[erdevs]

This report provides a detailed background of Hans' potential cheating, and detailed breakdowns of certain aspects of chess.com's cheat-detection methodology, including previously unknown (or little known) methods such as window focus change event monitoring and post-focus-change move analysis.[1]

The report also reveals Niemann's engine move correlations alongside over two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted to cheating on chess.com. The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me. Perhaps it is a good thing that this scandal is highlighting the issue, and given how widespread cheating may be, perhaps chess tournaments both online and physical need to take cheating much more seriously than they apparently have been.

There is also an interesting analysis of Hans' rating improvement history, his over the board tournament performance and key game analysis, and a rundown of key moments in his game against Carlsen in the Sinquefield cup. Each raises concerns.

Chess.com's report also makes it clear that Niemann lied outright about his history of cheating in post-Sinquefield interviews, as he admits in communications with chess.com Fairplay staff to much broader cheating.

All in all, the report raises many concerns and it seems reasonable for the chess community to demand much higher standards of cheat prevention and detection across competitive venues. How long might cheating issues have gone on merely rumored vs fully investigated or acted upon, had this intrigue not developed due to Carlsen's withdrawal from Sinquefield '22?

[1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage their ratings progress over time carefully, so as to stay in acceptable ranges of engine move correlation, rate of improvement, etc.

[maegul]

> [1]Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races. A clever cheater might scrutinize this report and refine their cheating plan. For example, they might recognize the need to use a second device (such as a phone) to cheat. They might use the data corpus presented in this report to establish limits on how often they use chess engine moves per game, and they might manage their ratings progress over time carefully, so as to stay in acceptable ranges of engine move correlation, rate of improvement, etc.

Important point I'd say. I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting.

Taking this report along with Hans's admission to only cheating twice, for example, and accepting Chess.com's assessment as accurate, it would seem that Hans's mistake was to confess only to the instances of cheating that he thought had been caught. Which indicates the mentality and experience involved where the actual game is not getting caught and many, just as Hans was before beating Magnus, are playing it successfully.

[lmm]

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport. Especially in combination with the possibility that there's plenty more cheating that they're not catching/detecting.

Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess). This is a major scandal that should have serious consequences, but there's no reason for it to be the end of online chess.

[patmcc]

>>Online chess is bigger than ever, and some kind of botting/cheating is possible for virtually every e-sport (indeed I'd say many are easier than chess).

I think it's the other way, chess is about as easy to cheat as it gets. With chess you can have a perfectly usable cheating system that isn't on the same computer at all - computer A is clean, and is where you actually play on chess.com, computer B is where you enter the moves into the chess engine. That doesn't work for something like CS:GO or League of Legends or whatever, cheating or botting needs to be in real-time and on the same computer.

[noxvilleza]

Yeah chess is the perfect type of game for cheating - it has a tiny (relatively) gamestate, perfect information, and it's turn-based. At the level of chess player we're talking about it's sorta trivial for them to almost immediately memorize a boardstate.

[OJFord]

> At the level of chess player we're talking about it's sorta trivial for them to almost immediately memorize a boardstate.

And the rest! I'm pretty crap (hovering 750-850 on chess.com, idk if I play enough for it to be accurate though, probably lower) but I was still thoroughly impressed when I got thrashed by someone (~1200) playing the entire game in their head. As in I had a local game running on my phone, called out my moves, entered his, and he never saw the board, just held it in his head. Thrashed me.

(And there was background conversation going he'd occasionally chime into, ordering pizzas, etc. Ridiculous.)

[xipho]

A 1200 playing full games in their head sends up some warning flags to me?! I'm over 1500 on Lichess (yes, ELO calculation is not the same, but likely within 300 points at that level?!) and can't even dream of doing that. Did your friend cheat? ;)

[thefringthing]

Surely that kind of play would indicate a rating considerably above 1200.

[jimmySixDOF]

It's not just AI and e-sports either

Fishermen Team Accused of Cheating by Stuffing Fish With Weights https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2022/10/01/fishermen-team-a...

[johannes1234321]

This however is easily detectable. It is undetectable whether I have a second device showing me calculations of a different engine.

[matwood]

Depends. Some fish tournaments, like bass, are typically catch and release after weighing. This makes it harder to examine the fish if the goal is to release. Others like kingfish are catch and kill, though people cheat by other means like catching a fish earlier in the week.

The big money tournaments like bill fish, where millions of dollars can change hands, are usually catch and release on the spot but entrants have a judge on board to measure any fish caught.

I've done competitive king fishing in the past, and cheating or suspicion of cheating has been around for decades.

[headsoup]

From the article they describe many ways they can cheat in fishing (e.g. putting ice in that then melts) that aren't so easy to catch.

If there is a way to cheat, someone will inevitably give it a go with enough incentives. Cheating is the meta-sport and I would think no sport could ever be completely free of it.

[kadoban]

For shooters, bots or assists that only use vision and normal input (special mouse/keyboard) aren't hard to imagine and I'm positive already exist. I know specifically I read a while back about mice that do recoil correction to improve aim, and things like "click when something that looks like a head is in the crosshairs" would be a weekend project at most for a bored college student.

Strategy games may be harder, but still not going to take too long before those exist.

