People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things
I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.
But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.
So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?
Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.
But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.
With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).
So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.
Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.
It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.
Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.
Niemann seems like a jerk, but he's also just a kid. He was 19 at the time of the controversy. I've sure grown a lot since I was 19.
Do you remember being a child and just playing with action figures? It was harmless and fun. I wonder where we lose that ability to just chill and have fun without a challenge.
Actually, a lot of people seem to just spend a lot of time watching TV, which is also fun without challenge.
- maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing"
- "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter.
- for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!)
> for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
These aren't the only two options. You can also just challenge yourself for the satisfaction of overcoming challenges and not wear a t-shirt. I think when people cheat at something where the outcome is broadcast there is almost always an element of status seeking.
> Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?
I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.