[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? ;)

[OJFord]

I don't see how he could (or why he would) have, in the same room, eyes often closed, yelling at people to shut up so he could concentrate; occasionally checking the board state with me (always bang on) - but as I replied to sibling, it's not necessary to have a great memory like that is it? Of course, picturing/tracking the current state of the board has a lot of overlap with thinking x moves ahead though I suppose.

[teolandon]

I'm 1500 Lichess but 900 on Chess.com, so no, not within 300 points at that level.

[xipho]

1500 blitz?

[thefringthing]

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

[OJFord]

1200 rapid if that makes a difference? Also, I suppose it's.. certainly not orthogonal, but it's not dead parallel either - can have a good/bad memory and play well/not well.

[howling]

I'm 1800 rapid on chess.com and can't play blindfold beyond the opening.

[lmm]

A real-life 1200 should be able to play blindfold. Online ratings are very inflated.

[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).

[Orothrim]

Due to the need for real-time input that's just not true.

[bombcar]

There are/have been elaborate cheating setups for online shooters that involved a second computer using the VGA or HDMI video stream.

It’s doable to get around kernel detection tools.

[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.

[WhitneyLand]

When you say it’s a weekend project for a college student it suggests it’s mundane or easy for most professional developers within a weekend.

This sounds exactly like the old “Twitter would be easy to implement give me a month” naivety.

Development is hard, even small projects aren’t usually finished in a weekend, let alone something there’s no reference implementation for and that we’re merely speculating about.

If such a project was built in a weekend to work reliably enough others could use it successfully in gameplay, it would be highly impressive. Maybe we’d call it an extraordinary effort, if for no other reason “because software”.

[rowanG077]

That's a generic AI. I would be very surprised you could get it to work accurately for games and hyper specific the heads of (possibly non-human)models. The box you see in the marketing material is completely useless for this use case. Besides how do you get the data to your standard second PC, scale the input the USB thing expects. Send it over USB and back, and then you have to send it to a custom mouse that receives the click command over bluetooth? I don't think 7ms just for the inference step is going to cut it.

A weekend project were you have to design an ultra low-latency software + hardware stack, a custom mouse and train a custom AI. I would be incredible if anyone manages this in a weekend.

[krageon]

If you want absolutely olympic response times (110-120ms), it is a little tight but nowhere near impossible. 7ms as the other poster says is absolutely insane. Most videogames will already trigger on consistent peak human response times, so you'll want to trim down your bot to go to a more average person (160ms, maybe a bit higher) to fly under all the heuristics they might (but probably don't) use. Plenty of time to compute things.

[barrkel]

7ms isn't going to be the bar. Human reaction times are in the 150+ms range, you have 20x your budget.

I agree it's still tough though, most I/O paths on generic hardware will have buffers at every step that you'll have to fight to eliminate.

[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.

[rowanG077]

How is Serial mouse/keyboard trivial? You'd need to make a custom mouse that receives data from your second PC. You'd probably want it to be wireless else you will have 2 cables coming out of it. And no just having a second fake mouse is not fair. That's easily detectable by software and would definitely raise a lot of red flags.

[xxs]

This is how: take ESP32 - it has bluetooth, wifi and serial port all integrated and it costs couple of dollars. It's small and it runs on 3.3V, it has a voltage regulator that it allows to connect to 5V.

I can do the code and place the esp32 in a mouse on a Saturday (my C is always rusty, not using it professionally). And I am a hobbyist at best. So the original serial mouse/keyboard are connected to ESP32 that normally proxies the signal of the hand movement to the PC.

If I press a pedal (w/ foot) the second computer would receive a signal, calculate a human alike trajectory to move the mouse and send it to the ES32. The latter will execute it along with the left click to shoot.

Like I said - trivial. The same can be done with the USB port as well, and it's not harder. Just that for PS/2 I have the tools laying around.

[seba_dos1]

It is trivial. All you need is a device that can work as a USB gadget that you can plug your keyboard into. I could do it with my phone, many Raspberry Pi-like SBCs, or even Arduino-like boards...

[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.

[eru]

You could do statistical analysis on the mouse and keyboard inputs to try and detect this.

(Very similar to how you might detect chess cheaters, actually.)

[erwincoumans]

You can use (the data of) statistical analysis to train a deep neural network to avoid detection. That may also help avoiding chess detection cheaters, so the moves are not perfect anymore.

[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.