[perth]

Funny thing, there are already YOLOv3 derived aimbots, and a lot of anti cheat now scans pci-e cards to try to detect them. They intercept video input and act as mouse and keyboard devices, acting almost completely independent of the host computer.

[kadoban]

Yeah that's not far at all from just running as a separate machine, either grabbing the hdmi output or going full webcam pointed at the screen.

[patmcc]

It's not hard to make cheating tools, it's hard to run them on the same hardware as the game and not get caught. Chess cheating tools don't need to be on the same hardware, so they're not detectable in the same ways.

[krageon]

It is not hard to run cheats for basically any game that uses video on another machine. Just a little more expensive (i.e. it is harder for someone in high school, but not anyone over 20).

[kadoban]

My point was that video game cheats _don't_ need to be on the same hardware.

[rowanG077]

I doubt that since a weekend project. You need to analyze a video stream of hundreds fps in real time with very low latency requirments. You'd probably need an FPGA to do that. Custom training an AI to only trigger on heads.

[rippercushions]

No, it's trivial these days, and this very task is one of the introductory tutorials to Google's Coral AI Tensorflow boards:

https://coral.ai/models/object-detection/

Which you can buy as a USB stick for $59:

https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/

Sure, it's a little more complex if you want to train on specific heads as opposed to a generic model, but not hugely so. The biggest challenge would likely be downsampling the video stream into something the model can process quickly enough.

[kadoban]

I was thinking a decent proof-of-concept. All you'd really need is a generic object detector and fake mouse.

Latency _could_ make it a lot more difficult, but beating a human I don't expect would be hard.

You don't need to do hundreds of fps. Just grab the newest frame, process it, repeat. Missing frames at most increases effective latency or means your cheat isn't 100% effective if you miss a head. It's a sliding scale of improvements, not a deal breaker.

You also don't even necessarily have to process the whole frame. Just the bit actually _at_ the crosshairs is probably going to be enough for a crappy version.

And a fake mouse is just usb-hid, usb gadget whatever search terms, not like you'd have to break any new ground there.

I consider it a "weekend project" because it's just throwing together a couple of existing libraries in a fairly standard way. Like most things, cleaning it up enough to be perfect could/would take far longer.

[xxs]

You don't need 'hundreds' fps - you can do it w/ 10sec and get better reaction time than humans (reaction under 100ms in track events is consider foul). It should not be so difficult with a separate GPU and a capture card. Serial mouse/keyboard inputs are trivial as well.

[perth]

YOLOv3 can do it

[Semaphor]

Those have been common for decades and are pretty much the lowest bar for detection.

[socialismisok]

Using computer vision on the video stream (eg via a capture card) and then sending valid mouse and keyboard inputs most definitely has not been around for decades. It's a mechanism to cheat that has zero binaries running on the host computer.

[lr1970]

You can point a camera on the first computer screen to capture and analyze GO board and second computer will provide suggestions. No need to memorize anything.

[dspillett]

Or if the system allows live spectators, just log another machine in as one of those and scrape the data that way, possibly more reliable than adding machine vision into the mix. That won't work for contests that have a broadcast delay though.

[maegul]

Totally fair ... and it would make a lot of sense that this event brings about some sort of cultural cleansing or realignment. I guess I really just meant "dead to me."

That being said, if it turns out that online chess continues to do well, but there's still plenty of cheating going on, I don't think it'd be accurate to say online chess is alive because it wouldn't be chess but something different, for better or worse. And whether such an outcome occurs might be what's really at stake here.

[pedrosorio]

Just look at Magnus Carlsen's performance in the most recent online chess event.

https://chess24.com/tour/standings/ (Prelim standings / Knockout Bracket).

Online chess is alive and well.

The whole "so many top players caught cheating" is a bit much. None of the very best are cheating.

[hndamien]

Well, none are getting caught cheating.

[vkou]

Cheating is common in e-sports, but it is rare in high-level competitive e-sports. Sure, you may be a 'gaming chair enthusiast', using a cheat when in your online Apex or Forntite pub games, but you can't bring it with you to a tournament.

Starcraft is about the only e-sport where I can see tournament cheating providing a very large advantage for a single bit of information - a player who can be notified that he is being all-inned would have a huge advantage in tournament play.

[b4je7d7wb]

Dota2 could have a similar situation. Enemy is doing Roshan. Obviously not as significant as your example since teams play around the control of that area and have very good gamesenses. But sometimes that few extra seconds or confidence to initiate would make a gamechanging difference.

It would also be a lot harder to detect since just having a hunch is a perfectly valid reason to jump into the fog.

[mrguyorama]

CSGO has had multiple instances of players bringing cheats with them to huge tournaments.

[Bakary]

I'm sensing a market in dedicated hardware here. For players who spend upwards of 1000 hours on a single game it could be worth it to have a locked down machine for certain contexts where you have to prove your bona fides.

[amelius]

Can't we just consider cheating part of the sport?

If you or your team is capable of making a tiny chess computer that fits under your skin and can go undetectable, then congratulations to you.

So basically a bit like Formula-1.

