“<i>Paranoia has become the culture</i>”<p>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.<p>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.<p>Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.<p>Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
I used to cheat on chess.com. It started as a small bit of cheating here and there, just checking every now and then if the move I was going to make was the best. Of course, the computer always had a better move and then I examine the line and told myself I probably would have thought of that! Like a drug, it escalated and I was checking moves all the time. I was never caught but I was ashamed and just stopped playing. Actually, more than ashamed, cheating took all the joy out of it as it felt like a job, switching tabs, and you don't get the dopamine hit when you think of a great line yourself. I uninstalled scid vs pc and opened a lichess account and never cheated on that. Though lichess tells me loads of opponents I've played have been banned for cheating. I never suspect a thing.
The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational <i>not</i> to cheat to find an edge. People cheat for the same reason they do anything: because it's worth it.<p>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.
I had a math exam a long while ago. One of those three hour long and the professor had me seated by myself in the math library. So I asked:
- There's tons of math books here. How can you know I won't cheat?
- Bjourne, do you intend to cheat?
- No, of course not.
- Alright. Good luck on your exam!
I'm a pretty serious online chess player. I'm in the top 300 players on lichess in blitz.<p>Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible.<p>There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.
One way to get around the cameras and the invigilator in the room for a live chess match is to have a small wireless vibrating device somewhere on your body that can encode information such as coordinates and move difficulty.<p>Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
> Perhaps thinking of Lance Armstrong, he added: “I was a big fan of a certain cyclist and a part of me understands the pressure to succeed at all costs. ..."<p>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.<p>There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#USADA_reasoned_decision,_UCI_and_IOC_sanctions" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/" rel="nofollow">http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/</a>
> Sarah Longson, a former British ladies’ champion<p>Athletic sports aside, does anyone know the motivation between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?
A similar thing has been happening in online contract bridge.<p><a href="https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheating-scandal/" rel="nofollow">https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat...</a><p><a href="https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-kibitzer/" rel="nofollow">https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...</a>
> “In his games there were abnormalities, sequences that he played godlike, but there were blunders as well,”<p>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.<p>Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.
Idea: Replay games to detect cheating.<p>Create a fleet of chess programs, with typical resource constraints (CPU, RAM, time).<p>Have the chess programs replay recorded games.<p>Compare the suggested moves with the player's actual moves.<p>Divine some kind probability that player is cheating.<p>Extra credit for replaying that player's history of games thru the same fleet. Was the player consistent? Were there spikes of cheating?<p>Until there's a better phrase, I'll call this "parallel construction".<p>It'd be neat to run the fleet of chess programs during live matches.<p>Caveat: I know <i>nothing</i> about chess, so someone is probably doing "parallel construction" for cheat detection.
I have mostly played in face-to-face tournaments. The first time I played in an online tournament, I was ahead of my opponent. Then, he started inquiring my whereabouts during my moves. I replied out of politeness and lost by timing out. I didn't mind losing this way, but the way he left without saying a word.<p>Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.
We built and released an open source crossword board game app (1) (think Scrabble/Words With Friends) inspired heavily by Lichess. We are currently exploring options for cheat detection, as cheating is also endemic in our sport, sadly.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/domino14/liwords" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/domino14/liwords</a>
The story of another sudoku cheating - who also was involved with some questionable chess cheating. Eugene Varshavsky. From Cracking The Cryptic channel: The Great Sudoku "Cheat" Scandal <a href="https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Wy_k0Tywpb4</a><p>And an NPR article about the incident: <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varshavsky_sudoku_chess.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/eugene_varsh...</a><p>And the chess cheating accusations from 2006: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheating-accusations-in-mental-sports-too.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/sports/othersports/cheati...</a>
<i>Why</i> would anybody do this?<p>It's not even like cheating in athletics where you can plausibly claim to be doing it yourself (just using illegal enhancements).<p>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.
If anyone is curious what Petrosian looked like during the match, here is part of the match with GM Nakamura analyzing:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798</a>
Let computers compete with human beings at the helm as entertainment. Or, keep changing the rules of chess right before the match so no one wouldn’t have time to program the initial conditions.
I have recently closed my chess.com account which I had since 2008. I got tired of cheaters. Actually cheaters forced me to only play 3+2 games in the hope they would not have enough time to check each move with the engine, but lately because of better and better cheating tools and higher and higher network latency, that solution stopped working. Now I can see exactly the same trend on lichess. Last year it was a rarity to meet a cheater on lichess. Now it is happening more often.
it might be a naive approach. I just ignore that cheating even happens. I assume everyone is not a cheater. If for some reason they are a cheater, i believe they will just get discovered after a while or it will be their internal satisfaction loss. I don't pour my heart into the game, it's just a fun distraction.
But I feel for the more serious players, the paranoia must be so annoying.
What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?
Probably a minority viewpoint, but I grew up playing chess face to face with friends and family and neighbours and people at school and at bus stops. I can’t get any enjoyment out of playing the game on a computer without physical pieces and without the other player being at least familiar enough that I might meet them again sometime
It's hard on puny humans. Computers went slowly from "no computer can play even a decent amateur game of chess" to "supercomputer can play at grandmaster level" and then picked up speed. Now we're at "laptop with $99 program can destroy all humans".
I noticed that poker was mentioned as well. Does anyone have more information on this? I know heads up limit is essentially solves and no-limit is “almost” solved but are poker bots really good enough to handle full ring NLHE at a high level?
as someone who's made videogame cheats, ive always got a bit of a chuckle from the enthusiasm of users who defend players accused of cheating. sentiments such as, "it's not a hack, they are just good and you're a sore loser!". how to tell can be extremely difficult. but certainly anything digital that is competitive will have cheats. i regard digital games/sports as more like hybrid/centaur games -- you should assume your competitors are using technologies to their advantage. in a classic game like chess it's pretty lame, but that's why you go to your local club.
I have a good friend who plays obsessively on chess.com who's taken a "come as it may" attitude to cheating. I wonder if there's a better, more restricted, version of chess.com that minimizes cheating.
The interesting thing is the increase in cheating. Is it just because of Covid, or is it perhaps because cheating has become more accepted in general, with "alternate facts" being touted as "facts"?
I'd expect to see Chess engines that allows settings such that it will chose a move only a human at rank X could chose.<p>And make easy mistakes a computer could beat, but a human couldn't. Along with randomisations.<p>So it can pass a Turing test.
The crisis is really that humans are desperately trying to "compete" at a game that computers have soundly defeated human players at. The answer, endorsed by leaders like Kasparov, is abandon competitive human chess. Embrace the computers for competition, and use ELO for <i>entertainment</i> matchups. I don't care if I'm playing a "cheater", as long as the cheater is playing at my level.
Chess drama is the best drama. Anyway it was sad to see armenians disqualified. They are a great team and they absolutely need not cheat. And probably did not. Not sure why petrosian kept looking down in that video, though.
"crisis". It's been a problem for decades now. It's why online blitz/bullet is so popular. Much harder to cheat on shorter time frames.