) cheat because cheating is a rational response.

It's just a different way of saying that when the measure of something becomes the target, then that measurement is gamed.

Would you also assume that Goodhart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) prefers cops who issue illegitimate tickets, or lawyers who pad their hours?

All of those things you can get by cheating. But cheating is never winning. The whole point of a game or sport is that it ceases to be a game when you go outside the rules.

Yes, many can square this circle in their own heads and convince themselves that anything goes. Some, like Lance Armstrong, will enrich themselves enormously. But none of them will have “won”.

A game is defined by its very specific set of rules. This can easily be seen in chess, which has a huge variety of variants. Or how one, minor rule change in baseball and you've got people wondering if the Hall of Fame even make sense anymore.

Once a set of rules are defined, competitions and tournaments within those rules are meant to determine the best people in that game.

When a player cheats, and rationalizes it as "only matters if you get caught", that means the cheater is playing by different sets of rules from his opponent. They are playing literally different games. If the two opponents are playing different games, it completely undermines the purpose of the competition.

Here's the thing though: How do you know a player cheated? Because you caught him. So what about all the cheaters who are never caught? You can't say they're cheaters.

Therefore, if a player cheats but is never caught, he isn't a cheater. If a player isn't a cheater, whatever he did is legitimate and it isn't a problem.

Therefore: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

Put another way, the rules only tell you there will be consequences if you are caught breaking them. The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself, only the results of such actions and only if the act of cheating becomes known.

So the optimal way to play a game to win is always to play skillfully /and also/ cheat without getting caught. Not cheating is not optimal to winning. It is absolutely a high risk, high return course of action, but that's the nature of optimizing.

If all you care about is the prize money, then there are easier ways to rob people, e.g. at gunpoint on their way out of the competition venue. The Rules say "If Person X does Y, then Person X gets Z". You want to rationalize interrupting that process to take Z for yourself. Y could be "their job" and Z could be "their salary". I suppose, in your terms, highway robbery is also a "high risk, high return course of action".

But entering into the competition under the guise of legitimate play means you also care about the prestige of being declared the winner. But you haven't won the game. You've played a completely different game. You can claim to have played the same game, but that would be a lie. You could just as easily redefine "narcissistic sociopath" in your own head to exclude adhering to The Rules. But it'd still be a lie.

I see in your other comments in this thread that you claim "most people finish dead last in life", intimating that they are fools for not cheating. But that's the thing: if everyone cheated, it would be a complete breakdown of society. Rules, laws, and systems to enforce them, are how we can leave our houses in the morning without wearing bulletproof armor from head to toe.

But what do I know? I only have a happy life with my wife and two kids. I'm a loser. So go! Cheat at science and get that Nobel Prize money! Cheat at keeping your restaurant clean and pocket the savings on soap! Never mind the wasted time and resources and lives ruined. You're a winner.

>you claim "most people finish dead last in life"

I made no such claim. I stated that, quote: "... Honest people finish dead last in the race known as life."

>if everyone cheated, it would be a complete breakdown of society.

Human society has always been, always is, and always will be rife with cheaters of varying degrees and impact. Some will be caught, most won't be.

I cannot agree. First, your position comes with an assumption that one feels okay when cheating. Many people simply do not, for personal integrity, anxiety and other reasons.

Also, if you expect a game to bring profits in a long run, risk assessment may become too complex, if you can be caught retrospectively (like that top-score trackmania guy for example). Some people understand it from the beginning and decide to not put themselves into an unstable trap for life, even if cheating is compatible with their values.

You’re right that games (businesses, situations) themselves may have a long-term model which includes cheating as an optimal solution. But assuming that people playing it are all cheating sociopaths is incorrect. Tbh, your persistence all over this subthread is a sign that you have some sort of a close personal relationship with this topic.

You seem to think, and I don't agree, that "cheater" is like "felon", a label which is applied after some process.

I consider it like "thief". A thief is a thief when they thieve. A cheater is a cheat when they cheat.

> Cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

I don't agree with blanket statements like that but I think there's a kernel of truth in your mindset that many people are oblivious to.

Chess, as a competitive game with meaningful stakes, is obsolete. It became obsolete when the first computer outplayed the reigning human champion, and it's been gradually becoming more obvious. Recent events have started to demonstrate precisely why: people are becoming better at cheating at chess way faster than they're getting better at playing chess.

> cheating is completely legitimate.

100% disagree.

Legitimate would mean condoning cheating. Which then means everyone should be allowed to use engines, which then would mean engine vs engine, which we already have.

Human vs human no augmentation.

I commented on this already in another post, but I'll reiterate here: How do you know a player is a cheater?

If you can't prove a player cheated, that is if you never catch the cheater, then whatever the player did is legitimate. It doesn't matter if the player in fact cheated and got away with it, it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.

The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself, only the results and only if the cheater is caught.

Let's say someone robs a bank. They break into the vault, steal a bunch of gold, get out. Never caught. Lives a long life. Were they a bank robber?

A cheater is a cheater even if no one knows it.

You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception. As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate?

I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?

>You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception.

For the purposes of this discussion, I define "legitimate" as whether anyone wants to cry foul on a player's performance. If a player cheats but doesn't get caught, it's legitimate because nobody can cry foul and make it into a problem.

>As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate?

Nope.

>I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?

If we were to drill down to it, it can be argued humans can never truly be objective. Take Neiman for example; so far we haven't seen any evidence (that I'm aware of) that Neiman did cheat in his game with Magnus without any doubt, but it appears that society at large has decided that he was a cheater in that game.

This and the aforementioned thought experiment actually also come back to one of my original arguments: That not cheating is stupid. When you can be judged a cheater despite being honest, or judged honest despite being a cheater, it is much more beneficial to just cheat and attempt to reap the rewards of cheating. Being honest gains you nothing while burdening the risk of losing everything, while cheating potentially gains you more at the risk of losing everything.

Also, I hope you don't misunderstand any of this as me passing judgment one way or another on this sort of behaviour. Personally, I would prefer no cheating, but there are my own thoughts and then there is reality, and reality is as filled with sunshine and flowers as it is dirty and ruthless. I see all this as a great opportunity to appreciate reality for what it truly is, so we hopefully don't end up on the short end of a stick insofar as what's within our powers to affect.

> That not cheating is stupid.

Hans cheated in over 100 online chess matches, and now he's stuck in this giant controversy. If he didn't cheat in those matches, none of this controversy would have happened, and he would be judged based on his skill.

I would argue his failing wasn't that he cheated, but that he got caught by cheating too obviously against someone who wasn't going to take it lying down.

The people who succeed cheat only as far as to reap the rewards while avoiding the risks thereof, they pick the time and place to cheat and not cheat. Of course, we don't know as third-parties whether any such successful individuals are in fact cheaters or not since nobody caught them.

To put it another way, if Neiman cheated in over 100 online chess matches and nobody caught him, we wouldn't know he's a cheater and we would judge him based off his apparent "skill". Thus, cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

I would say there are 4 main motivations to not cheat:

1. Getting caught and problems arising from that

As you stated, there is a non-zero chance that someone who cheated will get away with it. And there is a non-zero chance that someone who didn't cheat will be wrongly widely accused of cheating. But someone who cheats has a much much higher chance of being widely accused of cheating that someone who doesn't. Cheating purely increases your chance of being widely accused of cheating.

You as a single individual cannot know all the various analyses that will be done on your games in the future (whether analysis of your moves vs engine moves or analysis of video or data recordings from websites you're on). You cannot foresee all the different possible ways you might be caught. The better you get, the more analysis will be done on your past games. Every past cheating instance is a liability for the future.

And if you rely on the cheating to get to a high level, you'll be forced to continue doing it to retain that level. You can't foresee the various anti-cheat mechanisms that will be put in place in the future that will catch your future cheating.

Once you're caught, it's basically disaster for you. Even when you don't cheat in the future, people will still suspect that you're cheating.

2. A feeling of accomplishment

People are often motivated by a feeling of accomplishment. If you're cheating to get ahead, you're not accomplishing as much, so you won't have as much of a feeling of accomplishment. If you use a cheat code to beat a videogame you don't feel much accomplishment. You won't feel like the best person in the world at chess if you only won due to a computer feeding you moves.

3. Enjoyment of a better world

You said you'd personally prefer a world without cheating. By not cheating you would be helping create that world. By cheating you would be helping to create a cheatful world. You're going to have a hard time advocating for a cheat-free world if you yourself are cheating due to the conflict of interest. E.g. you won't be able to advocate for installation of anti-cheat protections because if they get installed, they'll catch you. Same with advocating for stronger statistical analyses.

If you cheat, you're disrespecting the people around you, both your competitors and the audience. When you're consistently disrespecting everyone around you, I would expect that to have a negative impact on your ability to make friends with them. It could negatively affect your mood and your outlook on life. Overall I expect your life to be less enjoyable.

4. Morality

Is there objective morality? Do we have a moral obligation to respect other people? What is the meaning of life?

I say yes there is objective morality. Yes we have a moral obligation to respect other people, it's one of the components of the purpose of our lives.

This sense of ethics is literally going to ruin this country.

> How do you know a player is a cheater?

> it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.

> The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself

These statements alone, well sure.... everything is legitimate if it's not caught. That's by definition.

Are you arguing really hard for the definition of word legitimate?

I'm actually quite confused about what it is that you're arguing here from these statements.

I'm arguing that it is in one's interest to not hold naive ideals about the world, about reality. Reality is a dirty, ruthless place. If you don't conduct yourself being aware that other people are going to take advantage of you, or even cheat on you, then you will end up getting screwed because you cannot defend against attacks you aren't aware of nor expect.

I agree with you on this.

Going back to my comment I have issue with:

> cheating is completely legitimate.

Which is not what you're saying here.

[Edit]

If you made your statement that "the world is a dirty place" I think most would agree with you. The point almost every reply is taking issue with is when you say "cheating is legitimate".

The replies, including my own, are saying "cheating is not acceptable". By originally saying "cheating is legitimate" you are saying "cheating is acceptable", but in your follow up arguments it's "cheating moves that are not caught are considered legitimate", which is the definition of legitimate and thusly there's no substance.

> [1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage their ratings progress over time carefully, so as to stay in acceptable ranges of engine move correlation, rate of improvement, etc.

Important point I'd say. I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting.

Taking this report along with Hans's admission to only cheating twice, for example, and accepting Chess.com's assessment as accurate, it would seem that Hans's mistake was to confess only to the instances of cheating that he thought had been caught. Which indicates the mentality and experience involved where the actual game is not getting caught and many, just as Hans was before beating Magnus, are playing it successfully.

I guess I’m not as cynical. I picked up chess again when I was deployed (I was on the chess team in high school) and have been closely following this drama, and my sense is that perhaps we all admit that online chess is dead, but a return to analog chess is possible and, perhaps, preferable. I know this begs the question of defeating cheats in irl play, but shouldn’t that be an easier problem to solve?

I would be surprised of over-the-board cheating was viable in the long term. Seems like it should be relatively easy to stamp out provided there's a will to do so.

Just play it naked. Ban cameras, except for internal closed circuit systems for tracking the board.

I've seen on the last thread that sometimes for cheating one bit of data is enough, something like a signal at some point where you could make a decisive move. I wonder, then, how you could send stealthily to someone a bit of data. Something like an implant under the skin giving a slight shock or vibration or heat. The answer to that would be to block signals from entering the space where the game is played, but then maybe you could implant a whole device in yourself to do that. I'm not sure how you could give it the data of the current game though.

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting.

Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). This is a major scandal that should have serious consequences, but there's no reason for it to be the end of online chess.

Totally fair ... and it would make a lot of sense that this event brings about some sort of cultural cleansing or realignment. I guess I really just meant "dead to me."

That being said, if it turns out that online chess continues to do well, but there's still plenty of cheating going on, I don't think it'd be accurate to say online chess is alive because it wouldn't be chess but something different, for better or worse. And whether such an outcome occurs might be what's really at stake here.

Just look at Magnus Carlsen's performance in the most recent online chess event.

https://chess24.com/tour/standings/ (Prelim standings / Knockout Bracket).

Online chess is alive and well.

The whole "so many top players caught cheating" is a bit much. None of the very best are cheating.

Well, none are getting caught cheating.

>>Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess).

I think it's the other way, chess is about as easy to cheat as it gets. With chess you can have a perfectly usable cheating system that isn't on the same computer at all - computer A is clean, and is where you actually play on chess.com, computer B is where you enter the moves into the chess engine. That doesn't work for something like CS:GO or League of Legends or whatever, cheating or botting needs to be in real-time and on the same computer.

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student.

Strategy games may be harder, but still not going to take too long before those exist.

Those have been common for decades and are pretty much the lowest bar for detection.

Using computer vision on the video stream (eg via a capture card) and then sending valid mouse and keyboard inputs most definitely has not been around for decades. It's a mechanism to cheat that has zero binaries running on the host computer.

You could do statistical analysis on the mouse and keyboard inputs to try and detect this.

(Very similar to how you might detect chess cheaters, actually.)

You can use (the data of) statistical analysis to train a deep neural network to avoid detection. That may also help avoiding chess detection cheaters, so the moves are not perfect anymore.

Yes. You can't make cheating impossible, but you can make it harder to pull off.

It's not hard to make cheating tools, it's hard to run them on the same hardware as the game and not get caught. Chess cheating tools don't need to be on the same hardware, so they're not detectable in the same ways.

It is not hard to run cheats for basically any game that uses video on another machine. Just a little more expensive (i.e. it is harder for someone in high school, but not anyone over 20).

Due to the need for real-time input that's just not true.

There are/have been elaborate cheating setups for online shooters that involved a second computer using the VGA or HDMI video stream.

