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I don't play chess and have never used chess.com, what's to stop someone playing on their PC and using an app on their phone to prompt their next move? I guess their anti cheat can't be like video game DRM but how do you declare someone's moved to be cheating without proving they're using a 3rd party?

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Here's how they describe it. https://www.chess.com/article/view/chess-com-fair-play-and-c...

It's a set of statistical methods as far as I can gather, that look at things like timing tells as well as accuracy compared to engine moves and so on. Obviously it's going to be imperfect.

In the same way mining a bitcoin proves that you've computed a large number of SHA-256 hashes, playing certain sequences of chess moves is attestation that you've run a large number of chess calculations—that you've solved a certain large system of constraints that has no real solution other than brute force. Naive cheating (that thing you describe) is obvious, because the cheater is running 6 orders of magnitude more computational power than a human and is proving it to you.

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