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Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

Presumably "the world" used enough engine help to do this.

This is interesting! I assumed the same thing, so I just skimmed through the game with an engine. The world, on average, was definitely not cheating. As early as move 7 Magnus was outright winning!

But there's an interesting meta in that Magnus played far more passively than he normally would. And so I think he also expected he was probably playing an engine by proxy, and wanted to keep the position completely under control. If he knew the world was legit, they probably would have lost!

I'm still trying to reconcile how it came to be that the world didn't cheat though. Lowest common denominator amongst 140k+ people paired with inevitable chatter of 'Hey best engine move is blah' seems unavoidable.

I think the assumption that more than 50% of people are cheating in online chess is not correct. Another Grandmaster and ex-world champion Anand recently also did a match against 70k people and won.

That's not the assumption at all. The percent of cheaters in online chess is approaching an asymptotic 0 (as a percent of all players) simply because the sites, and chess.com in particular, have gotten very good at culling them.

But things like this are social. I didn't follow this (or even know it was going on somehow) but it seems very safe to assume that somebody and probably multiple somebodies were regularly pointing out and discussing engine moves.

So my only real assumption is that a significant chunk of people would end up deferring to the engine moves rather than their own preference. Of course my implied assumption there is also that a significant chunk of people were involved in the social aspects of this, but I think that's also a fairly reasonable assumption.

Based on a quick skim of the article, I don't think this was, for example, Twitch Chat picking moves, which might enable the social aspect you're referring to - although I'd like to point out the difficulty inherent to being in a room with many thousands of people, all spamming chess moves, and trying to find the one engine move :P

It was a correspondence event, played a move a day time control on chess.com. Chat would've probably been mostly on X and other such places.

In that case, I definitely don't believe a majority of people interested in this sort of thing would be intentionally setting out to cheat.

It's not that. It's that once you know the best move you start to see why. And then it becomes hard to get it out of your mind. It's the reason I don't recommend computer assisted game analysis, unless you just want a quick blunder check.

A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.

> the percentage of cheaters is approaching 0. chess.com is _very_ good at culling them

Any evidence of this whatsoever?

There are writeups about this. The sites score each move, it is extremely unlikely to pick superhuman moves multiple times in a row. Once or twice maybe, but not most of the times.

They do a lot more than just that, but a lot of the process is kept confidential. There's a huge cat and mouse game between cheaters and the sites so they try all sorts of things including only using second tier moves, and even 'blundering' but only in winning positions such that the blunder doesn't risk the outcome of the game. Some cheaters also only use the bot in certain parts of the game. In the extreme case you might have very strong players who are cheating (like in a money event) using only the comp eval. So they don't have an easy job at all.

Here, for example, is one of the more well known and easy meta-indicators of cheating: Humans spend more time on difficult moves than on trivial ones. Cheaters will typically spend a comparable amount of time on a trivial forced move, and the start of an exceptionally deep combination. And an even bigger tell is that said exceptionally deep combo may be followed by a couple of forced moves, yet he will again take just about the same amount of time to play those moves.

Maybe the non cheaters lost interest when he was winning and the cheaters held the draw?

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