It’s doable to get around kernel detection tools.

Splitting the video stream to a second computer to run real-time video analysis and then send back commands through an emulated mouse may be doable, but it's certainly harder for anyone to do than copying chess moves on your phone.

Certainly! But it does show the amount of effort people will go to cheat - though lots of the "online shooter" cheating is people selling cheating tools/kits to idiots who want to win (basically turning games into pay to win).

The number of people who can build that kind of system from scratch is small.

But anyone can cheat at chess online.

That’s fascinating… do they work long term? With only certain games?

I don't have details, but they're originally were designed for specific games - but the mechanisms can be adopted for others. The goal is to get a slight advantage on headshots, I believe.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1779166

My point was that video game cheats _don't_ need to be on the same hardware.

I doubt that since a weekend project. You need to analyze a video stream of hundreds fps in real time with very low latency requirments. You'd probably need an FPGA to do that. Custom training an AI to only trigger on heads.

No, it's trivial these days, and this very task is one of the introductory tutorials to Google's Coral AI Tensorflow boards:

https://coral.ai/models/object-detection/

Which you can buy as a USB stick for $59:

https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/

Sure, it's a little more complex if you want to train on specific heads as opposed to a generic model, but not hugely so. The biggest challenge would likely be downsampling the video stream into something the model can process quickly enough.

That's a generic AI. I would be very surprised you could get it to work accurately for games and hyper specific the heads of (possibly non-human)models. The box you see in the marketing material is completely useless for this use case. Besides how do you get the data to your standard second PC, scale the input the USB thing expects. Send it over USB and back, and then you have to send it to a custom mouse that receives the click command over bluetooth? I don't think 7ms just for the inference step is going to cut it.

A weekend project were you have to design an ultra low-latency software + hardware stack, a custom mouse and train a custom AI. I would be incredible if anyone manages this in a weekend.

7ms isn't going to be the bar. Human reaction times are in the 150+ms range, you have 20x your budget.

I agree it's still tough though, most I/O paths on generic hardware will have buffers at every step that you'll have to fight to eliminate.

7ms is enough. But that is one in a chain of latencies. 150ms is way too long if you want your trigger to be effective. In 150ms the enemy has moved out of your crosshair. Humans deal with that with dynamic adjustment but the AI will just click the mouse. I'd think you'd need to hit less then 25ms end to end and even that might not be enough for far away targets.

25ms would be quite obvious, and absolutely wouldn't be necessary.

Humans regularly manage to hit heads without that reaction time, and a human will still be involved in the aiming / predicting where to aim.

The AI would need to lead the target under any reasonable implementation. Just clicking the mouse when crosshairs are over a target would scarcely deserve the name AI.

Leading the targets makes this MUCH harder from just an over the counter object detection AI. In fact making that and making it look human so it's not trivially detectable would blow this from a weekend project you can do in a few hours(Which I already doubt.) To weeks/months/years long project since you need it be really humanlike... Even now cutting edge AI can be spotted by humans.

If you want absolutely olympic response times (110-120ms), it is a little tight but nowhere near impossible. 7ms as the other poster says is absolutely insane. Most videogames will already trigger on consistent peak human response times, so you'll want to trim down your bot to go to a more average person (160ms, maybe a bit higher) to fly under all the heuristics they might (but probably don't) use. Plenty of time to compute things.

7ms is enough. But that is one in a chain of latencies. 110ms is way too long if you want your trigger to be effective. In 110ms the enemy has moved out of your crosshair. Humans deal with that with dynamic adjustment but the AI will just click the mouse. I'd think you'd need to hit less then 25ms end to end and even that might not be enough for far away targets.

I mentioned earlier - reaction time under 100ms on track events is considered a foul start and the offender disqualified.

You are completely misunderstanding the goal of such a cheat. It's a "triggerbot" as in it fires the mouse when an enemy head enters the crosshair. The classical use case is that the user camps at an edge and waits for the enemy to peek. The user has his crosshair at the correct offset from the edge so that when the enemy peeks he could hit them with a human reaction time.

However a human sees the enemy BEFORE it enters the crosshair and estimates and corrects when the enemy will enter the crosshair. A trigger bot measure exactly WHEN the head is in the crosshair, it has no predictive power of enemy dynamics. This totally changes the latency game. A 150ms trigger latency from the time a head is in the crosshair basically means you shoot when either the crosshair or enemy has moved significant amounts. This also means that you can very obviously cheat with a trigger bot if you use the trigger badly, the human needs to "hide" the trigger latency to make it appear human. You can't compare it to human reaction time at all, a trigger needs to be about an order of magnitude faster to be useable.

When you say it’s a weekend project for a college student it suggests it’s mundane or easy for most professional developers within a weekend.

This sounds exactly like the old “Twitter would be easy to implement give me a month” naivety.

Development is hard, even small projects aren’t usually finished in a weekend, let alone something there’s no reference implementation for and that we’re merely speculating about.

If such a project was built in a weekend to work reliably enough others could use it successfully in gameplay, it would be highly impressive. Maybe we’d call it an extraordinary effort, if for no other reason “because software”.

You don't need 'hundreds' fps - you can do it w/ 10sec and get better reaction time than humans (reaction under 100ms in track events is consider foul). It should not be so difficult with a separate GPU and a capture card. Serial mouse/keyboard inputs are trivial as well.

How is Serial mouse/keyboard trivial? You'd need to make a custom mouse that receives data from your second PC. You'd probably want it to be wireless else you will have 2 cables coming out of it. And no just having a second fake mouse is not fair. That's easily detectable by software and would definitely raise a lot of red flags.

This is how: take ESP32 - it has bluetooth, wifi and serial port all integrated and it costs couple of dollars. It's small and it runs on 3.3V, it has a voltage regulator that it allows to connect to 5V.

I can do the code and place the esp32 in a mouse on a Saturday (my C is always rusty, not using it professionally). And I am a hobbyist at best. So the original serial mouse/keyboard are connected to ESP32 that normally proxies the signal of the hand movement to the PC.

If I press a pedal (w/ foot) the second computer would receive a signal, calculate a human alike trajectory to move the mouse and send it to the ES32. The latter will execute it along with the left click to shoot.

Like I said - trivial. The same can be done with the USB port as well, and it's not harder. Just that for PS/2 I have the tools laying around.

It is trivial. All you need is a device that can work as a USB gadget that you can plug your keyboard into. I could do it with my phone, many Raspberry Pi-like SBCs, or even Arduino-like boards...

YOLOv3 can do it

I was thinking a decent proof-of-concept. All you'd really need is a generic object detector and fake mouse.

Latency _could_ make it a lot more difficult, but beating a human I don't expect would be hard.

You don't need to do hundreds of fps. Just grab the newest frame, process it, repeat. Missing frames at most increases effective latency or means your cheat isn't 100% effective if you miss a head. It's a sliding scale of improvements, not a deal breaker.

You also don't even necessarily have to process the whole frame. Just the bit actually _at_ the crosshairs is probably going to be enough for a crappy version.

And a fake mouse is just usb-hid, usb gadget whatever search terms, not like you'd have to break any new ground there.

I consider it a "weekend project" because it's just throwing together a couple of existing libraries in a fairly standard way. Like most things, cleaning it up enough to be perfect could/would take far longer.

Funny thing, there are already YOLOv3 derived aimbots, and a lot of anti cheat now scans pci-e cards to try to detect them. They intercept video input and act as mouse and keyboard devices, acting almost completely independent of the host computer.

Yeah that's not far at all from just running as a separate machine, either grabbing the hdmi output or going full webcam pointed at the screen.

It's not just AI and e-sports either

Fishermen Team Accused of Cheating by Stuffing Fish With Weights https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2022/10/01/fishermen-team-a...

This however is easily detectable. It is undetectable whether I have a second device showing me calculations of a different engine.

From the article they describe many ways they can cheat in fishing (e.g. putting ice in that then melts) that aren't so easy to catch.

If there is a way to cheat, someone will inevitably give it a go with enough incentives. Cheating is the meta-sport and I would think no sport could ever be completely free of it.

Depends. Some fish tournaments, like bass, are typically catch and release after weighing. This makes it harder to examine the fish if the goal is to release. Others like kingfish are catch and kill, though people cheat by other means like catching a fish earlier in the week.

The big money tournaments like bill fish, where millions of dollars can change hands, are usually catch and release on the spot but entrants have a judge on board to measure any fish caught.

I've done competitive king fishing in the past, and cheating or suspicion of cheating has been around for decades.

Yeah chess is the perfect type of game for cheating - it has a tiny (relatively) gamestate, perfect information, and it's turn-based. At the level of chess player we're talking about it's sorta trivial for them to almost immediately memorize a boardstate.

> At the level of chess player we're talking about it's sorta trivial for them to almost immediately memorize a boardstate.

And the rest! I'm pretty crap (hovering 750-850 on chess.com, idk if I play enough for it to be accurate though, probably lower) but I was still thoroughly impressed when I got thrashed by someone (~1200) playing the entire game in their head. As in I had a local game running on my phone, called out my moves, entered his, and he never saw the board, just held it in his head. Thrashed me.

(And there was background conversation going he'd occasionally chime into, ordering pizzas, etc. Ridiculous.)

Surely that kind of play would indicate a rating considerably above 1200.

1200 rapid if that makes a difference? Also, I suppose it's.. certainly not orthogonal, but it's not dead parallel either - can have a good/bad memory and play well/not well.

I'm 1800 rapid on chess.com and can't play blindfold beyond the opening.

Memory is different than chess ability, maybe his friend just has more effective techniques for memorization or visualization or both.

A real-life 1200 should be able to play blindfold. Online ratings are very inflated.

A 1200 playing full games in their head sends up some warning flags to me?! I'm over 1500 on Lichess (yes, ELO calculation is not the same, but likely within 300 points at that level?!) and can't even dream of doing that. Did your friend cheat? ;)

I don't see how he could (or why he would) have, in the same room, eyes often closed, yelling at people to shut up so he could concentrate; occasionally checking the board state with me (always bang on) - but as I replied to sibling, it's not necessary to have a great memory like that is it? Of course, picturing/tracking the current state of the board has a lot of overlap with thinking x moves ahead though I suppose.

I'm 1500 Lichess but 900 on Chess.com, so no, not within 300 points at that level.

1500 blitz?

You can point a camera on the first computer screen to capture and analyze GO board and second computer will provide suggestions. No need to memorize anything.

Or if the system allows live spectators, just log another machine in as one of those and scrape the data that way, possibly more reliable than adding machine vision into the mix. That won't work for contests that have a broadcast delay though.

Cheating is common in e-sports, but it is rare in high-level competitive e-sports. Sure, you may be a 'gaming chair enthusiast', using a cheat when in your online Apex or Forntite pub games, but you can't bring it with you to a tournament.

Starcraft is about the only e-sport where I can see tournament cheating providing a very large advantage for a single bit of information - a player who can be notified that he is being all-inned would have a huge advantage in tournament play.

Dota2 could have a similar situation. Enemy is doing Roshan. Obviously not as significant as your example since teams play around the control of that area and have very good gamesenses. But sometimes that few extra seconds or confidence to initiate would make a gamechanging difference.

It would also be a lot harder to detect since just having a hunch is a perfectly valid reason to jump into the fog.

CSGO has had multiple instances of players bringing cheats with them to huge tournaments.

Can't we just consider cheating part of the sport?

If you or your team is capable of making a tiny chess computer that fits under your skin and can go undetectable, then congratulations to you.

So basically a bit like Formula-1.

I'm sensing a market in dedicated hardware here. For players who spend upwards of 1000 hours on a single game it could be worth it to have a locked down machine for certain contexts where you have to prove your bona fides.

Makes me wonder how many people are running game-theory-optimal poker bots and raking in fortunes.

I don't know if a game-theory optimal poker bot would work well - You'd really want a battle-tested psychologically optimal bot that can convincingly play like an amateur, except when it really counts, to give your victims a false sense of confidence. A hustler-bot, essentially.

I'm sure it'd be highly illegal.

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport.

This sent me musing whether we are actually witnessing the emergence of a new type of gamesmanship. If we don't end up killing each other in another global war (sadly there won't be subsequent volumes about "the war no one wanted"), then having men and machines team up in competitive environments is a given. (This is already happening, no doubt, in military settings.)

Maybe new games can be devised, or existing games modified, that can't default to games that are machine vs machine with the human teammates reduced to secretaries in the game. Games designed with AI teammate already in mind. The human role can't be just physical. I wonder what that would be like.

One of the most interesting (but inconclusive) points they found was how Hans' evaluated strength dropped after they introduced the 15 minute broadcast delay.

Except, introducing the 15 minute broadcast delay just happens to coincide with Magnus scandalous withdrawal, Hans being especially carefully searched and being stared at by everyone (that is, if we trust how it was evaluated over a couple of games in the first place).

So, again, even though some statement from chess.com was expected, this one probably does more harm than good. Heavy implications, winking and chuckling, but nothing that would allow one to close the case (quite naturally). All of this historical progress evaluation was done by people a month ago already, and did achieve as much as this one. This one is "official" though, so pours another barrel of fuel into the fire.

That said, I wonder why 15 minute (or even more) delay isn't standard in events like that. Seems like the least you could do, given how questionable chess in 2022 is in the first place.

I didn't look at the chess.com thing since the historic progress is eclipsed by a streak of 5 important games where he simply scores 100%. Everything else is irrelevant. GM's usually have zero games at that level. Dropping to his usual level after that doesn't average it out to human level. lol

Someone should organize that running joke: naked chess tournament.

A Find-the-cheater tournament. One player is asked to cheat without consequences, the others are aware there is one cheater.

