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How Do You Detect Cheating In Chess? Watch the Computer
First time accepted submitter Shaterri writes "Which is more likely: that a low-ranked player could play through a high-level tournament at grandmaster level, or that they were getting undetected assistance from a computer? How about when that player is nearly strip-searched with no devices found? How about when their moves correlate too well with independent computer calculations? Ken Regan has a fascinating article on one of the most complex (potential) cheating cases to come along in recent memory."
What if they are not cheating? Some possibilities:
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:>)
1 -- they learned chess mostly/exclusively by playing against a machine rather than against human opponents. Then their strategy would mostly be informed by or similar to the type of gameplay which they have observed kicking their own ass as they learned to play. Thus they might "play like a computer" because they have internalized the computer's algorithms as they learned to play chess.
2 -- they randomly play chess in manners that appear like a computer's algorithms. In fact, hey, when they say that the person's moves closely mirror the moves a computer would make, shouldn't they specify which computer program/algorithm they mean for making chess moves? If you're running gnu/linux, you can play Xboard ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xboard ) as the front-end (visual GUI) with multiple possible engines driving it underneath (such as Gnu chess). You can even run Xboard to provide a running analysis of a game being played by others as you enter the moves played (see the man pages for analysis options). Different engines would probably come up with different moves/styles of play, right? So saying that a person's moves and play style mirror a computer is an insufficiently detailed accusation. The chess engine being suspected ought to be specified and indicated, in my opinion.
3 -- yes it is strange that someone with a normally low rating would suddenly get so far against a grand-master, and yes it is less suspicious when that happens with a yougner player, but why couldn't it occur with an adult player? Suspicion is just suspicion, not evidence.
4 -- there is a comment in the article about using Faraday cages at the match in order to decrease the risk for cheating. Remember that these days computers are very small, smaller than a deck of cards (yes, fancy phone in your pocket, I'm talking about you being as powerful as a supercomputer from the 1970s or 1980s). They could rig a fancy interface for their toes and have a shoe computer for all that you know.
5 -- is this all fallout from the pete rose type stuff, or because of lance armstrong from yesterday?
A cheating scandal in chess. Wowza.
If you win against a computer you are cheating
I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.
This presupposes that computers play chess differently to humans. My understanding with chess is that there are certain 'stock' moves, openings and such like, that players memorize and use to their advantage. What if someone has set up positions and studied a computer response to those positions or play, would repeating the learned computer moves be the equivalent of cheating? What impact does an eidetic memory have on this where a person is able recall those positions and moves exactly?
The idea that there was some undetected cheating mechanism at play in the case in the article seems to go against the principle of Occam's Razor. The simplest solution to the issue is that either Ivanov just had a great tournament, or that his opponents played into situations for which he'd prepared with the aid of a computer, or a combination of the two. Such appears to be the level of mistrust in chess though that this simple solution is dismissed in search of something more fantastical.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
You'd be surprised where you can stick a Raspberry Pi, you really would.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
While there may come a day when this is necessary, we're far from that point now.
The man suspected of cheating in the article was relying on analysis being performed somewhere outside of the tournament hall, which was then broadcast to him. This was enabled by having the moves of all the games broadcast live over the internet (which normal for tournaments like this). When they suspected him of cheating they disabled the broadcast, and he blundered predictably. It seems that all they need to stop this kind of cheating is a simple one or two move delay on the broadcast of games.
The economics of chess mean there isn't enough prize money to cover the cost of very sophisticated methods of cheating at the rank-and-file tournaments. There is money for the top 10 players in the world, so if cheating spreads that far maybe a faraday cage will show practical application.
I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.
In the old days, beyond student level, you had to play against tough human opponents to grind out experience, slowly learn to play like your human opponents, and with any luck you'd advance beyond your human trainers.
In the new day, because the computers are the strongest players and always available etc, you'll grind your experience out against a computer, slowly learn to play like your computer opponents, and with any luck you'll advance beyond the programmers of your computer trainers.