[remarkEon]

I guess I’m not as cynical. I picked up chess again when I was deployed (I was on the chess team in high school) and have been closely following this drama, and my sense is that perhaps we all admit that online chess is dead, but a return to analog chess is possible and, perhaps, preferable. I know this begs the question of defeating cheats in irl play, but shouldn’t that be an easier problem to solve?

[maegul]

I would be surprised of over-the-board cheating was viable in the long term. Seems like it should be relatively easy to stamp out provided there's a will to do so.

[remarkEon]

Just play it naked. Ban cameras, except for internal closed circuit systems for tracking the board.

[Zababa]

I've seen on the last thread that sometimes for cheating one bit of data is enough, something like a signal at some point where you could make a decisive move. I wonder, then, how you could send stealthily to someone a bit of data. Something like an implant under the skin giving a slight shock or vibration or heat. The answer to that would be to block signals from entering the space where the game is played, but then maybe you could implant a whole device in yourself to do that. I'm not sure how you could give it the data of the current game though.

[eternalban]

> I really can't shake my personal feeling that chess as a sport is just simply dead, especially as an online e-sport.

This sent me musing whether we are actually witnessing the emergence of a new type of gamesmanship. If we don't end up killing each other in another global war (sadly there won't be subsequent volumes about "the war no one wanted"), then having men and machines team up in competitive environments is a given. (This is already happening, no doubt, in military settings.)

Maybe new games can be devised, or existing games modified, that can't default to games that are machine vs machine with the human teammates reduced to secretaries in the game. Games designed with AI teammate already in mind. The human role can't be just physical. I wonder what that would be like.

[ninethirty]

Makes me wonder how many people are running game-theory-optimal poker bots and raking in fortunes.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

I don't know if a game-theory optimal poker bot would work well - You'd really want a battle-tested psychologically optimal bot that can convincingly play like an amateur, except when it really counts, to give your victims a false sense of confidence. A hustler-bot, essentially.

I'm sure it'd be highly illegal.

[cowvin]

One of the most interesting (but inconclusive) points they found was how Hans' evaluated strength dropped after they introduced the 15 minute broadcast delay.

[krick]

Except, introducing the 15 minute broadcast delay just happens to coincide with Magnus scandalous withdrawal, Hans being especially carefully searched and being stared at by everyone (that is, if we trust how it was evaluated over a couple of games in the first place).

So, again, even though some statement from chess.com was expected, this one probably does more harm than good. Heavy implications, winking and chuckling, but nothing that would allow one to close the case (quite naturally). All of this historical progress evaluation was done by people a month ago already, and did achieve as much as this one. This one is "official" though, so pours another barrel of fuel into the fire.

That said, I wonder why 15 minute (or even more) delay isn't standard in events like that. Seems like the least you could do, given how questionable chess in 2022 is in the first place.

[Taek]

I do think all of the implications on Hans are well deserved, and the deep exploration of cheating within the chess world is well placed. And after looking through the evidence myself, I do believe that Hans is cheating in over-the-board games. I don't think any of the analysis presented on YouTube have yet met a sufficient standard of quality (statistical mistakes everywhere), but I do have faith that someone will come forward with an analysis that both doesn't make any mistakes and also firmly implicates Hans is a cheater. Time will tell.

I also agree that Hans material drop in performance after the broadcast delay could be reasonably attributed to:

1. he's 19 2. the best chess player in the world said he's a dirty cheater

Such circumstances would throw off many prodigal 19 year old's, I'm sure his emotions got in the way of his playing. (I also believe he was cheating here, but I don't think the drop in his performance meets any standard for acceptable evidence)

[6510]

I didn't look at the chess.com thing since the historic progress is eclipsed by a streak of 5 important games where he simply scores 100%. Everything else is irrelevant. GM's usually have zero games at that level. Dropping to his usual level after that doesn't average it out to human level. lol

Someone should organize that running joke: naked chess tournament.

[rrobukef]

A Find-the-cheater tournament. One player is asked to cheat without consequences, the others are aware there is one cheater.

[fragmede]

It would be interesting to see what happens if you tell everyone there’s one cheater but there really isn’t one.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

It would also be fun to let everyone cheat but think they are the only cheater.

[maegul]

Yes! Had exactly the same thought myself.

There's a video of Hikaru Nakamura looking at some of the games identified by this report, and he was admitting that it wasn't immediately obvious to him: the games looked like good games (although I didn't watch the whole video).

So such a test of the system almost feels necessary for the chess world to see if they really can tell the difference between high level classical OTB play and cheating. It would be interesting indeed if ever the consensus was that a fair player was the cheater and the actual cheater just looked like "good play"!

[robertlagrant]

Hikaru is the king of sandbagging anything he says. Also, lots of repetition. I dunno. I dunno. Lots of repetition. I think?

[6510]

a triadlol: poker chess deadlift

[canes123456]

Another player decreased by 10 vs 15 for hans. Other players increased by a similar amount to hans. It could easily be noise. Hans under the most public scrutiny and criticism of his life, so you would expect his play to suffer.

I kind of suspect magnus misplayed because he knew that Hans cheated so much online.

[berkut]

Does engine correlation actually prove anything though? Some of the 'statistical analysis' that has been posted on twitter regarding it in the last week has been against hundreds of engines, so 'engine correlation' seems to mean "the move made matched against at least one engine that would have made that move" I think?

[bsder]

1) You can look at the "strength" of individual moves. Someone who plays at 2000-level normally but magically coughs up 2600-level moves when in trouble is probably cheating (watch some of the live chess streamers--you'll regularly see this in real time). Computers are quite good at estimating the strength of a move after the fact.

2) Quite often there are certain "play lines" that computers will play that humans simply can't find over the board.

For example, a computer can take a defensive "play line" that is littered with traps with only a single non-losing path for 30+ moves and work it out really quickly (there is only one non-losing path to take so it prunes the search space mega fast) and play it perfectly. A human playing such a line is almost always cheating--humans simply can't run those kinds of lines in real time.

If you look at computers analyzing even the highest end games, you see the humans making quite a few mistakes that the computers will spot and take advantage of immediately. Someone who walks down these kinds of paths regularly is a statistical anomaly.

That having been said, given the current crop of computer-trained chess kids, it IS possible that we'll grow a prodigy that can run those kinds of lines. However, it doesn't seem like that person exists, yet.

[Nomentatus]

I'm haunted by the possibility that humans might (at least half) catch up, too. When I look at how AI beats humans, I can't help thinking that AI shows us that human narcissism holds humans back. We don't want to look stupid, or mediocre - we don't want to make moves that are hard to explain the value of clearly.

In Go, we can't make ourselves spread our moves around the board as much as we should, we tend not to choose a maybe good move elsewhere over a clearly powerful move where the board is developed, for example.

Maybe there's a pattern to the moves AI chooses that is also a pattern humans can see without running every line; we're just reluctant to choose moves that we can't clearly justify in the shorter run.

[umanwizard]

> Computers are quite good at estimating the strength of a move after the fact.

Are you sure? I’ve never heard of such a program.

[Nomentatus]

He's just referring to the fact that after game is over you can let your program stew on any given move for a weekend or more before reporting back on how strong it was or wasn't.

[umanwizard]

But standard programs like Stockfish won’t tell you how strong a move was. They’ll just tell you how much it changes the evaluation.

E.g. if you initiate a queen trade in a straightforward position, on the next move I have to take back my queen; any other move will show a gigantic evaluation drop by the engine. But that doesn’t mean it’s a particular strong move — even an absolute beginner will play it. Thus it’s of no value for determining whether the person who played it is cheating.

It’s entirely possible that chess.com has access to more sophisticated software that can estimate the strength of players (they sort of allude to this with their “strength score” metric) but AFAIK it’s not publicly available and not clear how it works, or whether it can evaluate individual moves as opposed to the game as a whole.

[Nomentatus]

I think it's more a question of whether, given more time to calculate, the software changes it's choice of move to something else.

[computerdork]

Am not a statistician, but at least in an online analysis I saw, seems like correlation can effectively identify players who are playing too much like a computer. Because they don't just run correlations on Niemann, but on all the top players, and do comparisons (and for certain long stretches of tournaments, Niemann's is playing way, way above how anyone else has ever played).

This is video explains it pretty well, and seems like a very compelling argument (at least to me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjtbXxA8Fcc - and just know that the woman talking is a bit hard to understand because of her accent.

... oh, and to address your point about 100's of engines, my first thought was that are only a handful that everyone uses (Stockfish?) (and also, just guessing, but I get the impression that most top engines recommend similar moves, but again, just a guess!).

[matttb]

They are referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xqvhgh/chessbases_en...

[computerdork]

Ah, have to admit, this is a very good counter argument, calling chessbase's methods in to question. And it's surprising that chessbase does not always do the same analysis for each game, that its nodes aren't setup with the same set of chess engines (although, again, maybe most top chess engines suggest similar moves??). Hmm...

... also, not sure I agree with his opinion that for each move that is analyzed, LetsCheck will return 100% if any engine returns 100% (and there could be multiple computers that were used, each with different engines). The point of the analysis is to determine if a player is playing like a computer, and the user may himself have multiple chess engines open in order to confuse the cheat detection. But again, am not an expert at chess engines or statistics, so am not sure what effects checking multiple engines has...

... also, he says that "Ken Regan's scientifically valid method has exonerated Hans by saying his results do not show any statistically valid evidence of cheating." This is very confusing, because Chess.com post has basically said the opposite (maybe Ken Regan's analysis is referring to a different subset of games?). Guess nothing is definitive. But at this point, I still lean towards Hans cheating (on top of this analysis, there is also a lot of circumstantial things he did that to me indicate he might have cheated, which is too long a topic to go into).

[gbear605]

Chess.com explicitly states in the report that that sort of methodology does “not meet our standard” for cheating detection. If they don’t feel comfortable using it, I certainly don’t.

[nextaccountic]

> Does engine correlation actually prove anything though?

It probably doesn't, and for many reasons, both because the more engines you add the greater the chance of falsely accusing someone (so an analysis that features hundreds engines is probably worthless), but worse than that, you can manipulate the result of the analysis through the selection of engines

There's a number of topics about that on /r/chess, like https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xtwzfe/fm_ingvar_joh... https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xtwzfe/fm_ingvar_joh... etc

But anyway this isn't the analysis that Chess.com does anyway

[erdevs]

I don't think engine correlation necessarily proves anything, on its own. It's worth remembering, though, that chess.com's report a) presents more than merely raw engine correlation, and b) its correlations do not seem to match against hundreds of engines.