It would be interesting to see what happens if you tell everyone there’s one cheater but there really isn’t one.

It would also be fun to let everyone cheat but think they are the only cheater.

a triadlol: poker chess deadlift

Yes! Had exactly the same thought myself.

There's a video of Hikaru Nakamura looking at some of the games identified by this report, and he was admitting that it wasn't immediately obvious to him: the games looked like good games (although I didn't watch the whole video).

So such a test of the system almost feels necessary for the chess world to see if they really can tell the difference between high level classical OTB play and cheating. It would be interesting indeed if ever the consensus was that a fair player was the cheater and the actual cheater just looked like "good play"!

Hikaru is the king of sandbagging anything he says. Also, lots of repetition. I dunno. I dunno. Lots of repetition. I think?

I do think all of the implications on Hans are well deserved, and the deep exploration of cheating within the chess world is well placed. And after looking through the evidence myself, I do believe that Hans is cheating in over-the-board games. I don't think any of the analysis presented on YouTube have yet met a sufficient standard of quality (statistical mistakes everywhere), but I do have faith that someone will come forward with an analysis that both doesn't make any mistakes and also firmly implicates Hans is a cheater. Time will tell.

I also agree that Hans material drop in performance after the broadcast delay could be reasonably attributed to:

1. he's 19 2. the best chess player in the world said he's a dirty cheater

Such circumstances would throw off many prodigal 19 year old's, I'm sure his emotions got in the way of his playing. (I also believe he was cheating here, but I don't think the drop in his performance meets any standard for acceptable evidence)

Another player decreased by 10 vs 15 for hans. Other players increased by a similar amount to hans. It could easily be noise. Hans under the most public scrutiny and criticism of his life, so you would expect his play to suffer.

I kind of suspect magnus misplayed because he knew that Hans cheated so much online.

> Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races.

This exists in every domain, and is - perhaps - inevitable. Look at what SEO has done to web search.

The one thing that baffles me with SEO is how it's just guesswork yet is a massive business. It's like promising to someone that you'll get their name listed sooner in the phonebook without any control over the phonebook itself, and then that person pays you to do it.

It's no different, since we have no control over Google's ranking mechanism and they won't explicitly tell you what the algorithm is (and change the rules daily), so it's just guesswork.

Baffling an entire colossal "industry" is built from guesswork.

It's chess, it's not heart surgery exams. The cheating sucks, but anti-cheat measures are infinitely worse. There is no better way to suck the fun out of something than demanding you submit to a patdown and metal scan or a rootkit before you can participate.

It's just soccer, bicycle racing, weight lifting, sprinting, marathon running, ..., no need to submit to a urine and blood test, if you want to compete in the olympics. That sucks the fun out of it. /s

With respect, in those examples the extreme amount of money to be made with the first place motivates the cheating. The anti-cheat for such competitions only barely works, as top competitors do as many (possibly dangerous) things they can to come out on top. As long as they are undetectable. We should approach a disincentive to cheating in a different way, so it is just a few lemons as it is in chess.

They say they estimate that less than 0.14% of players on chess.com ever cheat, so it may be less than everyone assumes just due to this current drama.

They also claim 100 million subscribers, so that's 140,000 cheats. Since if you're cheating you probably do quite well (I pity the engine that could lose to me!), that's likely most of the high-rated players on their site.

And actually this tallies quite well with my experience of amateur physical sport, where at the lower levels everyone's honest and sporting and it's all great fun, but as soon as you get to the point where people are putting their heart and soul into the game, everyone's cheating, everyone knows everyone else is cheating, and anyone who's not cheating might as well give up and go home, as far as winning things is concerned.

Once you put money on it, and you're playing against people you're never likely to meet in real life, Jesus I can't imagine what it's like.

This number seems wildly low to me. I've been playing on chess.com for 2 years and have run into ~30 cheaters. I know they were cheating because chess.com told me they were. I've suspected a handful more of cheating who may not be as they were never banned. Either way this number doesn't seem correct.

> window focus change event monitoring

if you have ADHD you are naturally a cheater! or if you have some important reason to check your email periodically.

same applies to online tests of various sorts.

> The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me.

A few weeks ago my daughter very proudly announced that she managed to "outsmart" (=hack) her online test app used by her class. I was shocked and asked why she would do that, she's smart enough to get an A without that. She seemed obviously puzzled by my question and my lack of enthusiasm about her "achievement" she was so proud of (it involved some JS modifications). I guess is it's just another kind of thrill.

Depending on what she had to do to hack it, I’d be proud, and then try to explain to her why even if we can do it we shouldn’t.

When you’re bored you try to learn how the system works - it’s a valuable skill.

> A few weeks ago my daughter very proudly announced that she managed to "outsmart" (=hack) her online test app used by her class. I was shocked and asked why she would do that, she's smart enough to get an A without that. She seemed obviously puzzled by my question and my lack of enthusiasm about her "achievement" she was so proud of (it involved some JS modifications).

I wonder if maybe it was the chance to solve a different challenge than the one before her (the test), which if she could already get an A maybe wasn't the right challenge?

She should be proud in the sense that real world problem solving and valuable technical skills is a lot more important than any school test. That said she will have to learn not to let arrogance and risk-taking be her downfall.

Tracking window focus change is not a good deterrent.

> two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted to cheating on chess.com. The fact that online cheating is so widespread

chess.com globally has more than 93M members. There is cheating, but a dozen admissions can't be accurately described as "so widespread." Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat. While this is mildly shocking, your statement based on 12 grandmaster admissions is a sweeping generalization.

Two dozen is 24, not 12.

This is how many grandmasters admitted cheating, not how many players globally have admitted it.

As of 2021 there were 1,315 active grandmasters. [0]

24/1,315 = ~1.8% of grandmasters admit cheating (give or take a few depending on how many play online chess or are still active). In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

[0] https://chessdelta.com/how-many-chess-grandmasters-are-there...

Even with my careless error, the statement in question is still a sweeping generalization.

> As of 2021

This is a tough number to track down, and you've limited the count by "active," in 2021, but the number is rapidly increasing. According to the FIFA Database as of a few moments ago, there are 1771 chess grandmasters.[1]

24/1771 < 1.4%

> In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

Even assuming 1.8% of chess grandmasters are cheaters, this means that 98.2% of them are not. If you tested a 98.2% of a perfect score on a test, would you really think your grade was a serious problem? If you had the chance to retake the test for a replacement score, either better or worse, would you?

[1] https://ratings.fide.com/advaction.phtml?idcode=&name=&title...

That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

> That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

The difference between 1.8% and 1.4% is negligible and is only in regards to the limited population of chess grandmasters which could not be a valid sample representation of 93M chess.com members.

> Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

Your answer is apparently in reply to some question that was not asked. On the contrary, my claim was that the argument that cheating was "widespread," by extrapolating a mere two dozen cheaters among 93M, is fallacious reasoning, specifically a sweeping generalization, and also that

>>> Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat.

which is not a postulation but a published fact.[1] Being that two hundredths of a percent may be described as a tiny fraction of a percent rather than more than a fraction of a percent, you can clearly see in this case, by your own scrutiny and straw man, cheating is not a detriment to competition.

[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

What seems really odd is that they don't have any data accusing him of cheating after his initial 2020 ban/new account creation.

They conclude that while there are several unusual things about his OTB play, there is not enough for them to conclude he probably cheated.

Basically the biggest takeaway here is that he definitely publicly lied about the extent of his cheating prior to his original ban.

> The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess.

> While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess.

> Greats like Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen, and almost all of the modern GMs who have been established as top five players, were notable GMs by age 15 at the latest

Wow.

Aronian was a late bloomer. No evidence here at all.

How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?

> How representative is Aronian as an example of skill trajectories in chess?

It doesn't really matter, does it? There's a big difference between telling someone "if you're not a GM by age 14 [but actually I mean 15], then don't bother, it's hopeless" and "a typical top-level player reaches GM by age 14, but it is possible to reach that level even if you are a relatively 'late bloomer'." I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.

as a rule it is decidedly uncouth in our society to use population statistics when speaking in terms of ability or potential, as the act of making those statements can bias real world abilities and potentials by setting expectations of limits.

There's a big difference between "[if you're not a GM by age 14], it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess." and "..then don't bother, it's hopeless". The former statement is perfectly valid, nobody saying that it's hopeless

> nobody saying that it's hopeless

Well, it's a report about cheating which is essentially claiming that if you're not a GM by age 14, then you must be cheating. Which is...kind of the same thing.

It literally does not say that. What do you want them to do? Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it?

The conclusion of their report is repeated several times; no evidence of OTB cheating.

> Leave out all the weird or suspicious stuff so that some other commenter will swing by and complain that they didn't analyze it?

I don't think any serious commenters are going to complain about the absence of stereotypes about "the greats" unbacked by statistical analysis. That is what is bad. The actual analysis of anomalously fast progress at equivalent ages is fine.

>It doesn't really matter, does it?

It's literally the single most important fact in this context.

If there are lots of people like Aronian, then there's nothing out of the ordinary about the evolution of Hans Neiman as a player. If he's a rare and unusual example, he shouldn't be cited to suggest Hans' skill growth is within the norm.

>I'd prefer not to err on the side of telling people not to try.

This is a non-sequitur.

The exception the proves the rule?

One of the stupidest phrases vert.

Almost by definition the exception disproves the rule.

There’s literally no logical sense in which the exception can prove the rule unless the rule is not really a rule but more of a suggestion.

Yeah it's pretty much exclusively used incorrectly. The original meaning was that an exception to a rule proves that such a rule exists. For example, "no parking on Sunday" is an exception that implies that parking on any day except Sunday is okay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

It honestly doesn't bother me as much as when people incorrectly say "begs the question" when they mean "raises the question" but I think we're long past the point of us ever correcting any of these.

One note about parking - normally all actions (incl. parking) are allowed, unless they are explicitly forbidden. Lack of any other rules/guidance implies the parking is allowed.

That’s a fairly generic statement, have you confirmed that rule to be true across every city/state/country across the globe?

> > The conventional wisdom is that if you are not a GM by age 14, it is unlikely that you can reach the top levels of chess.

This is confusing correlation and causation.

One thing that people don't realize is the sheer amount of money required to become a "GM". You have to get a certain number of "norms" from FIDE and the requirements list is a PITA: https://chessgoals.com/how-to-get-a-grandmaster-norm/

If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of free time to go to a lot of chess tournaments around the world, you are not getting a "GM" title in this day and age. This favors children (few time constraints) with rich parents (lots of coaching along with the ability to travel).

The problem is that if you aren't a "chess prodigy" by 15 it generally isn't worth continuing to pursue--what does sinking the resources into being a "GM" get you at the end? If you're one of the "Chess Gods", you have entry into the tournaments anyway, and, if you're not, it doesn't really matter.

This also ignores a once in a century pandemic.

It’s an absolutely ridiculous basis to make a claim.

> This also ignores a once in a century pandemic.

Hans Niemann was almost 17 years old when the pandemic started. When he turned 15 (June 2018) his rating was 2313, almost 200 points (an immense gulf at that level) below the minimum to become a grandmaster.

A name that basically means “John Nobody” is pretty curious.

That's why I quit playing seriously when I was still an underclassman. It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant, and there was absolutely no practical reason for me to play chess whatsoever. Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

> It was overwhelmingly obvious that merely being well above average was completely irrelevant

I find this true for any semi-competitive endeavor that doesn't also have intrinsic extra benefits. You're going to hit the people who want it more than you and are willing to put in the practice time, and they're going to beat you.

Consequently, any competitive thing I do has to also have an extra dimension to it. A competitive sport is generally fine since I'm getting in better shape. I'm happy to do stuff like darts or bowling if it has a high social aspect to it. As long as I can be slightly above average and that's good enough and there is some extra benefit, I'm down with it.

Chess, sadly, generally fulfills none of those criteria.

Wisdom is an obstacle to material success.

> Although it did subsequently get me laid once or twice, which in retrospect still surprises me.

Don't leave us hanging!

I see what you did there. :)

You even managed a double-entendre in 2 completely different realms. Well done.

I didn't know there was a thriving chess groupie scene

Imagine how barren a sport/hobby/field is when you feel compelled to point out that you had sex two times during your stint in it.

In my opinion, this sort of ad-hoc stereotyping weakens the rest of the analysis. There are plenty of counterexamples.

Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19 and is still ranked World No. 9 currently (at age 52). Ding Liren (Current No. 2) became a GM at 17. Grischuk (currently No. 17, peak No.3) became a GM at 17. All three have crossed 2800 ELO at some point.

I hope this is not the sort of analysis that chess.com has run in the other 71 pages of the report.

Yea generally I wouldn't characterise the report as being a glimmering indication of the scientific quality of the chess.com cheat detection team.

Even the graphs look a lot like copy-paste jobs from excel, which is fine obviously, but not the sort of thing I'd expect competent scientists/data-scientists/developers to be doing, especially for a big public report where some of the formatting issues are just about readability and basic presentation quality. Like Figures F and G (page 14) ... why are they styled so differently? Same question applies to many of the graphs, which isn't to mention label font sizes either.

Beyond that, yea I'd say good amounts of the data and logic are pretty basic and wouldn't be surprising from an amateur on the internet. The main thing chess.com have seems to be their Strength Score algorithm, which IMO is probably developed and maintained by a team different from the one that prepared this report.

Good design skills have zero correlation with good data analysis skills.

I might even go so far as to say it’s negative correlation.

I’ve seen wonderful and factual data analysis presented in the most horrible default templates and hacked together screenshots.

Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails.

Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to understand the same we expect of ourselves with writing.

