This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades.
People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did.
Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.
Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.
Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.
I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).
Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.
Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:
3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)
2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)
1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")
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3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)
2: For your National-cup
1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)
"Of the 50 fastest men's 100m sprint times ever, only 15 have been run by an athlete NOT banned for drugs. All 15 were by Usain Bolt."
https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1164654855329329152...
It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.
If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.
Notice the discontinuity around 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_metres_world_record_pro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5000_metres_world_record_progr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_1500_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_sta...
You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.
EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche
For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.
The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):
... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.
It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.
If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones
You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.
There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.
For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.
If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?
Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".
Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.
Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.
Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?
And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.
Sports are a theatric illusion.
Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.
Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.
Anti doping agencies are always behind in doping research and many athletes have access to the best clinics there are.
Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.
EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.
Trivial with the Stockfish open source chess engine
Athletic sports aside, does anyone know the motivation between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?
[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/team-battles-femme-batale-no...
Because with few exceptions (the Polgar sisters) they didn't manage to compete on the same level as men. Judit Polgar was the highest-ranking women ever (no. 8, in 2005), but 15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight.
I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.
In situations where you are expected to perform worse due to a stereotype one tends to perform worse.
They still play in non-segregated tournaments, get regular titles and such. Women's chess titles, tournaments and such an extra.
Think of it like having a local league with its own rating system and titles. Countries have this, and it exists alongside international, fide titles and ratings.
Then there are commercial and opportunity reasons. The winner of a women-only tournament is always a women and sponsors can show a winning woman to their customers. Furthermore it could help to recruit new female players. I'd like to hear from a woman about that because maybe knowing that they'll win only in a protected area, or the very existence of protected areas, could actually discourage them to play.
BTW, the same principles apply to the game of Go (only one woman ever won a major open tournament), and even the anti cheating measures.
Story:
I got paired with someone rated 400 points higher than me (no idea why). The dude was destroying me, but somewhere in the middlegame, he let his guard down and exposed himself to a mate-in-one. For once in my life, I saw the mate and I won.
The dude was FURIOUS. He immediately asked for a rematch and I said I had to go. Then the insults came ("chicken shit", etc.).
He even messaged me a few times over the course of a few months (same kind of name calling) and challenged me a few times.
Eventually, I thought, "You know what will really upset him? If I accept a rematch and win again."
So, I accepted one of his challenges and I used a computer. Obviously, he lost and he was FURIOUS again.
Not my proudest moment, but I enjoyed it while it was happening.
But yeah, regular cheating just kind of takes the joy out of the competition.
If you haven't played in a while, then glicko will give you a wide ratings deviation, and pair you against much stronger or much weaker opponents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system
Well, as the saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Maybe we should just move over to computer-assisted human chess and compete that way?
I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
I discovered that you’re better off walking away from a game that feels so insurmountably difficult rather than cheat a bit or a lot.
“I’m not going to finish so why not cheat to see the ending?” Was always disappointing. I’d rather that mountain still exist off in the distance that I’ll never summit.
When I was young I hated playing games against the AI. It always felt unreal to me and there was no satisfaction in it. Now, I immensely prefer playing the computer - it goes at my pace, I can get up and leave, I can take all the time I want for my move, and if I do something dumb I just undo back to where I feel comfortable and play better. When I get legitimately stuck I ask the computer for advice.
In this way, I basically always win against a superior player. It may not be ideal for practice, but I just play for fun and find it satisfying to win.
The one sure way to find / detect players with cheats was... to use the same cheats. It saved my sanity but cost me the joy of playing.
I now can't play FPS's anymore but am limited to MMO's :(
Create a fleet of chess programs, with typical resource constraints (CPU, RAM, time).
Have the chess programs replay recorded games.
Compare the suggested moves with the player's actual moves.
Divine some kind probability that player is cheating.
Extra credit for replaying that player's history of games thru the same fleet. Was the player consistent? Were there spikes of cheating?
Until there's a better phrase, I'll call this "parallel construction".
It'd be neat to run the fleet of chess programs during live matches.
Caveat: I know nothing about chess, so someone is probably doing "parallel construction" for cheat detection.
Online chess areas like lichess and chess.com absolutely have automated cheat detection which they consider along with with reports in automated banning of accounts. They consider not just whether the player is playing the excellent moves (something common at any level and very common at high levels), but also how a deep search is needed to evaluate that move, whether other obvious moves were available, how long was taken to play the move, if the position is common, etc. When these serial cheaters are banned, the sites even refund rating points to everyone who lost to them.
However, the issue of isolated cheating incidents is still a big deal, even if the serial obvious cheaters can be detected.
So maybe my only novel suggestion is running lichess (or equiv) live in parallel. Something livestream viewers could also help with.
And I hope someone's replaying historical games.
"how a deep search is needed to evaluate"
Of course. Obvious now that you mention it.
I assumed different programs would make different suggestions. So overseers would want to run a few programs to see if any matched the player's gameplay, style, etc.
Probably the last time I played chess was on an IBM PC XT. The quality of misc game engines varied widely. Of course there's probably been a convergence since.
Re-running the games (especially to check for new techniques that aren't public at the time of the event) would be in the same spirit.
No one strategy is sufficient.
Edit: Links.
EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.
I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing.
There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US...
Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
So, yeah, the issue is someone getting an advantage, which in turn puts pressure on athletes to have to dope or take PEDs to have a career.
I'm not sure what the equilibrium outcome is if the restrictions are lifted, but the usual assumption is that it's a race to the bottom.
But WADA clearly has a perverse incentive to ban more and more drugs simply to justify its own existence.
Maybe the solution is to let athletes themselves figure out the rules, since they have to live with them.
If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing.
But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race.
Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat...
https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...
Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.
The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner.
So the whole thing is built on an honor system.
Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line.
If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.
You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
The is the secret to successful cheating: knowing where to use the engine and where to go on your own. It is easy to run engine evaluation after the fact and see if your moves always match up with the engine. However when sometimes they do an sometimes they don't it is hard to know if you just happened to stumble on the best move. Particularly since most everyone regularly studies with an engine and so the best players sometimes will pick out the types of lines the engine will prefer without help.
Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.
Also there are moves that if you don't understand will look odd - computer like. That is also how suspicion can be raised.
Anecdotally i remember other cheating story.
In online FPS like Counter Strike some top level players have been caught using aim enhancer (aimbot) that move a mouse towards a target. But they had it set to only move mouse 1px. Otherwise it was too obvious, but 1px adjustment at top level is a great competitive edge.
And still people get caught. And people still cheat. Its infinite cycle.
It's not even like cheating in athletics where you can plausibly claim to be doing it yourself (just using illegal enhancements).
Here it is something else doing it for you. Bizarre that anybody would take pride from doing it, especially considering the risk of being found out.
Cheating is the difference between getting a "real job" for many, so there is a reason.
Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible.
There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.
And make easy mistakes a computer could beat, but a human couldn't. Along with randomisations.
So it can pass a Turing test.
Cheater of real rank R would set target rank R' = R+delta.
Once officially at R', set R'' = R'+delta. And so on by modest increments.
It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.
Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.
And an NPR article about the incident: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varsh...
And the chess cheating accusations from 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheati...