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Chess Grandmaster Used iPhone To Cheat During Tournament
SternisheFan sends this quote from the Washington Post:
Gaioz Nigalidze's rise through the ranks of professional chess began in 2007, the year the first iPhone was released. In hindsight, the timing might not be coincidental. On Saturday, Nigalidze, the 25-year-old reigning Georgian champion, was competing in the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament when his opponent spotted something strange. "Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet," Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. "I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren't occupied." Petrosian complained to the officials. After Nigalidze left the bathroom once more, officials inspected the interior and say they found an iPhone wrapped in toilet paper and hidden behind the toilet. "When confronted, Nigalidze denied he owned the device," according to the tournament's Web site. "But officials opened the smart device and found it was logged into a social networking site under Nigalidze's account. They also found his game being analyzed in one of the chess applications." Nigalidze was expelled from the tournament, which is still ongoing and features more than 70 grandmasters from 43 countries competing for a first-place prize of $12,000. The Georgian's career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion.
The progress of computers in both power and miniaturization has had a strong effect on chess. The biggest effect is the end of the practice of adjourning tournament games. It used to be that games which ran long would be adjourned to the next day, but once overnight analysis by computer became a serious possibility (displacing overnight analysis by each player), the practice became pointless and now tournament games run continuously until they end.
The challenge of miniature devices both for chess analysis and for communication with analysis occurring elsewhere can't be so easily met by changing the rules, but diligent policing will help. Stricter no-cellphones-in-the-playing area policies would have to be implemented.
Note: The former World Chess Champion Tigran V. Petrosian died in 1984.
The comments were made by grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian, born 1984 and named after the champion.
I don't know what the state of the art is(and it would presumably vary a bit depending on whether the phone was running the analysis or just acting as a nice UI for a remote server)
In 2009, a version of Pocket Fritz ran on a 528 MHz HTC Touch phone, and won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw, and a performance rating of 2898. That's good enough to win most tournaments, and that was more than 5 years ago.
Cyborg chess tournaments actually have been around for about 20 years.
I dunno, the original claim was pretty general in nature and equally unsupported.
The actual "evidence" question is actually sorta beside the point. Arendt specifically in Origins of Totalitarianism discussed how the Nazis would systematically treat actual criminals better than political prisoners or random arrestees, because in the end the message they were trying to send was that they could destroy you whenever they wanted, and it didn't really matter if you'd done anything wrong. The only way you could be safe is by enthusiastically cooperating, and even then it was never really enough.
At this point we would make the distinction between a merely authoritarian regime and a more "bloodthirsty" thing. The first would be like, say, Morsi's Egypt or Iran, where they arrest people for opposing the state. The latter would be more like North Korea, where they arrest people at random wether they oppose the state or not, because the terror is an end itself.
Miller was writing about the Hollywood Blacklist in the end, but it's an important example of authoritarianism of the first kind. Joe McCarthy knew that Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets hung out, that they were fellow travelers with more committed Communists and even soviet agents, he had all the evidence he needed to prove association. But the logic of the 50s Red Scare wasn't driven by the desire to find Communist agents as much as it was to get "suspect" individuals to turn over their friends, so that even though there was no evidence of actual wrongdoing, there were simply so many people named that spectre of conspiracy took on a life all its own, and the spectacle of people evading the "justice" of HUAAC or the senate, of "hiding" their friends and associations, would cast disrepute on leftism in general. They arrest you to make you look guilty, and then they make you turn States Evidence to buy back your respectability.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.