That wherewithal is the design skill. Some people have it, some don't. Some are good with data too, some not.

Ok ... then aren't we stretching the term "design skill" too thinly then, to the point of disrespecting the actual skillset?

I suspect there'd be a tendency to presume a design process is more like solving a problem with a clear techniques for arriving at an objectively correct solution, when in reality, it can and often if just the iterative process of assessing-adjusting-repeat. Being better at these things to the point of sometimes reducing the iterative loop to 0 repeats is "design skill". But the essential base-line ingredient, IMO, is being willing to enter the iterative cycle at least to some extent.

IMHO unless line three of the table on page 5 is a typo it conclusively proves that their analysis is bunk. In every other line they think he cheated 100% of the games. But for line three it's only 12 out of 32. Of the 11 events in that table he had his 2nd highest rating in that event.

That obviously shouldn't be possible. If he only cheated in 1/3 of the games in the event then his performance should have been much worse than events where he cheated 100% of the time.

And I don't understand how they can say this:

>However, while Hans has had a record-setting and remarkable rise in rating and strength, in our view there is a lack of concrete statistical evidence that he cheated in his game with Magnus or in any other over-the-board (“OTB”)—i.e., in-person—games.

So what the hell? They pored over his OTB games, found no evidence of cheating, but then wrote 70 more pages? And even the circumstantial evidence is weak. They base a lot on Hans having unusually late improvements. But it's not like they're an order of magnitude better. He's slightly better than #2. And it's a simple fact that someone is going to have a late career rise that is better than anyone else. It's not evidence of cheating.

IMHO, Magnus or Chess.com need to pony up some hard evidence or STFU.

> Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19

At the age of 18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand#Early_chess_...

Also, according 2700chess.com he was #96 in the world with a rating of 2520 on January 1988. That's right after turning 18. Growing up in India (before the chess boom). Before chess engines existed. 6 months later he was #49 in the world. https://2700chess.com/players/anand

A year earlier (at 17), he had won the world junior chess championship (U-20). Not exactly a "strange meteoric rise" for Anand. The "GM at 18".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Junior_Chess_Championshi...

Meanwhile, at the same age of 18 (already during his covid boost), on July of 2021, Hans Niemann was #20 among all juniors (U-20), with a rating of 2571. Close to #300 on the global rating list: https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596/top https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2000059

Unlike Anand, no achievements of note until then (ok, he was 9th at U-16 World Youth Chess Championships in 2019). A year later he's a top 40 player, hanging out with the best and beating the (incredibly dominating) world champion with the black pieces. Make it make sense.

Also, take a look at this analysis of correlation between average (and stddev) of move accuracy vs rating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnJ0Da4Rp0 - explained in the detail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nEFaRdwZY - analysis applied to several players

> Make it make sense.

Hans Niemann didn't win the game. The incredibly dominating world champion lost it. He bodged the game and then threw a tantrum calling the other, weaker, player a cheater to save face because he couldn't stomach his own incompetence.

The rest is what is called "circumstantial evidence" in the lay press.

Thanks for the pointer to Milky Chess YT videos. The first one at 13.41 minutes has a clincher argument regarding a flat Centipawn loss at 2300 ELO and 2600 ELO. Don't think, another argument is needed.

This is all pointless comparisons though. Hans made his improvements during Covid times and The Queen's Gambit boom in online chess. Even if it's an extraordinary thing to happen we were in extraordinary times.

> Hans made his improvements during Covid times

None of the similarly rated players at the same age did anything similar during "Covid times and The Queens' Gambit boom".

Watch the videos I linked at the end of my comment and tell me how covid times contribute to that anomaly.

Unless they make a concrete accusation of cheating I'm not really interested. These circumstantial accusations all boil down to "something unusual happened" but the world is full of unusual things happening. Nobody, AFAICT, has come out and said "Hans cheated in X OTB event. He did so by getting Y information by Z method".

IMHO everyone needs to either put up hard evidence or shut up.

Don't forget Sam Shankland! He became a GM at the age of 20 and is now one of the top players in the world (Super GM status)

Levon Aronian (former No. 2, current No. 10, achieved the 4th highest Elo rating of all time) only became a grandmaster at age 17.

Most of the sports starts tend to start very very young. Some more true than others, like how most ice skating Olympic winners are sub 18. More true for classical music as well.

But not all of them have immediate success. Look at someone like Kurt Warner. It took him until his senior year to start at the University of Northern Iowa. Then he plays 3 years for the Iowa Barnstormers in Arena Football and 1 year for Amsterdam in NFL Europe.

Finally he gets on a NFL roster as 3rd string for St Louis. Cleveland skips picking him in the expansion draft. The Rams sign a different starting QB and trade away #2 QB leaving Warner as the backup. The starter gets hurt and with basically no first team practices Warner gets named the starter.

After all that and starting for the first time in the NFL at age 28 he has one of the best statistical seasons ever for QB and wins the MVP and Superbowl. Goes on to win the MVP again and has a 10 year HOF career.

If we apply Chess.com's logic he's the biggest cheater that ever cheated. But obviously he's not because you can't really cheat at QB in the NFL.

The trouble I have is, that Hans is 19. Given the accusations and his own confession, he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs. Hans confessed to have cheated at age 12 and 16.

Since cheating is arguable habit forming, he simply based his career on cheating. Where others put in the mileage, he invested in his cheating expertise.

>... he is a life long cheater in contrast to traditional GMs.

Is this an accurate statement given that, because of this report, we are now aware that a lot of other GMs have cheated as well?

He cheated as a child during a stressful period that children still need to figure out how to deal with. I think it’s very unreasonable to cancel someone over things they did as a child, much less to cancel them IRL over things they did as a child in an online game.

We have evidence of a sustained period of cheating that he then lied about and obfuscated as a legal adult. This is not just a childish mistake. A teenager, in particular a person capable of being a professional chess player, can fully understand the ramifications of these sorts of actions.

What about the stress of the players he's cheated against?

Except the only reason we know is because chess.com said so. He hasn't exactly come clean about it, he's been lying about this whole time. It's fair to judge him for his childhood cheating if he is still lying about it as an adult.

Another explanation is simply that, if you reach early adulthood without deciding to devote your life to becoming good at chess, you are unlikely to do it later. Becoming among the best in the world at anything requires not only natural talent but also focused, almost monomaniacal work, and if you haven't started doing that (for chess) by your mid-teens, it's hard to see why you would start.

If, for some reason, you decided to drop your budding music/engineering/whatever career at age 20 to focus entirely on chess, and you had the natural aptitude to be able to become a GM, perhaps it could happen. But rarely would a person decide to do that, if they had not prior to that point.

Brain plasticity is real. If I dropped everything and devoted my life to studying Chinese I would still never learn to speak it as well as a child who grew up in China.

I think both effects have something to do with it.

Definitely brain plasticity is real, but there are people who learn to speak languages as adults, with native proficiency. I recall hearing on the radio, people in India who (as adults) learned a Midwestern US accent, because they were doing phone support and they could get through each phone call quicker if the old person on the other end of the line wasn't confused by an Indian accent. I am a midwesterner, and I could not detect anything "off" in their midwestern accent, even though I knew they were Indian.

In other words, you can only learn a language natively, if you have some good reason to do so, like say money.

But, your basic point that both effects have something to do with it, is surely correct.

Actually I did something similar - learned to speak French with no perceptible foreign accent at age 17 (unfortunately my abilities have decayed in the intervening years, so I’m sure now I’d sound American, but anyway…)

However, accent is only one part of language. I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary, reading speed, writing elegance, etc. of (educated) native speakers.

> > While that statement may seem discouraging, it has been borne out in modern chess.

Totally unnecessary sentence that just leads to derailment (like in this subthread).

So page 9 from the last paragraph is interesting. Chess.com basically indicate that apart from Hans, a number of highly rated players (including higher than Hans) have been caught and admitted to cheating.

I haven't gone over the report thoroughly, but it's clearly focused on Hans's conduct and not so much on the state of play regarding online cheating, which is, even by Magnus's statement, the chief focus of all of this.

As an outsider to the chess world, this revelation of rampant online cheating is the main story.

First, not surprising, right? Using a computer engine is part of learning and preparing in chess (AFAICT). What other sport has a similar issue where an extremely useful and essential and highly available tool in the sport is considered cheating based entirely on using it within the narrow window of a game? Of course it was going to leak into play in online games where you only have the data feed of moves and nothing else connecting the players.

Second, that it's common amongst the elite of the sport is huge. Either online chess is somewhat dead on arrival as a sport and was never taken seriously by many players (which makes sense to me given how integrated computer engines are in the sport) ... or the chess world needs to go through some sort of cultural revolution here.

Third, chess.com have a conflict of interest in this meta-discussion, I presume, as they have commercial interests in the survival of online chess.

Fourth, the OTB cheating question still seems open and it seems plausible to me that a good chess player would cheat online for followers and income and entrance to tournaments and then use OTB as the real testing ground. My bias here is that I suspect cheating in OTB is just crazy by comparison as you'd have to carry some sort of device that would stand as hard evidence of cheating while in online play the proof is always circumstantial and so easier for a cheater to convince themselves they won't get caught. Which gets back to my second and third points about how online chess maybe doesn't make much sense and chess.com aren't quite seeing the forest for the trees on this.

> Using a computer engine is part of learning and preparing in chess (AFAICT). What other sport has a similar issue where an extremely useful and essential and highly available tool in the sport is considered cheating based entirely on using it within the narrow window of a game? Of course it was going to leak into play in online games where you only have the data feed of moves and nothing else connecting the players.

Pretty much every e-sport with hidden information has this issue. CS:GO, DotA2, SC2. They all have replay analyzers to reveal the map and let you look back to figure out how to play better. But if there was a way to use them in game (map hacks), it'd invalidate the game.

I don’t know about those games … but isn’t the incomplete/hidden information a fundamental difference from chess and how easy it is to cheat?

Only partly. In DOTA for example one of the more common cheats is scripting that provides the player with reaction time more like a pro in triggering items and abilities.

That makes lots of sense for quick real time games. But getting back to my point about how integral computer engines are in chess for training/preparation ... a script to enhance reaction times seems much more like doping in sports where it probably doesn't improve the player's intrinsic abilities only their performance.

Poker would also break if you could just use algorithms to tell you how much to bet and when to fold.

I suppose any strategic, turn-based game breaks down as soon as you have a world class engine for it.

Exactly. Even just a unary hint that a particular position is dangerous would be a huge advantage to even a moderately skilled player.

In Poker all skilled players remember all probability tables, and there are heuristics for calculating probabilities on the flight, and players also count chips, so any players has all the information for theoretical optimal bets. The game happens on estimating bluffs and adjusting your strategy agains opponent bluffs.

> I suppose any strategic, turn-based game breaks down as soon as you have a world class engine for it.

Yep. Perhaps just a consequence of technology and an oncoming "singularity" ... professional sports just don't make much sense anymore apart from their value as entertainment (which is already questionable in the case of Chess IMO) and all of the noise around cheating etc is much more about "being immersed in the story" just like good film directing and VFX/SFX. You're either a fan or aren't and that's just how it is.

Hopefully the love and appreciation for amateur sports makes a return ... not much to cheat for if the only prize is pride and pleasure.

I'd argue it's much easier to cheat in Chess than those games. In Chess the "hidden information" is the best move to play (I know I'm misusing the term there), which is easily determined by using a computer.

eSports are similar to normal sports in the fact that even if you have complete information, you need the physical skill to back it up. Professional DotA / SC2 / CSGO players would still wipe the floor with a mediocre player using maphacks.

Trying to think of an example in 'physical' sports (give me some rope here)... in baseball you start by using light aluminum bats, then in college they impose weight rules on non-wood bats, then in the MLB they impose weight rules on wood bats. However, pro players sometimes train with non-regulation bats to work on bat speed or for pregame warm up. Rarely, a training bat will accidentally get used during a game. If such a bat breaks during the game, it will reveal itself as a hollowed or corked bat. The consequences, esp with regard to public perception, for such mistakes are severe.

https://fanbuzz.com/mlb/sammy-sosa-corked-bat/

Some of the Dota cheats use methods in which subtle bits of what should be private information are made public, although not always in a nice/easy way for humans to see. For example some animations and particle effects are visible through the fog of war. Another interesting situation (which I think was recently fixed?) was a bitmap stored on a unit (for example, your hero) for visibility checks by each faction (as in, which factions could see you). You could thus tell if you were visible, and hence detect enemy vision.

Yup that part stood out to me as well. There are dozens of "Anonymous Confessed GM"s on the cheating list, most of them with a rating much higher than Neimann's. And this doesn't even mention the players who are flagged by their algorithm but haven't admitted their guilt. Given the very high ELO range of the offenders (2600-2700), it's clear that a lot of the most popular names in chess are involved. Why not name all of them? Shouldn't they receive the same amount of scrutiny, public criticism and punishment as him?

Yea, it definitely seems a bit suspicious and unfair, which fits frankly with the sport going through growing pains on this.

Seems like you gotta beat Magnus for your cheating to matter?! Snark aside, Magnus’s behaviour makes some sense, he wants this to be addressed. But the manner in which it is happening, his conduct included, is just poor form for the sport, even if it was the best overall move Magnus could make.

I suspect something like “everyone cheats online” is kind of what we have here, and they’re a bit worried about upsetting the whole applecart.

Which gets to my point about the bias of chess.com. Surely they have an interest in making this look like one awful offender, a bad apple essentially, and not that they’re profits come from a broken sport.

For anyone unaware, chess.com recently bought out the Play Magnus Group for about $80 million. They most definitely are not a neutral party in this financially. I personally interpret this sort of situation as creating an additional burden to acknowledge and demonstrate the conflict of interest isn't a material factor.