But even with all the evidence presented, "proof" is a tricky thing. To what standard would we be trying to prove a claim?

Does this report prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Niemann cheated? I'd say no, but others may disagree.

How about to a preponderance of evidence? Perhaps. But even that is hard to say when no one has yet presented a rigorous defense or set of counterpoints.

In any case, my post wasn't meant to say that Niemann cheated per se. I have no idea, and chess.com themselves may not be able to actually prove whether he did. But I found the report interesting, even beyond the current issue surrounding Niemann and speaking to potential cheating in high-level chess more broadly, and if you re-read my post, I tried not to state anything definitive about whether Hans actually cheated or not.

[rybosworld]

Not anymore than elevated testosterone levels are "proof" of performance enhancing drugs. Engine correlation is a marker and when combined with other markers, can be meaningful.

What it mostly shows is that Hans move strength is unnatural.

Further evidence to support this is that he often plays bad moves. That is, moves that are considered blunders, with a high frequency. This is either an attempt to cover up the engine moves or representative of his actual capability. For instance, the report mentions that in a post-game analysis he suggested a move that would be an obvious blunder. When the interviewer pointed this out, Hans wasn't fully convinced until he was shown the engine analysis. So he also is showing a habit of deferring to what the engine suggests.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me.

A few weeks ago my daughter very proudly announced that she managed to "outsmart" (=hack) her online test app used by her class. I was shocked and asked why she would do that, she's smart enough to get an A without that. She seemed obviously puzzled by my question and my lack of enthusiasm about her "achievement" she was so proud of (it involved some JS modifications). I guess is it's just another kind of thrill.

[borbulon]

> A few weeks ago my daughter very proudly announced that she managed to "outsmart" (=hack) her online test app used by her class. I was shocked and asked why she would do that, she's smart enough to get an A without that. She seemed obviously puzzled by my question and my lack of enthusiasm about her "achievement" she was so proud of (it involved some JS modifications).

I wonder if maybe it was the chance to solve a different challenge than the one before her (the test), which if she could already get an A maybe wasn't the right challenge?

[Bakary]

She should be proud in the sense that real world problem solving and valuable technical skills is a lot more important than any school test. That said she will have to learn not to let arrogance and risk-taking be her downfall.

[bombcar]

Depending on what she had to do to hack it, I’d be proud, and then try to explain to her why even if we can do it we shouldn’t.

When you’re bored you try to learn how the system works - it’s a valuable skill.

[Maursault]

> two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted to cheating on chess.com. The fact that online cheating is so widespread

chess.com globally has more than 93M members. There is cheating, but a dozen admissions can't be accurately described as "so widespread." Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat. While this is mildly shocking, your statement based on 12 grandmaster admissions is a sweeping generalization.

[daveguy]

Two dozen is 24, not 12.

This is how many grandmasters admitted cheating, not how many players globally have admitted it.

As of 2021 there were 1,315 active grandmasters. [0]

24/1,315 = ~1.8% of grandmasters admit cheating (give or take a few depending on how many play online chess or are still active). In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

[0] https://chessdelta.com/how-many-chess-grandmasters-are-there...

[Maursault]

Even with my careless error, the statement in question is still a sweeping generalization.

> As of 2021

This is a tough number to track down, and you've limited the count by "active," in 2021, but the number is rapidly increasing. According to the FIFA Database as of a few moments ago, there are 1771 chess grandmasters.[1]

24/1771 < 1.4%

> In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

Even assuming 1.8% of chess grandmasters are cheaters, this means that 98.2% of them are not. If you tested a 98.2% of a perfect score on a test, would you really think your grade was a serious problem? If you had the chance to retake the test for a replacement score, either better or worse, would you?

[1] https://ratings.fide.com/advaction.phtml?idcode=&name=&title...

[daveguy]

That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

[Maursault]

> That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

The difference between 1.8% and 1.4% is negligible and is only in regards to the limited population of chess grandmasters which could not be a valid sample representation of 93M chess.com members.

> Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

Your answer is apparently in reply to some question that was not asked. On the contrary, my claim was that the argument that cheating was "widespread," by extrapolating a mere two dozen cheaters among 93M, is fallacious reasoning, specifically a sweeping generalization, and also that

>>> Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat.

which is not a postulation but a published fact.[1] Being that two hundredths of a percent may be described as a tiny fraction of a percent rather than more than a fraction of a percent, you can clearly see in this case, by your own scrutiny and straw man, cheating is not a detriment to competition.

[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

[sigmaml]

> Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races.

This exists in every domain, and is - perhaps - inevitable. Look at what SEO has done to web search.

[72deluxe]

The one thing that baffles me with SEO is how it's just guesswork yet is a massive business. It's like promising to someone that you'll get their name listed sooner in the phonebook without any control over the phonebook itself, and then that person pays you to do it.

It's no different, since we have no control over Google's ranking mechanism and they won't explicitly tell you what the algorithm is (and change the rules daily), so it's just guesswork.

Baffling an entire colossal "industry" is built from guesswork.

[res0nat0r]

They say they estimate that less than 0.14% of players on chess.com ever cheat, so it may be less than everyone assumes just due to this current drama.

[johnaspden]

They also claim 100 million subscribers, so that's 140,000 cheats. Since if you're cheating you probably do quite well (I pity the engine that could lose to me!), that's likely most of the high-rated players on their site.

And actually this tallies quite well with my experience of amateur physical sport, where at the lower levels everyone's honest and sporting and it's all great fun, but as soon as you get to the point where people are putting their heart and soul into the game, everyone's cheating, everyone knows everyone else is cheating, and anyone who's not cheating might as well give up and go home, as far as winning things is concerned.

Once you put money on it, and you're playing against people you're never likely to meet in real life, Jesus I can't imagine what it's like.

[tarentel]

This number seems wildly low to me. I've been playing on chess.com for 2 years and have run into ~30 cheaters. I know they were cheating because chess.com told me they were. I've suspected a handful more of cheating who may not be as they were never banned. Either way this number doesn't seem correct.

[jsmith45]

What seems really odd is that they don't have any data accusing him of cheating after his initial 2020 ban/new account creation.

They conclude that while there are several unusual things about his OTB play, there is not enough for them to conclude he probably cheated.

Basically the biggest takeaway here is that he definitely publicly lied about the extent of his cheating prior to his original ban.

[lvl102]

Tracking window focus change is not a good deterrent.

[bryanrasmussen]

> window focus change event monitoring

if you have ADHD you are naturally a cheater! or if you have some important reason to check your email periodically.

same applies to online tests of various sorts.

[krageon]

It's chess, it's not heart surgery exams. The cheating sucks, but anti-cheat measures are infinitely worse. There is no better way to suck the fun out of something than demanding you submit to a patdown and metal scan or a rootkit before you can participate.

[WA]

It's just soccer, bicycle racing, weight lifting, sprinting, marathon running, ..., no need to submit to a urine and blood test, if you want to compete in the olympics. That sucks the fun out of it. /s

[krageon]

With respect, in those examples the extreme amount of money to be made with the first place motivates the cheating. The anti-cheat for such competitions only barely works, as top competitors do as many (possibly dangerous) things they can to come out on top. As long as they are undetectable. We should approach a disincentive to cheating in a different way, so it is just a few lemons as it is in chess.

[Dalewyn]

>The fact that online cheating is so widespread even among top chess players is certainly news to many, including me.

Not to me. When the stakes of winning are so damn valuable, sometimes literally so, it would be patently stupid to not cheat and increase your odds of winning.

Remember: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught. If you're never caught, cheating is completely legitimate.

These aren't games of pleasure, played for the sake of playing chess. These are games played for the sake of winning. Prize money, ELO, fame and renown, etc. When the only thing that matters is winning, you gain nothing by playing honestly.

[fsckboy]

If your attitude about chess competition was applied toward you in all of your routine irl activities, you would be extremely unhappy.

The cop does better in his job by meeting his quota of speeding tickets, so it objectively makes sense that he would issue you a speeding ticket every day with no evidence and over your strenuous objections... except you wouldn't object because the cop is working the system rationally. Yeah, right. Anyway, the lawyer you hired to work through this issue in court would of course inflate the number of hours he worked on your case, because why wouldn't he, he'd be an idiot not to!

Can't wait for you to apply for you YC investment, you make a great business partner, so rational and all.

[lelanthran]

He didn't say it's a good thing, nor that he approves, just that it is unsurprising that people (attempt to, and sometimes) cheat because cheating is a rational response.

It's just a different way of saying that when the measure of something becomes the target, then that measurement is gamed.

Would you also assume that Goodhart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) prefers cops who issue illegitimate tickets, or lawyers who pad their hours?

[Dalewyn]

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another.

Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy off the ladder, so be it. If a cop is feeling particularly irate and/or is hard pressed to satisfy a quota with frivolous speeding tickets, so be it. Contractors inflating their hours is par for the course.

Life ain't all sunshine and flowers, it's also dirty and ruthless. Nobody's a saint in this plane of existence.

[rfrey]

> Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another

Totally unfair. Some of us succeed by being dealt unreasonably good hands at birth.

[sriram_malhar]

I'm just happy to say that most people that I call my friends don't share your vision of what it means to have a life well-lived, or how they define success, or have lived with this attitude of dirt and ruthlessness being necessary.

[ndespres]

This is sociopathic rationalization for poor behavior. It isn’t true. If you are a compulsive liar and cheater, perhaps you will justify your immoral behavior by deluding yourself into believing that everyone else is doing it too- but it is not so. We are not all behaving this way.

[Dalewyn]

You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

You also fail to understand I'm not passing judgment on such behaviour. Rather, I'm saying we need to take into account the ruthless nature of reality if we don't want to get screwed over ourselves.

Calling evidence of Neiman cheating a surprise is an honest and naive understanding of reality, one which leaves you wide open to cheating thrown your way that you will never realize because you never expect it.

Nobody is a saint, much less when achieving victory is so heavily incentivized as in professional games.

