Top French Chess Players Suspended For Cheating
cf18 writes "The French chess federation has suspended three top players for violating sporting ethics at a chess olympiad in Siberia last September. The allegation claims while the first member was playing, a second member would watch the game via internet, use software to find the best move, and send it to the third member via SMS. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."
Would have been much easier and less obvious than changing seats for every move.
So the French can't even pwn at Chess without cheating? What CAN they do without stooping to low ethical levels?
That's what you get for putting money on the line. No one would do that for the glory of it because there would be no glory in it.
... if the agreed upon seat is already occupied?
We called that : "une victoire à la Française".
Le stink.
as a chess player myself I find this very insulting to the game. It's not about winning it's about the beauty of the game the thought and ideas that go into making a position work regardless of it being advantagous to you or not.
My first thought, how would steroids help in chess? Guess chess isn't like other sports.
Nothing worse the cheating and loosing. And no the loosing loser is not the winner in some twisted proverb of the world
This has been a public service announcement from your neighbourhood adult who's about to go nail his wife in three orifices. Try to focus on that, just for one second. Three orifices, in any order I feel like. How'd you like that, Grand Master k1ll54l0tZ?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Holy crap that's the nerdiest backhanded French thing I've ever heard, I think I threw up in my mouth...
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
My understanding was that Chess, while significantly less intractable than some games, was still something that you needed a fairly serious computer to play well fast enough to be tournament legal.
Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought, or were these guys sufficiently low-level players that some quite ordinary software was deemed sufficiently likely to be better? I'd assume that you wouldn't take the risk of being caught cheating unless you were fairly confident that it would boost your odds of winnning, which would imply a belief that you were substantially worse than whatever software they had access to.
Chess is for autistic, gullible, unimaginative people who should be stuck im the dark ages if at all and in any way possible.
That it teaches strategy is a misnomer; the limitations on the game's entire possible data set is a cul-de-sac that the player enters willingly, with one ruse: that white is entering the room with black behind holding the knife, whereas in actuality the first player "leads" in the sense of gesturing into the room (wherein lies the end) and follows as black is forced to respond to the initial gesture.
If two gods were to play, white would forever win. This we *do* know as indisputable fact. Icingly we can also store all nine piece endgames -- ALL of them, possible, probable, or not -- on a singlle Digital Video Disc.
Chess does nothing but pigeomhole otherwise useful mental cycles. I't's all niches and workout, no payoff or analogy. Even simple study of naval warfare would be a better exertion for every single one of chess's claimed passive benefits. For the active, well, modern gameplay has surely provided better. Golf. Football. Flight sims. aNYTHING is closer to reality.
Some people believe chess is mystical because we cannot yet compute it all. The same people believe human conciousness can exist in electrons and transistors (but not the equivalent in even a trillion abacii). Chess is an abacus compared to what we can achieve today in challenges and discoveries. The holdover is entirely for nostalgia.
These young men showed it up is all. If the scheme had been more actively encryptable, and the answers to questioning prepared more carefully, they would have ruined exhibition chess for the rest of eternity.
So saying, they have done so by proxy. I applaud their genius and so should every instructor alive today, for the liberation they exposed.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I know specialist systems (big blue) can beat anyone, but are standard PC-based chess programs really better than players at this level?
(If so, maybe time for everyone to switch to Go?)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Accordingly, I'm supposed to lead with my King and be the first to summon Exodia.
While I despise such cheating in general, I still have to say that this is a nice stunt. I like the coding through seating step.
According to TFA, this cheat is discovered by their own federation, and disclosed so at least these cheaters can be considered as violator of their own ethics and the rest of the French chess players on that level won't have a bad reputation or leave a doubt in future events.
It's wise, and also fortunate, that they solved this problem in house.
nous avons perdu encore une fois!
How long has crap like this been going on? How do we know computers didn't surpass humans two decades ago and we just haven't noticed that a lot of people are cheating?
I enjoy a good game of chess myself, on occasion. However, at the top level, chess is populated almost entirely by gigantic douchebags. I'm not surprised cheating went on. Look at some of Bobby Fischer's early matches. And hey, Kasparov isn't above cheating, either. His opponent didn't say anything because she knew he'd use his reputation to destroy her and anything she said.
"An interesting example of taking back moves at the highest level of OTB chess occurred recently at the elite 1994 Linares super tournament. It's claimed that there is video tape showing that PCA World Champion Garry Kasparov, while playing Judit Polgar, moved a knight to a square which would have cost him the exchange. Apparently, even though he had released the piece, he picked it up again and moved it to another square and went on to win the game." Link to more.
Bobby Fischer, the greatest American player ever, idolized Hitler and hated Jewish people, and cheered 9/11 on his radio show. Sample quote: "This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming." Don't think he was alone in the chess world, either, he had a lot of friends: as Gudmundur G. ThÃrarinsson, the man who arranged the famous "Cold War" match against Spassky in Iceland, said at Fischer's funeral, "In the fullness of time, history will judge the United States harshly for its treatment of Robert James Fischer."
I leave with this piece about chess, written in the 1500s.
"Chess is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
giday, what youve asserted is that the standard AI algorithms such as variants of Alpha Beta pruning, rely on having heuristics, an opening book, and probably an endgame 'closing book' too.
to your knowledge are there any world class chess codes that only use heuristics that are completely generated using inductive/invariance methods together with transposition tables (for whole sub trees), cause there is apparent overlap between a human created opening book and a kind of transposition table which applies over an entire history of games not starting from scratch every single game, what would you say is the portion of opening books that are not part of this overlap??
Recently an improvement in computer Go was achieved by using monte carlo like methods. apparently it produced a significant improvement in the quality of the AI's play. has the monte carlo idea been applied to chess successfully too, perhaps it was even tried earlier than for go without showing much potential but should be revisited, perhaps the hybridisation of the monte carlo idea together with exact consequential analysis is more critical in chess and so the emphasis has remained on the latter.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to apply galois theory to chess to find if there are questions that cannot be answered constructively? Also if any chess programs can use induction and invariance? as this would start to include aspects of what i would consider thinking about chess. also what about approaching the solution of chess (proving who wins given the first move) by considering a continuous model; eg the problem of finding the resistance between adjacent resistors in an infinite mesh is non trivial and one approach is by solving a continuous extension, eg the resistance between two points on an infinite plate which relates to the discrete problem.
finally what about a partial information approach specifically for AI vs Human where the information model of the human is modelled using monte carlo methods and information risk/arbitrage theory ideas are applied together with time limits, so as to address tactics such as making a 'complex' move intentionally to burden the opponent or making certain moves to intentionally probe the humans conceptual boundaries, and to infer what the human has read and so exploit any weakness.
surely nobody would say that the analysis of chess has been exhausted or that the question of computers given the above questions! XD