Its easy to cheat, but also easy to get caught. You can’t cheat yourself to a high score.
The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.
It depends on how you use the engine. Obviously, picking its best move or nearly best move when they're close in value, will get you caught.
But suppose you sample from the engine's ranked moves to have some decent ACPL (average centipawn loss) error rate.
Just a slightly lower rate than you'd have on your own.
If you further bias your sample to moves to that look reasonable to you, then I don't see how you'd get caught.
Current engines may not have the right support for such sampling, but it wouldn't be hard to implement, e.g. with a private fork of Stockfish.
I can imagine training ML models that can imitate human play closely enough and even your play specifically to increase the odds you win.
Detecting a stockfish moves over enough sample size is easy sure, but detecting a engine which is designed to imitate human play not make the best move everytime is not easy with number of moves a human would play in their lifetime.
The original commenter say it’s easy to cheat at chess. While potentially possible, I wouldn’t consider building a ML model to mimic your own play an ‘easy’ cheat method.
I’d also say building a model to mimic your own play consistently would be incredibly difficult. But, that’s for a different conversation.
While ML model building is bit more difficult , fuzzing a standard engine moves do only what you can understand is certainly possible without too much difficulty.
The point is cheating is bigger concern in online chess than other eSports
Yes, it’s a concern. But that doesn’t mean unfair advantages and cheating doesn’t occur in other esports.
Anyway, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on chess cheating. For me, the small chance someone is cheating doesn’t ruin the esport for me - For you it does, which is a perfectly reasonable response to it.
Secondary thought in the engine idea you had - chess fraud detection, I imagine, goes well beyond just the engine and move likeliness. It will also human-like interaction (Can’t confirm this, but the PM in me has me consumed with thinking about solutions to this problem)
When people play a chess game online, they are frequently evaluating positions. This results in cursor/mouse behavior that’s sporadic. If a user is considering moving the queen, they’ll move their cursor over to it. A user relying on an engine for every move would interact with the board in a very precise manner.
A player with a perfect engine to mimic humans will still get caught as their interaction with the board would differ greatly because only one position is considered for each move.
The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.