I don't know if Hans cheated beyond his admissions. Online seems plausible if not likely to me. OTB seems much less plausible. But this report being leaked to the WSJ, then goes up on the blog, immediately ahead of Neiman's next big event? That definitely an intentional PR campaign, and that comes across as scummy to me. I'd say doubly scummy consider the report itself establishes how prevalent cheating on chess.com is among GMs, yet nothing like this sort of public disclosure has happened in other cases. It's hard to interpret this as anything but selective enforcement based on Carlson's reaction to a specific player and game.

Agreed on all fronts.

I've gotten the vague impression over the years that the chess establishment isn't the most fair and non-corrupt organisation (par for the course perhaps for sports organisations). It also seems to be relatively behind or new to massive cheating scandals (??). Put together an event like this was almost certainly going to be ugly and unimpressive.

FIDE has a very poor reputation when it comes to handling the more unpleasant stuff.

Err, if that was their interest, why did they even include the new-to-many info about other top GMs having admitted cheating? They could have just not included that part at all.

Because the “our detection shows cheating” is supported by “here’s X cases where our detection worked and got a confession”.

If they have that interest, why did they just release a detailed 72-page report in which they make clear that there have actually been many offenders?

Your argument doesn't hold much water.

It appears that chess.com was handling the matter discreetly until Hans made the issue public. It would be unfair if it turned out that the other GM's also challenged chess.com publicly.

Hans didn't make anything public until two stars made public allegations against him.

carlsen is right saying cheating is an existential threat to chess. if cheating becomes easier to conceal (more subtle) it will kill interest in spectating and double paranoia in player.

i could not care about bike racing due to doping, literally all top racers were doping back when i was following it. i can no longer watch it without doping in the back of my mind after all of it started coming out. Olympiads to me are the same.

if cheating in your sport is not dealt with it will grow like cancer .

As I understand it, Hans decided to take the issue public and made questionable statements about his credibility, which in turn weighs upon the credibility of chess.com's decision to kick him out of an upcoming $1M tournament.

I wouldn't take this to mean that everybody cheats, or everybody at the top cheats, as a sibling comment has stated. Wikipedia cites the number of grandmasters as "almost 2000" so even 100 GM cheaters is still a small amount (modulo the ones no longer living I guess, who likely are not playing on chess.com). Elsewhere in the report chess.com gives a figure for number of players they believe have cheated on the site from total player base of 0.14%.

1/20 GMs is a minority, but it means that top players play cheaters all the time.

This article https://en.chessbase.com/post/thirteen-super-grandmasters says

The history of the game of chess knows around 30 players who have at some point exceeded the dream mark of 2600 Elo points.

On the other hand this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_players_by_peak_... puts 125 at over 2700

I don't think the list of other confessed GM cheaters has this same qualifier of "is a super GM" or "is ranked above 2700," however.

Grandmaster rank is achieved via a peak Elo of 2500 plus gaining two grandmaster norms[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmaster_(chess)#Current_re...

https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596 says Hans Niemann has a rating of 2699

You were replying to a comment that said

"Anonymous Confessed GM"s on the cheating list, most of them with a rating much higher than Neimann's.

That qualification is true of Hans Niemann's Elo given in the table - at the time of the chess.com cheating - of 2465, when he was an IM with a single GM norm.

The highest rated "Anonymous Confessed GM" in this table in the report is a 2686 Elo.

worth noting that gm title is up for 'sale'

the are proven cases of gms selling/throwing games so you can earn norms for gm title (understandable phenomenon when considering effort of getting to gm level vs little money you can make from it, gm from poorer country has big incentive earn extra $).

Is it not obvious that you start with the most anomalous ELO to success comparisons?

Therefore, Neimann.

Also these players will think twice now about crossing chess-com's star players and stake-holders.

It would be against chess.com's interests to name those GMs, wouldn't it?

There are devices that you can put on your arm to greatly improve your baseball swing. They are permitted during batting practice but not during play.

But are they even useful in training for a player? Are they essential for improvement and competition?

I’m not sure they’re essential, but they may be able to help you improve your swing.

All major sports watch film, and then run drills based on that film. They also now have analytical recommendations. Welcome to 2022

Tony Gwynn wasn't an insanely naturally talented hitter; he spend hours each day watching his own films and painstakingly improving his batting.

There's a story that Ted Williams told him "you need to hit the inside pitches for power" and Tony went and did that; he never became a huge home run hitter but he improved. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-gwynns-hitting-coa...

> Second, that it's common amongst the elite of the sport is huge. Either online chess is somewhat dead on arrival as a sport and was never taken seriously by many players (which makes sense to me given how integrated computer engines are in the sport) ... or the chess world needs to go through some sort of cultural revolution here.

Really? My takeaway is that chess.com is doing a better job of detecting cheaters than FIDE, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel with Niemann

> Fourth, the OTB cheating question still seems open and it seems plausible to me that a good chess player would cheat online for followers and income and entrance to tournaments and then use OTB as the real testing ground.

This seems wildly implausible to me. Niemann‘s OTB rise would be indicative of a not just significant but utterly world historic chess mind, head-and-shoulders above Fisher and head-shoulders-and-entire-torso above every other player in history. When led into uncharted territory by the world chess champion, Magnus indicated that Niemann seemed utterly and completely untroubled - and yet he’s, what, running stockfish in another window for $1000 prizes online and getting himself caught dozens of times? Why? Why take the risk against opponents he should beat in his sleep? These should have been sleepwalk games for this Fisher++ genius who’s totally untroubled by a 5 time world chess championship, but he’s for some reason making obviously weaker moves when not switching windows when his unaided moves shouldn’t have been screamingly weaker than the aided ones given his singularly extraordinary chess rise.

It beggars belief. His world historic rise in rating alone is ludicrously over the top. Kid’s an obvious fraud.

They didn’t find any instances of cheating after August 2020. At that point his OTB ELO was only around 2450. It’s only after his last known instance of cheating that he improved into the truly great level.

> They didn’t find any instances of cheating after August 2020

They banned him after August 2020, and only reinstated him after a full confession the next year.

The fact that, after having being caught red handed in online for-prize tournaments and knowing he’s being monitored very closely online going forward, he suddenly starts rising at a world-historic pace (at an age this has never before happened at) at OTB tournaments suggests to me that having lost the ability to reliably cheat in one forum he turned his attention to another.

They reinstated him January of the following year, only five months later.

He was (and still is) banned from prize money tournaments even after that partial re-instatement.

Regardless, there's obviously a huge difference between "no evidence he cheated after August 2020" (wow, guess his heart grew 3 sizes that month) and "no evidence he cheated after a 5 month ban which required him to beg to get his account back, made it very clear to him that they were watching him like a hawk, and they wouldn't let him play in tournaments even after that" (not exactly indicative of an unprompted improvement in his morals).

The Chess.com anti cheat system, as described by the report, is set up to handle blitz and bullet. This makes sense, both because it's most of what is played on the site, and because it's so much easier to detect cheating in that environment: A whole lot of engine recommendations would be bananas if a human played them in blitz, and finding major mistakes is very challenging under such time pressure. Evaluating when to play a secondary or tertiary line under pressure, instead of what the engine says, is also challenging. Along with the metadata of thinking time, or whether someone tabbed out of the screen, it's unsurprising that cheating is pretty detectable.

On the other hand, in OTB classical chess the difficulty is in bypassing the security controls. Players are much closer to engines, and far fewer moves appear to be completely inhuman. Furthermore, with an accomplice that is also quite good at chess, those lines could just be discarded. This makes it much easier to both play very good moves that are not all that suspicious, and take enough time to "sell" the thinking time.

This doesn't mean Hans cheated over the board, just that without very good physical security, any unscrupulous GM could gain 300-400 points virtually undetected, other than from the fact that they are playing much better than they used to. If security is a top priority, at the very least we need to do what the Sinquefield cup did in the last few rounds: No spectators and a 15 minute delay, so that all communication with computers/co-conspirators has to include the player relaying all the moves out before they can get any help.

> If security is a top priority, at the very least we need to do what the Sinquefield cup did in the last few rounds: No spectators and a 15 minute delay, so that all communication with computers/co-conspirators has to include the player relaying all the moves out before they can get any help.

This. And then let's test this Niemann character, as now I'm really curious as to whether -and how- he cheats at OTB.

From page 17 of the report:

> In conclusion, while we cannot definitively prove that Hans’ rise in strength is entirely “natural,” we have also found no indications in the game data to suggest otherwise. While some have suggested that a move-by-move analysis by humans may surface some oddities in move choice or analysis, there is nothing in our statistical investigation to raise any red flags regarding Hans’ OTB play and rise.

That’s specifically in response to the question of whether or not Niemann has played a statistically anomalous number of “near perfect games”, based on analysis of on-board moves. But as they note earlier:

> Hans is consistently above many contemporaries in strength increases, even though he has only recently shown the same caliber of play. Likewise, as set forth in Figures A and B below, Hans had the fastest and biggest increase in his score over time in comparison to his peers and other notable players, when considering all of their known Classical OTB games played from age 11-19.

Which should raise a lot of red flags given the nature of the “peers” (Fischer, Magnus) and its very sudden occurrence after being banned from online tournaments. It’s much harder to detect computer-aided cheating in classical time control moves than in speed chess (where they detected it in his online play) — not least because, as they note, they have no access to time-usage data for the OTB events, which would be critical to any such analysis. Nevertheless they do flag 6 OTB events that their FairPlay team believes merits further analysis by FIDE, in Appendix X.3. Reading between the lines I think that’s about as strong a statement as they can make without fully creating political issues with FIDE, who they’re probably hoping will work more closely with them going forward.

All that said, it makes more sense to look at the anomalous nature of his OTB outcomes rather than searching individual OTB moves trying to find a smoking gun given chess.com’s relative lack of data there, and the political entanglements involved. And as for that

> While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.

Rampant online cheating? Hm:

> At the outset, we want to make clear that while these events highlight a critical topic in chess—cheating the vast majority of chess games do not involve any cheating. We estimate that fewer than 0.14% of players on Chess.com ever cheat, and that our events are by and large free from cheating. We firmly believe that cheating in chess is rare, preventable, and much less pervasive than is currently being portrayed in the media

How rare is cheating in contexts where there is money at stake?

Your average person playing blitz while seated on the toilet has little incentive to cheat, particularly if it involves setting up real time access to a powerful engine ... One expects almost no cheating in such an environment.

What if the numbers are: 1/700 cheat, but 1/7 GMs cheat ...?

> particularly if it involves setting up real time access to a powerful engine

You might be overestimating how difficult this is. The free Stockfish app on your phone is enough to crush any human player.

Professional sports deal with cheating in a number of different ways; suspensions, fines, exclusion from HOF consideration.

Cheating is a part of every competitive thing human beings do, unfortunately. Chess is no different.

In Magnus' recent interview with Lex Fridman, he said though members of his team utilize engines in preparation, it's not something he personally uses very much if at all in his training. In fact he seems to think training against engines can be detrimental.

---

Transcript from: https://steno.ai/lex-fridman-podcast-10/315-magnus-carlsen-g...

Lex: How much do you use engines like Leela and Stockfish in your preparations?

Magnus: My team does. Personally, I try not to use them too much on on my own because I know that when I play you can obviously cannot have help from from engines and often I feel like often having imperfect or knowledge about a position or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse than than having no knowledge. So I try to look at engines as little as possible.

Lex: So yeah, so your team uses them for research for generation of ideas but you are relying primarily on your human resources.

Mangus: Yeah, for sure... I can evaluate as a human. I can know what they find unpleasant and so on and it's very often the case for me to some extent... And so then looking at the engines doesn't necessarily help because at that point you're facing a human, you have to sort of think as a human.

Thanks ... didn't listen to that interview. Also, I'm not a chess person, so everything is AFAICT.

But ...

1) Magnus is one of the greatest ever, so he doesn't count as an example;

2) From excerpt, his *team* does use engines, and he *uses his team*. So his use of engines is one degree removed compared to others, which hardly matters, especially given point 1 above.

Yeah, I thing Magnus is saying he doesn’t practice by playing the computer because it doesn’t help; but his team can use the computer to try to find human situations for him to look at.

And it makes sense - if he’s the best he really doesn’t have someone better to play against to “learn” so finding plausible situations could be useful.

I wonder if that’s one of the things - he felt like he was playing a computer.

Swimming has training tools that would obviously disqualify you in competition, for one example.

> Third, chess.com have a conflict of interest in this meta-discussion, I presume, as they have commercial interests in the survival of online chess.

How is this a conflict of interest? It's just regular old interest. They are interested in Chess continuing to grow.

The is a subtext in the report suggesting "When players play on the largest online site cheating can be detected and regulated; it is very hard to apply the same level of analysis to OTB matches." It is possible that aligns with chess.com's interests.

Anyone who has taught a technical subject in the university knows that something like 1/5-1/2 of the audience is inclined to teach when there is not much risk, even when there is very little (a grade on an exam) at stake. When there is money at stake the inclination increases. When the marginal benefits of cheating are high is when cheating is most likely. This occurs in any competitive context that is a subculture (i.e. not football) in which the, say, top ten or one hundred are well compensated ($5000+) but no one else is.

Cheating is particularly easy in any online context and those who dismiss the notion that online sports and gambling aren't infected with it are simply naive. People cheat in competitive bass fishing where all you have to do is cut the fish open to catch them ...

“Our investigation has revealed that while there has been some noteworthy online play that has caught our attention as suspicious since August 2020, we are unaware of any evidence that Hans has engaged in online cheating since then.”

So he was re-banned for absolutely no reason.

He kept his side of the deal, i.e. not cheat again on chess.com platform. Chess.com didn’t keep theirs.

An admitted cheater has been playing suspiciously. “No reason” lol.

They could have chosen to ban him for life when they caught him cheating. I would have no sympathy for him in that case.

But the document paints a different picture. He cheated, and they agreed to re-enable his account if he promised to not cheat again.

According to chess.com he kept his promise. So why the sudden new ban?

I would agree with you that the initial cheating was enough for lifetime ban. But chess.com decided against it at the time.

Reconsidering their decision 2 years later without new evidence, is kind of shitty.

Because of the public uproar?

Happens all the time in all kinds of fields.

The report outlines the rationale in some detail. The removal of Hans' ban was controversial among chess.com's Fairplay staff. In recent months, suspicions grew about Hans' tournament performance among both elite chess players and chess.com staff. Simultaneously, chess.com is readying to host its largest ever (by cash prize pool) tournament, and Hans recently qualified for it. Then the Sinquefield incident happened, resulting in both Hans' play specifically, and the potential for cheating in chess tournaments generally, being called into question with a great deal of attention.

All of this led chess.com Fairplay staff to request that leadership re-review Hans' account, with updated analysis they provided, and to reconsider the removal of Hans' ban.

Where does this report state that the "removal of Hans' ban was controversial among chess.com's Fairplay staff?"

> Where does this report state that the "removal of Hans' ban was controversial among chess.com's Fairplay staff?"

Page 58, from the text of a letter chess.com sent privately to Hans, just after they banned him:

"When I received your confession back on August 12th of 2020, in light of your age, I allowed you to create a new account with no fair play markings to continue to stream chess... For my team, however, there always remained serious concerns about how rampant your cheating was in prize events. In finalizing the field for the upcoming CGC, and based on a growing concern regarding ensuring fair play in Chess.com’s first million dollar prize event, my team did a deep review of your past history, and encouraged me to rethink my position of letting you continue to play in prize events on Chess.com. I ultimately made the decision that too much was at stake given our ongoing suspicions and past violations." [Emphasis added, 1]

This is an example of where such internal controversy is discussed.

[1]Full text of this section of the letter: "Moving on to my second point, I want to address both the reasons and timing for freezing your account and rescinding your CGC invite. For my team, however, there always remained serious concerns about how rampant your cheating was in prize events.

When I received your confession back on August 12th of 2020, in light of your age, I allowed you to create a new account with no fair play markings to continue to stream chess. You’ll remember that I worked hard to both advise you on this process and to protect you as much as I could. I would do that again for you or any young player I deemed to have lost their way and wanted to choose a better path forward.

For my team, however, there always remained serious concerns about how rampant your cheating was in prize events. As you know, we’ve closed the accounts of hundreds of titled players (including 4 of the top 100 Grandmasters who have confessed to cheating), and we carefully monitor and help all of them as they rehabilitate into participating in our events. You and I had many subsequent discussions in our Slack DMs where we openly cooperated on the right way for you to rebuild your reputation.

In finalizing the field for the upcoming CGC, and based on a growing concern regarding ensuring fair play in Chess.com’s first million dollar prize event, my team did a deep review of your past history, and encouraged me to rethink my position of letting you continue to play in prize events on Chess.com. I ultimately made the decision that too much was at stake given our ongoing suspicions and past violations.

Considering the above, we made this decision to close your account privately and uninvite you from the CGC. I regret the timing, but the timing between the Sinquefield Cup and the CGC required me to move quickly to replace your spot. I believe I acted in the best interest of the game and all participants to reconsider our invitation with so much at stake.

I’m going to bring my letter to a close with an offer to have a call. If you are willing to correct the false statements you made about having never cheated when it mattered (now that you have said these untruths publicly), acknowledge the full breadth of the above violations, and cooperate with us to compete under strict Fair Play measures, Chess.com would be happy to consider bringing you back to our events. In fact, I think it would be a wonderful redemption story for the full truth to come out, for the chess world to see this and acknowledge your talent regardless of your past, and give the community what they deserve: The truth."

Thank you very much!

Don't expect an honest report from chess.com, think about how that conversation would go in the event he _was_ cheating and they caught him:

Public: "So he's been cheating recently?"

Chess.com: "Oh yeah, he cheats all the time. Everyone does, really. Online chess is like 50% cheaters/bots, don't expect any real humans here, this is like 10x worse than Twitter."

This doesn't even remotely line up with the data they cite.

It’s not an assertion, it’s a hypothetical. If the situation was bad, they would never admit it.

If the situation is that bad and cheating is that easy, soon there will be researchers cheating all the way to Elo 2000, just like there are researchers submitting garbage papers to prove that some journals are jokes. That will be interesting too so I am not against your vision.

No...they seem willing to provide evidence that he has cheated more times than he admitted. He did NOT keep his side of the deal

Where did you read that in the document?

Search for "admitted" and it is on page 2.

[Edit: This paragraph is wrong] As I see it he was largely banned for lying about his past cheating... which makes a lot of sense given that one of the conditions they impose for reinstating the account is telling the truth about the cheating (at least privately).

Either way, chess.com kept their side of the deal, their side of the deal was "and we can ban you at any time in the future for any reason or even no reason whatsoever". Frankly that strikes me as a very fair term in a deal for reinstating a admitted cheaters access to your tournaments with large cash prizes...

The famous interview where (we now know) he lied came after he was banned again by chess.com.

As stated in the report, the reason he was banned again was that the insinuations from Magnus caused the chess.com team to reevaluate whether or not they could trust him not to cheat going forward, especially with an upcoming tournament with a million dollar prize on the horizon. After this reevaluation, they decided their previous leniency was unwarranted.

Oops, I really should have double checked the timeline...

Edited to warn people that that portion of my post was incorrect.

Just ban this clown outright.

If somebody has a prodigious history of not playing by the rules, there is no reason to think they'll ever reform, and it isn't worth the reputational damage to the game both within (Magnus) and without (the public's perception of high-end chess). This has been a fiasco when they should have just banned Neiman once it became clear that he's been consistently cheating for years.

Where was this report say 1 month ago, before a certain Magnus Carlsen lost to Niemann over the board?

Is Chess.com gonna reveal similar reports for every other player or is this privilege only for those who are accused by a chess.com part owner of OTB cheating.

They must have started investigating when Carlsen protested a month ago.

This report is incredibly underwhelming. I only see Hans cheating before 2020-08-12 from the same chart the WSJ published earlier today. To me it seems he was banned again this year for the same offenses yet complied with chess-com terms (save for not sending an email).

I think the thing I'd like to have clarified: Why does chess.com care about the results of an OTB game?

I can understand their online tournaments being something they care about and why they might rescind an invitation based on these allegations but there's something very strange about them taking it upon themselves to ban him from the platform as a result of his play against someone whose company they're in the process of buying.[1]

It seems to me as though they're inserting themselves into this unnecessarily with their analysis too. They spend a great deal of time explaining their rationale in a few places and then toss in a "In our view, no conclusions should be made from this data." at the end of it. If no conclusions should be drawn, don't bother sharing the data; it's useless. By sharing it in this manner, they are attempting to pretend it's reliable and effectively make the accusation with an out to claim they didn't.

This part too:

    And while Magnus’ actions prompted us to reassess the situation, Magnus did not talk with us in advance about our decisions or ask for, or directly influence, those decisions at all.

An uncharitable reading is that this is a very honest statement. Magnus may not have directly influenced their decisions but I think it would be hard to argue they don't have a vested interest in this for the reasons above. IMO this is a clear conflict and they should have simply withdrawn his invitation, even suspended him from their platform, but refrained from commenting on the over-the-board controversy entirely.

[1]: https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/embedded/announcement?publisher...

>I think the thing I'd like to have clarified: Why does chess.com care about the results of an OTB game?

They run money tournaments and hope to have top GMs join and advertise their service by playing, streaming, and commentating the tournaments. You really don't see why they would prefer not to have an OTB cheat invited to these events?

Not to say that Hans has been proven to be a cheat, but it does explain why they have to care about cheating in any event, anywhere.

> You really don't see why they would prefer not to have an OTB cheat invited to these events?

No, I definitely see why they would rescind his invitation. I mention so in my post you're quoting from.

My question is specifically about the "analysis" they performed of the over-the-board game that started all of this off.

> It seems to me as though they're inserting themselves into this unnecessarily with their analysis too. They spend a great deal of time explaining their rationale in a few places and then toss in a "In our view, no conclusions should be made from this data." at the end of it. If no conclusions should be drawn, don't bother sharing the data; it's useless. By sharing it in this manner, they are attempting to pretend it's reliable and effectively make the accusation with an out to claim they didn't.

I agree. Inline with your comments, the report has to me a bit of the vibe of an PR department scrambling to get ahead of the story. The poorly and inconsistently formatted graphs indicates they were pulled out of various documents written by various people at different times. And the spray and prey arguments that don't go any where make it seem like they're desperate to appear as objective and unbiased as possible ... which indicates that they are very biased in their urge/need to respond to the "Magnus refuses to play with Hans" situation.

If their cheating detection is so good, wouldn't it be reasonable for chess.com to say to Magnus that you don't have to worry about cheating in our tournaments so you'll play whoever you're paired with and you can leave it up to us to ban people because we know what we're talking about. Why ban Hans now, right after Magnus's ultimatum?

This is my general take on it. As I posted on Twitter:

As one example, chess.com thinks it’s suspicious that Hans became a grandmaster at 17 instead of a younger age (page 15 of the report), but keep in mind that the legendary Joseph Henry Blackburne didn’t learn to even how to play chess until he was 17. More recently, world champion #15 Vishy Anand did not become a grandmaster until he was 18.

Point being, it argues like a polemic, not a fact-finding report. They themselves admit this. On page 19: “Chess.com is unaware of any concrete evidence proving that Hans is cheating over the board or has ever cheated over the board”.

My personal hurdle, which has not changed in the last month, is real evidence of online cheating on or after June 20, 2021 (Hans’s 18th birthday), or real evidence of over the board cheating. Understating the extent of his online cheating in his September 6 speech is not evidence of recent cheating. I don’t like it, but it might not even be deliberate lying, but a combination of a foggy memory and nerves.

Regardless, while apparently guilty of online cheating when he was 17 or younger, and possibly guilty of understating the extent of his juvenile delinquency, I see no need to ban him from playing over the board chess with the evidence we have on the table. To ban someone as an adult for something done while a juvenile is generally considered immoral, and to ban someone without solid evidence is also considered immoral. This is a line I draw in the sand and will hold to.

> This is a line I draw in the sand and will hold to.

Would you play him for money at a game where you are both equally skilled and it's easy to cheat?

> To ban someone as an adult for something done while a juvenile is generally considered immoral

I don't think it's so clear, especially when the time elapsed is short.

If you cheated I'm a game we played yesterday and today is your 18th birthday I'm still not going to trust you today.

This is something I don't understand, why should FIDE accept any evidence from Chess.com, a completely separate corporate entity? That Hans cheated on chess.com is a fact at this point, but I don't see why that means he should be banned from real OTB tournaments or even from competitor online chess websites like Lichess.

Talk about a buried lede, I can't believe that they allow caught cheaters to simply reset in rankings and never publicly name them. Can you imagine any other sport operating that way?

When they receive admittance of cheating, they are able to confirm their cheating detection works as intended. It's a two-way street.

Wouldn't it be noticeable if someone got their ranking reset? So others can easily infer who got caught?

People are investigating now, because of the drama. But prior to that there wasn't much in the way of open source analysis

Chess.com recently (coincidently just before this drama happened) bought out Magnus Carlsen's group of companies https://chess24.com/en/read/news/play-magnus-group-receives-...

They are going to be defending 100% their investment.

Could you please elaborate? I personally can't see how the acquisition and cheating are connected

Conflict of interest.

Magnus Carlsen has put his reputation on the line by calling out Hans Niemann for cheating. Many people have criticised him for doing saying there is not enough evidence.

Chess.com has an interest in defending Magnus's brand since they are buying his companies.

There is a very short list of people, in the entire history of the game, who could possibly be considered better players than Carlsen. His reputation is not in jeopardy at all.

No one is questioning his reputation as a skilled player. They are questioning him for potentially calling someone out for cheating on flimsy (or no) evidence.

Only the most casual of chess followers think that Carlsen calling out a confessed cheater is somehow putting his reputation at stake.

One way to settle it: Grudge match... in an isolated room, fully naked, x-ray scans, in a Faraday cage, no coverage until the match is over.

That won't prove anything...

> Grudge match... in an isolated room, fully naked, …

At that point does it even have to be chess?

Drama aside, no-one seriously thinks Hans can measure up to Magnus. The outcome of that match heavily favors Magnus, even players like Nepo, Caruana, Firouzja are underdogs.

I've only really looked at the WSJ version but I'm scratching my head at what the big reveal is here - we already know - by Hans admission - he cheated online when he was 12 and 16.

I think anybody who knows how online chess tournaments work assumed those two times would cover multiple games and dates.

Other statistical analyses have been published that indicate no evidence for OTB cheating.

The negative against Niemann is the cheating is beefier than he indicated, and given the spotlight he needs to be more thorough.

Chess.com has a dog in the fight though, and it's bark seems worse than its bite here...

The full report is worth reading, if you're interested. It reveals a great deal of additional information, not just about Hans' history of cheating and his misrepresentations, but of wider spread cheating (or suspected cheating) by high level chess elites online.

I've now gone through the full report and note that the vast bulk of it has little to do with the accusations themselves (or evidence) but ELI5 type stuff about the context including analysis, and - as you say - indications of a wider problem.