[lmm]

> You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

That's a total non-sequitur. Perhaps no-one is perfect (though frankly I doubt it), but that doesn't mean that cheating more means more success than cheating less.

Cheats definitely exist. But many of them end up doing worse than people who live more honestly, as we see here.

[lvass]

It's also the sophist Thrasymachus' central point in Plato's republic: "Justice is serving the interest of the stronger".

[nurettin]

Cheating might work if you have nothing to lose. Example: you are supposed to be present in an online lecture as a formality, there is no interaction and nothing to gain by being in it. Sure, people are likely to join, mute and do other things.

However, for serious real life situations where stakes are high, risk of ruin is too high. This is not rational. In fact, those stars have to align for the cheater, not the honest ones.

(I still don't think Hans cheated OTB and chess.com is being ridiculous)

[moron4hire]

A game is defined by its very specific set of rules. This can easily be seen in chess, which has a huge variety of variants. Or how one, minor rule change in baseball and you've got people wondering if the Hall of Fame even make sense anymore.

Once a set of rules are defined, competitions and tournaments within those rules are meant to determine the best people in that game.

When a player cheats, and rationalizes it as "only matters if you get caught", that means the cheater is playing by different sets of rules from his opponent. They are playing literally different games. If the two opponents are playing different games, it completely undermines the purpose of the competition.

[Dalewyn]

Here's the thing though: How do you know a player cheated? Because you caught him. So what about all the cheaters who are never caught? You can't say they're cheaters.

Therefore, if a player cheats but is never caught, he isn't a cheater. If a player isn't a cheater, whatever he did is legitimate and it isn't a problem.

Therefore: Cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

Put another way, the rules only tell you there will be consequences if you are caught breaking them. The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself, only the results of such actions and only if the act of cheating becomes known.

So the optimal way to play a game to win is always to play skillfully /and also/ cheat without getting caught. Not cheating is not optimal to winning. It is absolutely a high risk, high return course of action, but that's the nature of optimizing.

[samatman]

You seem to think, and I don't agree, that "cheater" is like "felon", a label which is applied after some process.

I consider it like "thief". A thief is a thief when they thieve. A cheater is a cheat when they cheat.

[moron4hire]

If all you care about is the prize money, then there are easier ways to rob people, e.g. at gunpoint on their way out of the competition venue. The Rules say "If Person X does Y, then Person X gets Z". You want to rationalize interrupting that process to take Z for yourself. Y could be "their job" and Z could be "their salary". I suppose, in your terms, highway robbery is also a "high risk, high return course of action".

But entering into the competition under the guise of legitimate play means you also care about the prestige of being declared the winner. But you haven't won the game. You've played a completely different game. You can claim to have played the same game, but that would be a lie. You could just as easily redefine "narcissistic sociopath" in your own head to exclude adhering to The Rules. But it'd still be a lie.

I see in your other comments in this thread that you claim "most people finish dead last in life", intimating that they are fools for not cheating. But that's the thing: if everyone cheated, it would be a complete breakdown of society. Rules, laws, and systems to enforce them, are how we can leave our houses in the morning without wearing bulletproof armor from head to toe.

But what do I know? I only have a happy life with my wife and two kids. I'm a loser. So go! Cheat at science and get that Nobel Prize money! Cheat at keeping your restaurant clean and pocket the savings on soap! Never mind the wasted time and resources and lives ruined. You're a winner.

[Dalewyn]

>you claim "most people finish dead last in life"

I made no such claim. I stated that, quote: "... Honest people finish dead last in the race known as life."

>if everyone cheated, it would be a complete breakdown of society.

Human society has always been, always is, and always will be rife with cheaters of varying degrees and impact. Some will be caught, most won't be.

[wruza]

I cannot agree. First, your position comes with an assumption that one feels okay when cheating. Many people simply do not, for personal integrity, anxiety and other reasons.

Also, if you expect a game to bring profits in a long run, risk assessment may become too complex, if you can be caught retrospectively (like that top-score trackmania guy for example). Some people understand it from the beginning and decide to not put themselves into an unstable trap for life, even if cheating is compatible with their values.

You’re right that games (businesses, situations) themselves may have a long-term model which includes cheating as an optimal solution. But assuming that people playing it are all cheating sociopaths is incorrect. Tbh, your persistence all over this subthread is a sign that you have some sort of a close personal relationship with this topic.

[irjustin]

> cheating is completely legitimate.

100% disagree.

Legitimate would mean condoning cheating. Which then means everyone should be allowed to use engines, which then would mean engine vs engine, which we already have.

Human vs human no augmentation.

[Dalewyn]

I commented on this already in another post, but I'll reiterate here: How do you know a player is a cheater?

If you can't prove a player cheated, that is if you never catch the cheater, then whatever the player did is legitimate. It doesn't matter if the player in fact cheated and got away with it, it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.

The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself, only the results and only if the cheater is caught.

[patmcc]

Let's say someone robs a bank. They break into the vault, steal a bunch of gold, get out. Never caught. Lives a long life. Were they a bank robber?

A cheater is a cheater even if no one knows it.

[lamontcg]

This sense of ethics is literally going to ruin this country.

[irjustin]

> How do you know a player is a cheater?