It seems inevitable that in a couple generations human chess will look "computer" to a current player.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It is mathematically proven to be unsolveable within finite time, as the problem is in class NP.
No. No it is not. I am not sure where you got this, but chess is easily solvable in finite time. It is a simple tree search but incredibly massive. My desktop, given enough time and a massive increase in memory, could solve chess. Granted the memory would take up a planet the size of Saturn and the time would run into issues with the heat death of the universe, but this is much different than being "unsolvable within finite time".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
If you win against a computer you are cheating
I thought it was more if you win playing the same moves that a computer would make you are cheating.
This presupposes that computers play chess differently to humans. My understanding with chess is that there are certain 'stock' moves, openings and such like, that players memorize and use to their advantage. What if someone has set up positions and studied a computer response to those positions or play, would repeating the learned computer moves be the equivalent of cheating? What impact does an eidetic memory have on this where a person is able recall those positions and moves exactly?
I can comment a bit at this. I used to play in chess tournaments in my state some years ago. I was at a very low level in most of them. To put it in simple terms, I was about as far away in talent from the best players in my state (not my country or the world, but just my state) as I could be. I gave up playing chess because bluntly put, computers ruined it. You are right that players memorize openings. The list of known openings and known variations of those openings is staggering. Honestly, it's more than most people can memorize. Back in the 1990s when I played, it was unusual for a known opening to go beyond maybe 7 or so moves before you "got out of book" as they put it and responses started to deviate from known ones. Keep in mind that while you could always deviate very early from known responses, the odds of such being successful were quite low as if the move was really any good, it would already be known. Now add to this the knowledge that since white moves first, he controls the game. So if I as a player think "I'm really hoping white opens with e4 as I've been dying to try out the black side of this variation of the Ruy Lopez", white may open with d4, destroying my chance to defend an e4 opening. Even if white opens with e4 as I hope, on his 2nd move he may prevent the Ruy Lopez variation that I wanted to play. So you can see that what you have to learn is quite enormous because when you play black,you have to be prepared for all kinds of openings that you may not ever play when you have the white pieces.
Computer analysis took to openings to deeper levels of known good responses. So an opening that used to be maybe 7 moves long before you got out of book was now 13-14 moves long. At some point it just becomes impossible to keep up. To be honest with you, I put a lot of time into trying to improve and I really didn't make much progress. It was already tough enough for me to keep up before computers got involved and I just gave up as I felt like I was getting left further and further behind. To be honest with you, a lot of the tournaments weren't much fun. A lot of the guys who showed up to them were really weird. It made me question whether I really wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at something that attracted defective people to it. It's not unheard of for guys to be exceptionally good at chess and be homeless because they can't keep a job. Fischer himself was a genius player but if there was ever a crazier World Champion than him, I don't know who that would be.
It seems pretty obvious upon RTFA that this guy is likely to have cheated.
One of Ivanov’s losses was in a long game in a closed position (the kind where computers perform poorly), and at the end, Ivanov made a rudimentary mistake. It stood out because of how well he had played in the other games. The other loss was in the penultimate round, when the organizers, as a precaution, stopped broadcasting the games on the Internet so that people outside the playing hall could not try to assist the players.
Please mod this post up so other people can see it -- I'm sorry I don't have an account and I'm late for work.
It is mathematically proven to be unsolveable within finite time
Every game ends in a finite number of moves, therefore the permutation of all games is also finite.
"His name was James Damore."
Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.
The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.
This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.
So it is doubtful that Garry Kasparov would lose to Chessmaster XI at its highest AI on a normal computer a.k.a. not Deep Blue.
Don't bet on it. Deep Blue was designed in 1996. That was 17 years ago. A modern laptop has more computing power than Deep Blue had. Chess algorithms have also improved. You can download free chess programs from any app store that will play at grandmaster level.
Playing chess against a computer is like having a weight lifting contest with a forklift.