That's fine, but gives the surface impression of being heavyweight while the important stuff is only a few pages and adds little that is new and nothing that delivers a knockout blow that justifies the onslaught against Niemann led by Carlsen's antics that kicked the whole thing off.

No, the kicker here is that Niemann claimed that at no point did he "cheat in a tournament with prize money.”

Chess.com says this is not the case by their analysis.

Cheating when you're 12 in matches that don't matter is one thing. Cheating in your late teens in tournaments with money is an entirely different one.

I think the big reveal was 100+ games where it's extremely likely he cheated including prize games

I can't remember the exact wording of his denial but I was thinking of him copping to two periods, which would cover 100+ games easily (any online regular can play more than that over a few days), so the report isn't a major surprise in that respect.

He specifically said "I never cheated in paid-tournament games" and "I never cheated whilst streaming". Chess.com presents pretty clear evidence that's untrue.

That's fine if so, but hardly worth 72 pages.

In releasing this report, Chess.com appears to violate their promise of confidentiality expressed in Exhibit C:

> As we mentioned earlier, we have made no public statements regarding the reasons for your account closure or our findings, and anything that happens in this conversation will remain confidential.

But they did at least hide the player identity, so we only know it's a FIDE top 100 nearly-2700 player.

I'm slightly surprised at how easy they make it for a confessed cheater to unban themselves:

> As a titled player, we would like to offer you a chance to re- establish yourself within the Chess.com community, and because of that, we have made no public statements regarding the reasons for your account closure or our findings. If you choose to acknowledge any of the behaviors that you feel might have resulted in your account being closed within the next 72 hours, we may try to work with you privately to have a new account opened, equipped with a title and Diamond Membership.

Edit: the comment above is apparently about a different, unidentified, player, not Nieman

>... Chess.com appears to violate their promise of confidentiality...

I think they believe that Nieman bringing his alleged cheating at Chess.com into the public arena, and saying things about it that Chess.com believe are not true, broke the agreeement between them, and gave Chess.com the right to respond

Exhibit C is about another unidentified player, not Nieman...

Sorry, I didn't read your comment carefully. I also wonder if there's enough information there to identify the players

Redditors are certainly speculating [1] who could be the 4 confessed cheaters in the top 100.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xvo7u4/comment/ir2el...

It ought to be quite easy to identify this person. The report says:

>This person competed in a single event featuring 10 total games in 2020.

They either created a new chess.com account, or totally ceased playing on there around or after July 2020. They were a Top 100 player with almost a 2700 rating.

Those facts combined probably narrow the list to extremely few candidates, perhaps only 1. I don't know chess well enough to identify them.

doing the statistical analysis and all is pretty cool, but honestly, can't they just challenge him to play at his rating in a secure environment?

his learning curve is a little steeper than the others... that doesn't convince me the otb games were fraudulent.

That would be interesting. Have a chess bunker somewhere with 100s of games against a variety of opponents. I think at first there would be some nerves but over time the statistics would become clear. Perhaps there could be a 10 game burn-in.

i don't know how chess ratings work, but i suspect it could be done with a secured and monitored computer in a secure facility where some small number of games could produce a rating with decent confidence interval on it?

And as a competing grand master, I want to be a test subject in this bunker why?

Stream it and make money?

If you're streaming it, it's not exactly a secure chess bunker is it?

If information can only go out and not in, maybe?

True, assuming you can know for sure it can't come in. You could just delay the information coming out by a few moves so that even if it can get back in via an accomplice watching the game, it won't matter

Well athletes are required to provide urine samples and sometimes at random inconvenient times.

For chess, maybe your rating doesn't mean anything until you've gone through a "verified" bunker-play tournament that operates as a sort of baseline for your ability at all subsequent games until the next one.

To me seems as though chess pros play for the sake of playing. Perhaps this bunker could be placed somewhere secretly in Hawaii and the GMs could be flown out for a free vacation with family.

Chess is a game that requires large sample sizes to make any sort of conclusion with 95% confidence interval. The variance in performance is far beyond a lot of competing sports. Magnus makes blunders, sometimes below-GM level, and so do other GMs (including former World Chess Champions).

For example, if you were watching WCC, one cannot conclude who is better by simply looking at game 9 out of 14. Comebacks happen often.

Even the ELO rating has its drawbacks in determining true strength of the player.

If Magnus plays Hans for 5000 games, sure. Not a chance, at least statistically speaking, in 10 games.

> Magnus makes blunders, sometimes below-GM level, and so do other GMs

Famously Kramnik, one of the greatest players of all time, blundered mate in one at classical time controls, which is literally a beginner-level mistake.

Releasing Exhibit C seems like a huge lapse in judgement from chess.com; they've supposedly redacted it, but there's so much information there that it has to be completely trivial to deanonymize. Like, just how many of the people with a 2700+ rating played in chess.com money tournaments until suddenly creating a new account in July 2020 and then didn't play in such tournaments for a year.

If that still doesn't narrow it down to one person, then the widths of the redaction black bars will finish the job.

Edit: Not sure where the downvotes are coming from, but just to be clear, Exhibit C is some totally unrelated bystander with nothing to do with the Niemann case. These emails, and by proxy the person's identity, are being published for no other reason than for chess.com to fluff up their cheating etection credentials. How is this acceptable?

How is this not acceptable? The person cheated, chess.com said they would keep it confidential, circumstances changed. They didn't swear on their mother's graves.

I've not gone through it myself, but believing someone's investigation on Twitter, it does narrow it down to one person.

So, this is all interesting for chess, but I wonder if we should be discussing more the broader implications. How much does this happen during high-stakes tests (professional qualifications, etc.)? How much does this happen during job interviews? How much does this happen during political debates? How much does this happen during any high-stakes activity where the person is supposed to be thinking through it on their own?

I'd be willing to bet that the prevalence of cheating is roughly equal regardless of the discipline. Let's say 1% of participants are cheating at any given time (I have no idea if this is a high or low estimate).

For better or worse, this could represent a metric for gauging how well that discipline is at detecting active cheaters.

I'm quite skeptical that it's equal as that would mean that cheating is not affected by, nor affects community/culture. I think we would find, if we explored this deeper, that occurrences of cheating are clustered as they feed off themselves in a developing culture of cheating.

I recall the bagel measure of cheating found that different industries had significantly different rates of cheating. This was a business where office break rooms had self-serve bagels, and you paid for it by putting money into a money box, on the honor system. Most people were honest, and so the business just dealt with the 10% or so who took a bagel without paying, as a cost of doing business. After a while, he realized that he had a measure of the general level of honesty by industry. I think Freakonomics wrote about this.

I think clusters of cheating would be especially prevalent in cases where there was a finite pool of positions available, and more people than that who wanted to get a position. If you know others are cheating, it's a pretty strong rationalization for cheating yourself, and the more prevalent the cheating, the stronger the rationalization.

Well, people on blind have admitted to cheating during algo interviews. Not sure how prevalent it is, but a lot of people openly admitted to it. Guess it shouldn’t be surprising given the nature of these interviews and the money at stake.

I also know from my time at school, cheating is fairly prevalent there - even at top rated universities. Lots of universities have developed fairly sophisticated statistical tools for catching cheaters, similar to what chess.com has.

The literal majority of the class cheated at my college. It was unusual not to cheat.

What I find interesting about this case are the implications around using what I would call "cognitive augmentation" devices. I can't help to compare this situation with the revolution that's happening with art and ai.

I suspect the organizers of Chess.com are at the beginning of a cat and mouse game that will produce more sophisticated detection algorithms, which in turn will help develop more sophisticated chess engines.

I bet that for lovers of chess, who want to continue to enjoy their passion, this is a critical problem to figure out.

However, can we expect that in games, sports, arts, humans will continue to compete with each other without any forms of artificial aid? Or should we instead explore now what augmenting human's cognition means for our culture? Starting now might be the only way to creating a framework to ensure success (however we want to define it) in the long run.

Will chess.com provide an automated tool that uses the same methodology to analyse every player that uses it's platform?

If not it seems unfair to other high profile players.

But imagine they do, will those players get automatically banned from the website? Will tournaments require a proof of your online score and "non-cheater" certificate?

A part of me seems to see this kind of automated analysis dangerously intrusive. Another part of me sees a big monetization potential for the platform.

If you play in tournaments for cash prizes your level of play demands a higher level of scrutiny.

Seems like an almost unsolvable problem long term as in online poker.

Most players using their platform aren't making money from it?

It is a very manual process involving human experts. It is not an automatic process, which you would know if you read a couple pages of TFA

Totally agree. They only show baselines for the metrics that don't matter, like "Strength gained during first 2.75 years after receiving 2465 ELO" or "Time Between Achieving 2500 Elo and 2700 Elo or Peak Rating".

The most important metric is "Number of games flagged by our cheat detection system", and they don't show the baseline for that.

Seems like a pretty easy solution would be to have some games played without third party viewers in real time.

People can still cheat with some hidden hardware I guess [0]. A full body inspection of each player would be required as well.

——

[0]: https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish

Most of the _plausible_ systems involve a one-way link, where an observer is running the engine and supplying information to the player through some system that is perceptible to the player and nobody else. Forcing the player to pass information about the board state _outward_ certainly doesn't make cheating impossible, but it makes it a whole lot harder - input devices that can't be observed are much more difficult.

Not if it’s tied to the live game state available on any number of websites or broadcasts. And the harder the game gets, the more delay you’d need to prevent timely feedback in such a system, as thinking about moves for considerable periods of time is commonplace.

I personally think the stakes are plenty high enough that people would try any convoluted mechanisms that they could sneak past security.

Maybe Neimann’s a cyborg - more machine than man now.

But yeah, no spectators and a delay should be pretty effective OTB.

Maybe that one way link is as simple as high frequency sound, that he's trained himself to hear which everyone else ignores. Simple on/off modulation, or maybe two freq modulation...

The amount of data required to communicate a chess move is very little.

How about .. let's just forget about pro sports like chess, tour de france, 100m dash and instead work out ourselves. Makes more sense anyway, instead of sitting in front of the "TV".

Surprisingly well written. I was expecting a dry report full of fluff and technical jargon, but this is an excellent read.

Professional competitive chess is dead.

Long live chess.

It sounds like cheating detection in chess is highly circumstantial, based on outlier data points.

Given the massive volumes of chess data out there, I bet it would be easy to make a bot that mirrors the win/loss and blunder/best move ratio of an average GM chess player’s trajectory.

Instead of picking the best move all the time, maybe pick a random move out of the top 10 moves. And use a random number generator to determine if you make a blunder. And use an engine that’s appropriate to your current rating.

It looks like Hans might have been picking the best moves from the best engine in those games where he got 100% accuracy, which is a dead giveaway.

If you’re patient enough to sit through hours of slowly progressing your rating through a few wins, lots of draws a few losses, I bet you could do it undetected. And don’t give any interviews!

Hans probably didn’t think about the trail of data he was leaving, or got greedy.

Except, chess.com has literal "strength profiles" of every top player. They have enough data to say, hey, this how strong you should be playing, anything outside that expected norm might be suspicious, especially over a long enough time period.

It's a similar idea to the 'Biological Passport' seen in sports wherein the biological data of an athlete is stored and you can reference the data points against new test results to see any anomalies.

Creating the "perfect cheating engine" would only be useful for unknown players, and in chess, it's literally impossible to be an unknown and play at a Super GM level (its happened, and of course they were immediately exposed for cheating).

Now, if someone like Hikaru or Magnus decided to just automate themselves at their best in the form of a bot, yeah, it would be nearly impossible to detect them on data alone.

I was more thinking that cheaters would create a new account and play at a level that’s good but not uncommon like 1700 or 1800 and work their way up to GM status over a few years, careful to coincide their ascension with the historical pace, win rate, etc. of fellow GMs. That way there’s no anomalies in the data.

Theoretically sure, but without a title they'd never really get to play in any online money tournaments, and to get a title they'd have to play over the board games where cheating would be a lot harder. So it would be a lot of work to be a very strong online only player that doesn't make any real money.

As a proof of concept it would be interesting to create an AI that has an undetectable natural progression and human-like play style.

Is Niemann's win in the 4 September 2022 in-person game really so improbable?

Is it unlikely enough that it offers convincing evidence that we live in a simulation? (i.e. he acted based on information he received from outside our reality)

Not a chess specialist, but he pulled out a couple of unusually good moves on a very uncommon line of play without thinking too much about it, almost looking casually. His excuse was "it just happens that I studied this line last night ". This doesn't happen.

It was a line that Magnus has already played once or twice in tournament. Hans wondered how Magnus could surprise him. So Hans studied various lines rarely played by Magnus including this one. This was very clear in Hans interview.

The featured article talks about this. It didn't go down even remotely the same way in Magnus' previous game. He also references a game which never actually happened.

He is not in charge of maintaining a chess database. Did Magnus played this before: yes. Can Hans have know about this: yes. Can he have studied this line because Magnus played it before: yes. Was the line exactly the same: no, he explained that he spent several minutes to evaluate if the transposition was possible. Very credible (contrary to Magnus insinuations)

did you even read the chess.com report?

> In fact, Magnus has only played 4.g3 twice previously (both before 2010), and the position after Hans castled on move four had never been seen in any of Magnus’ games. Hans in a later interview commented that Magnus had previously played the opening against Wesley So in the 2018 London Chess Classic,24 but there is no such game on record.25 Magnus did play a g3 Nimzo-Indian against Wesley So in a rapid game in Kolkota in 2019, but the move order and emerging position in that game had no similarities to the game against Hans. Hans’s 9...cxd4 had only been played once previously, in a June 2022 Titled Tuesday game between Rasmus Svane and Stelios Halkias.