> it's all legitimate if he wasn't caught.

> The rules do not and cannot police the act of cheating itself

These statements alone, well sure.... everything is legitimate if it's not caught. That's by definition.

Are you arguing really hard for the definition of word legitimate?

I'm actually quite confused about what it is that you're arguing here from these statements.

[Dalewyn]

I'm arguing that it is in one's interest to not hold naive ideals about the world, about reality. Reality is a dirty, ruthless place. If you don't conduct yourself being aware that other people are going to take advantage of you, or even cheat on you, then you will end up getting screwed because you cannot defend against attacks you aren't aware of nor expect.

[irjustin]

I agree with you on this.

Going back to my comment I have issue with:

> cheating is completely legitimate.

Which is not what you're saying here.

[Edit]

If you made your statement that "the world is a dirty place" I think most would agree with you. The point almost every reply is taking issue with is when you say "cheating is legitimate".

The replies, including my own, are saying "cheating is not acceptable". By originally saying "cheating is legitimate" you are saying "cheating is acceptable", but in your follow up arguments it's "cheating moves that are not caught are considered legitimate", which is the definition of legitimate and thusly there's no substance.

[Thorrez]

You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception. As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate?

I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?

[Dalewyn]

>You seem to define "legitimate" as depending on society's perception.

For the purposes of this discussion, I define "legitimate" as whether anyone wants to cry foul on a player's performance. If a player cheats but doesn't get caught, it's legitimate because nobody can cry foul and make it into a problem.

>As another thought experiment, what if someone didn't cheat, but society erroneously came to the conclusion that the person did cheat. Is what that player did legitimate?

Nope.

>I guess it comes down to: does objective truth exist, or is everything relative to society's beliefs?

If we were to drill down to it, it can be argued humans can never truly be objective. Take Neiman for example; so far we haven't seen any evidence (that I'm aware of) that Neiman did cheat in his game with Magnus without any doubt, but it appears that society at large has decided that he was a cheater in that game.

This and the aforementioned thought experiment actually also come back to one of my original arguments: That not cheating is stupid. When you can be judged a cheater despite being honest, or judged honest despite being a cheater, it is much more beneficial to just cheat and attempt to reap the rewards of cheating. Being honest gains you nothing while burdening the risk of losing everything, while cheating potentially gains you more at the risk of losing everything.

Also, I hope you don't misunderstand any of this as me passing judgment one way or another on this sort of behaviour. Personally, I would prefer no cheating, but there are my own thoughts and then there is reality, and reality is as filled with sunshine and flowers as it is dirty and ruthless. I see all this as a great opportunity to appreciate reality for what it truly is, so we hopefully don't end up on the short end of a stick insofar as what's within our powers to affect.

[Thorrez]

> That not cheating is stupid.

Hans cheated in over 100 online chess matches, and now he's stuck in this giant controversy. If he didn't cheat in those matches, none of this controversy would have happened, and he would be judged based on his skill.

[grog454]

> Cheating is only a problem if you're caught.

I don't agree with blanket statements like that but I think there's a kernel of truth in your mindset that many people are oblivious to.

Chess, as a competitive game with meaningful stakes, is obsolete. It became obsolete when the first computer outplayed the reigning human champion, and it's been gradually becoming more obvious. Recent events have started to demonstrate precisely why: people are becoming better at cheating at chess way faster than they're getting better at playing chess.

[moomin]

All of those things you can get by cheating. But cheating is never winning. The whole point of a game or sport is that it ceases to be a game when you go outside the rules.

Yes, many can square this circle in their own heads and convince themselves that anything goes. Some, like Lance Armstrong, will enrich themselves enormously. But none of them will have “won”.

[lvass]

Games are just games, they don't have to mean the same thing to everyone. The way you view them tells more about youself than about the games.

[Dalewyn]

The question is one of incentives and motivations.

Am I playing chess because I love chess? To have fun? In that case, cheating is counter to my goals (unless I enjoy the act of cheating itelf, but that's getting besides the point).

On the other hand, is chess simply a means to an end? Am I playing chess because I want to win something? If so, cheating is but one of many possible decisions I can undertake to increase my odds of winning.

Where professional games are concerned, where money and fame are at stake if you lose, cheating is downright inevitable and certainly not something to be surprised about.

[lvass]

I don't disagree at all. But there are people who just want to play the game by the rules. There are people who won't cheat for moral reasons. There are people who lack competence to cheat. There are people who are risk averse. Cheating should be expected, but you were implying every single person has more incentive to cheat than not, which just isn't true. You could even argue most people are in fact cheating and I might even agree with you, but without evidence it's just slandering, something even the world champion should be reprehended on.

[Dalewyn]

>but you were implying everyone has more incentive to cheat than not,

I am implying that because that's inevitable in a situation where winning is so much more important than simply playing. Again, these aren't games of pleasure, games "for fun". These are games with valuable stakes on the table.

Even Magnus himself can be argued as playing to win in order to eventually obtain the famed 2800 ELO or whatever the magic threshold number is. If evidence comes out that Magnus cheats, it would be a shame but I wouldn't be surprised either.

In situations where the ends justify the means, the means will include cheating.