Hans have studied this line because Magnus played it before. Was the line exactly the same: no, he explained that he spent several minutes to evaluate if the transposition was possible. I'd rather believe Hans than the far fetched cheating theory. Magnus just was on full paranoia mode. Everybody agrees that both of them played poorly and that Hans even gave situations where Magnus could have won.

Maybe at this point the highest levels of competitive chess should just continue outright as programming challenges. It would perhaps be more interesting and open to anyone.

This would have been possible a few years ago, but now giant machine learning models outperform human-programmed engines.

I did see a round of speed chess between Magnus and Hans, I think it was 60 seconds on the clock. Does speed chess have the same cheating problem is the regular format?

Less probable but it's quite trivial to make a browser extension or something of the sort for cheating (feeding moves to engine and showing suggestions)

Previously (today) on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33085649

Original title: "The Hans Niemann Report"

It's very heartening to see so many here angered by cheating. (And the few voices that justify it are disappointing.)

Tbh this scandal only reminds me there is no point in playing a game like chess or go online for fun.

Or any game online, really. Couch multiplayer is the way.

I've played a few online competitive games that were fun. But if you go to the mainstream games you end up with kids calling you a stupid noob ... when you beat them. Weaned me off StarCraft at the least.

I'm confused, do you mean besides for fun?

You are. You can't play for fun when you have no idea if you're playing against another human or Stockfish (or whatever is in fashion this week).

You don't need to worry about that unless you're playing at GM level for fun. For most people they'll pretty much never run into cheating

You mean chess.com has the resources to police all casual players? :)

Cheating results in high ELO so it takes care of itself.

In casual unrated games right?

I wonder if the accused would be willing to play in a faraday cage?

Is anyone else only able to see the first page of the PDF?

I was able to open it in a Google hosted thing.

I think we are all Hans Neiman on this blessed day.

Reading through the comments on this thread, it feels like 3/4 of the people on here decided to not read through at least 52 pages of the 72 page report chess.com released lmao

These are work hours. I'm not reading volume 3 AND 4 of this. That's why Europeans were invited to HN, to summarize in the comments :)

Besides, everyone here just wants to know: Was he cheating with a "secret device"? Just publish a paper that says yes or no, that's all we want.

Seems to be happening in the poker world as well.

https://twitter.com/dexerto/status/1575867098328289280

Discussed here the other day. There was no evidence but seemed to be lots of butthurt and bullying there as well.

What next, competitive fishing?

Only in Ohio.

… actually yes, if you haven’t seen it: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1126570725/fish-weights-walle...

Oh man, that would have been one hell of a coincidence if I wasn't making that reference

Oddly I saw a conversation about exactly this a few days ago.

Yeah, that was the (perhaps slightly too obscure) reference.

I see. I wasn’t too familiar with the specifics, I just happened to walk into a convo about it. I thought they were all talking about local people at the time, not a national news item.

For anyone not following this I'll save you some time with the TL;DR:

Hustler Casino livestreams a regular game with High Stakes Poker. A new player who is also a wealthy model wife type made a call against a pro that sucked out where her decision making was baffling. Off camera but on mic the pro demanded his money back. Then it blew up into a giant drama of accused cheating.

Here's my read on what happened: this woman is basically buying her way into being a poker celebrity, something many people have done before, some of them successfully in the long run. She's new the game, and pretty clearly not as sophisticated a player as the rest of that table, to put it mildly. This hand would be a very bizarre one to cheat in, as there were others with much more upside and that would trigger less suspicion. On the other hand, new players often combine both overconfidence with nervous panic, especially when say this is the biggest stream you've gotten onto yet with your plan.

So basically I think she just made a huge emotionally driven donkey call like you'd see at a drunken house game, then just said whatever she thought would sound smarter than "I did a donkey call." Then when this big figure in the poker world is giving her the death stare and then asking for his money back, she probably just wanted to put out the fire as quickly as possible.

This is by far the most parsimonious explanation.

From personal experience, there’s nothing “good” poker players hate more than losing to a “bad” poker player who “shouldn’t have even been in the band.”

Especially in this era of GTO kinda taking over poker mindshare, it's important to remember that poker games happen in a context and something like Game Theory is really only applicable when you can fully account for everyone's subjective ordering of utility of outcomes.

I played in a weekly game back during the early 00's poker boom, where one guy that showed up pretty clearly just wanted to get away from his wife and get drunk. It was a low stakes game (intentionally so diverse friends could play) and the amounts involved were totally immaterial to him. He had zero problem being the fish of the game and no real pride in his play or the outcome.

I played a very small amount in the early heyday of the fad around the 00s and since I didn’t know what I was doing other players really didn’t like me, because I wasn’t predictable.

This happens almost everywhere.

There's some advice about never being better than your boss, particularly in public.

I despise it, btw.

Most pros I've read think she misread her hand as J3 (instead of J4, which is what she had), which gave her the impression of having a pair. The donk call was seen as too obviously a bad call for it to be a viable explanation.

So that story seems reasonable, but at the same time she is a winning player in these games. I know, two sessions has enormous variance, but still the kind of people doing that mistake should not be a winning player in their first two sessions.

That weekly game I mentioned? I got disinvited after I convinced them to let my then girlfriend join a weekend tournament we organized. She was a mahjong player so not totally unfamiliar with the sort of thinking, but a total poker novice.

She destroyed everyone that day. It wasn't because she was a stronger player in terms of her rationale behind each decision. It happens. You really can't conclude jack from 2 sessions.

Just don't let a few bad apples ruin the fun and set new rules.

In my poker heyday, I made similar call downs in big games when I read someone for a straight draw and had a backup flush draw as she did.

If you know they are going to bluff if they miss, it's very profitable and also maddeningly tilt inducing.

I once called $5k cold on the river and won with J high and several over cards on the board in what ended up a $15k+ pot.

Her move esp by a somewhat amateur player is not that outlandish.

Yes, when you reach a certain level - any plays which do not conform to the "best practices" of the day, will look highly suspicious. In poker, when you're playing at the top level, against top level people, it is assumed that all players on the table know things like GTO, etc.

When people start to deviate from stuff like that, it is either assumed that the player is cheating, or a complete beginner.

Same with chess. When top players start making really weird moves, they're either getting computer assistance - or they've made a nonsensical move. And for people that seemingly never do nonsensical moves, it is easy to conclude that they must be cheating.

It is actually not too different from video game speed runs. The margins are so small, and all the top level players know every move. Discovering new stuff can take years - so if a newcomer suddenly starts making waves, beating seasoned pros left and right with seemingly genius strategies - is he a genius, or cheating? Most in the community will go for the latter.

Garrett's behavior indicates narcissistic and/or antisocial personality disorder. He got outplayed by a woman and couldn't handle it happening again, and lashed-out. This is narcissism 101. He accused her of cheating with absolutely no evidence, then proceeded to corner Lew and threaten her off-camera in a dark hallway. This is advanced narcissism. Only after Garrett demanded his money back did Lew offer to return the money. This is extortion. She should have instead charged Garrett with menacing, gotten a restraining order and sued him for slander, but it is understandable she feared for her life and reputation, as many after being threatened have trouble thinking rationally, and she likely just wanted to escape from danger. It's pretty fucked up, and Garrett is a coward that only wins by bullying other players and is also a giant, walking, steaming turd that should be banned from the game.

If he has been cheating, then he hasn't be practicing to the extent you would need to in order to gain the ELO he has.

its called centaur and its time to embrace it

Thank you! I feel like I'm going crazy here. IMO it's much more fun to watch humans teaming up with machines to compete in games of strategy, and given where we're headed in this world, these are exactly the kinds of games we should be encouraging. Building the tools to play games like this will give kids some serious skills required to tackle some of the hardest problems coming down the pipe in the next 10-20 years.

What?

So chess.com says Niemann cheated online. Well, I'll buy that, why not, it's so easy to cheat at chess online that maybe we should assume most online players do.

Oh? What? And GMs admit to cheating online? Why then is Niemann's possible/likely online cheating news and not the other GMs'?!

Fine, but let's say he's cheating online and that it's more a scandal than those GMs' cheating, and that it being more of a scandal than other GMs' cheating is not in itself a scandal. Now let's look at the OTB issue.

So they have no evidence of Niemann's cheating irl, OTB. And he beat Carlsen w/o cheating, OTB.

And Carlsen threw a fit.

So now chess.com is practically libeling Niemann. They can't prove he cheated even online, but then, Niemann can't prove that he didn't either, and we'll all believe that he probably did because... we'll believe most players do cheat online. And as for the OTB game with Carlsen, there's a video of that game. And Niemann's explanation of his pauses and his thinking in that game are sensible. So chess.com will not come right out and say he cheated OTB -- perhaps that would be a bridge too far in any possible libel case?

I don't know if Niemann cheated, and maybe I don't care because what this brouhaha is leading to up is this conclusion: online chess is so trivial to cheat at that money-making online contests and online game ratings should now be a thing of the past. And that is a conclusion chess.com does not want the public to reach, so they're trying real hard to look like they can do something about cheating at online chess.

Chess had a great revival these past two years because of covid. Chess is very accessible, easy to learn (to a point), very watchable, and trivial to make it playable online. But chess is also a practically a solved problem, with AI and non-AI chess engines that easily beat grand masters and world champions, and it has been a solved problem for quite some time, and now those engines are trivially available to people trying to learn, to analyze, and/or to cheat. That means that cheating will be trivial. No amount of focus change detection or whatever is going to help because you'd have to have cameras and microphones capturing the whole room that a player is in to keep most players from cheating.

Maybe it's time for chess to go back to being an in-person only thing for ratings and contests with real prizes.

Also, let's not talk of the ageism in chess.com's complaint that Niemann is too old to be that good at chess. It's true that generally speaking chess has to be learned early in order for one to get good at it, but there's always humans who defy the averages.

Niemann himself admitted he cheated online on an interview.

If you're going to rewrite the headline, could you at least not make TWO typos in the guy's last name? Sigh.

I love the fact there are so many news about cheating in a sport/game. This suggests the world has no real problems.

If the acuteness of a problem was the determining factor with regards to the attention put on it, the news would be completely different. It would currently be 80% climate change 20% nuclear strike modeling strategy or something similar.

  The best humans play at an Elo rating of 2800. “Stockfish,” the most powerful chess engine, has an estimated rating of more than 3500.

This may be the most terrifying statement I've read all year. From parity to ovewhelming dominance in two decades. And it may just be approaching the base of the S curve. I for one welcome ...

There used to be this fantasy that the best player would be a human augmented by a computer, optimally blending their respective gifts into the best moves. Ha. Nowadays it would be like a baby in a crib helping a heavyweight champ.

Checkout Alpha Zero chess which has no other information other than the chess rules. No opening books or repetoires. It sometimes beats Stockfish like a python strangling and squeeing a prey. It makes moves that no one understands.

> In a 1000-game match, AlphaZero won with a score of 155 wins, 6 losses, and 839 draws. DeepMind also played a series of games using the TCEC opening positions; AlphaZero also won convincingly. Stockfish needed 10-to-1 time odds to match AlphaZero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero

It is savage.

It played Stockfish 8, which was already a year old when they played, and the match was under arguably unbalanced circumstances.

The current version of Stockfish is Stockfish 15, and although it hasn't played AlphaZero (because AlphaZero doesn't compete), it has played clones of AlphaZero such as Leela Chess Zero in TCEC which it won against consistently for the past 5 seasons.

AlphaZero beating Stockfish was more a propaganda attempt from Google to appear as a world leader in AI then an actually attempt to find the superior engine.

Stockfish is definitely strong but the way LCZ or AZ beats its opponents is totally different and foreign to humans. Stockfish has a database and a whole bunch of openings prebaked into it.

Here are the actual stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...

Leela Chess Zero is definitely not as strong as Stockfish 14 but still ranked #4. That's not nothingburger.

> AlphaZero beating Stockfish was more a propaganda attempt from Google to appear as a world leader in AI then an actually attempt to find the superior engine.

Wtf?

Agree. I feel awful that Deepmind honchos take a round table meeting once in a while, where they pick up a board or online game and totally demolish the top player just to prove how good ML algorithms are.

I learned chess late and enjoy playing it, through mistakes, at a different pace... so, in spite of the numerous headlines, I don't get it. Competitively, cheating should be meaningless - and/else what kind of society has people playing chess for food? Perhaps I should read the article. current mood, tipsy

I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Think they’re saying they can’t find any motive for cheating in professional chess.

I was about to ask "what does Kasparov say?" but decided to research it first. Very disappointing, but coming from him I'm not surprised. See below.

[1] https://www.chessdom.com/garry-kasparov-carlsens-behavior-wa...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LaEipwGi0o

His Twitter feed is all Ukraine stuff, AFAICT. Maybe he's said something more than the above (?)

Personal story: I was the host at his Google talk in Mt. View in July 2017. I had to find a room for it, which was super-hard and getting worse all the time. I got a room that held 100 people, and I really didn't know how big a deal Kasparov was. I underestimated that, I guess, but remember that by 2017, Googlers could watch from their computers, so they didn't have to attend in person. I don't think he could have filled up Charlie's Cafe, which holds 450 (if it was even available).

Anyhow, he complained that the room was too small. Jerk.

(If you look this up on YouTube, you won't see me; they used his London talk instead.)

The room was full and he complained that it was too small. I believe he had the right to do so. You were supposed to organize his reception and you did your job poorly by not doing the due diligence and now you're publicly calling a guy jerk for your failure. I wonder who the real jerk is...

How did he dare remark that your failure made his life harder? He is only one of the greatest GM of all times, he should know better than disrespecting you by stating a fact.

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