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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.
He isn't a grandmaster if he cheated. :p
I think the real story here is that a Georgian man's cellphone became sentient and was using him as a proxy to enter chess tournaments. The phone is the real grandmaster here.
"When confronted, Nigalidze denied he owned the device..."
...didn't do nothing!
Apparently he opted for the logical partition, rather than the extended. Wise move.
"He's got the kind of moral fiber we're always looking for, that will to win."
- [insert name], CEO
[insert big business name], Inc.
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Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
All they have to do is remember how many times a tourney he has really bad IBS and they'll have the answer to whether he cheated a lot or not.
they use iPhones for toilet paper.
When I was actively playing tournament chess the computer world champion program was about as good as a mid-level club player. It ran on a big mainframe at Northwestern University. Most strong players were sure that a computer would never be able to beat a human grandmaster. And now a damn phone wrapped in toilet paper can do it.
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.
There's an app for that.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
How can such a simpleton become the grandmaster? It belies imagination. Everyone knows the way to cheat at that level of chess tournament is to have a team analyze the game in the audience and have them send color coded yogurt to the player in the middle.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Any smartphone will... look for the Stockfish engine in the app store of your convenience
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.
Since when did running to the bathroom after every opponent's chess move get considered unusual behavior?
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); but it's possible that he was using the computer to augment competent-or-better human play; but not replace it entirely.
Chess has a large enough search space that full scale brute force and ignorance is quite a challenge; but more constrained states(like the actual state of the board partway through a game, or after the use of one of the standard openings) have correspondingly smaller search spaces. A computer program could also assist in checking proposed moves for 'something dumb you would usually recognize; but sometimes miss under stress'. Again, by being one move 'in the future'(since you are just testing, without commitment) you reduce the difficulty of the analyzing the game; but get potentially useful error checking.
I don't know how thoroughly, in terms of human level of play, the game has been beaten with various amounts of hardware at your disposal; but it is definitely beaten enough that a good player with access to a machine is likely to play a better game, possibly a markedly better one.
His Nexus 6 wrapped in toilet paper was hidden in the adjacent stall...
I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange
Why would that be strange? I'd think it was stranger if he visited a different one each time, pausing to consider his options as he enters. "Now, I tried number 3 last time, but I reckon number 1 could be a winner..."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There are three main programs that beat grandmasters on rather modest computers. Stockfish (an open source project), Komodo (A private original product that largely uses more correct algorithms and internal scoring), and Houdini (a project built by largely extending Rybka). There was a large increase in strength a few years back over the standard programs that had to do with much improved "search" and better pruning. Rybka took those ideas along with improved board scoring and led the field with an entire class difference in strength (about 300 elo increase). The programs since have raised that by about another 150 or so points. It may be that we have reached near apex with these techniques. And it may be hard to get more "strength" but there are surely points to be discovered. I suspect it may be in exception handling. There is a big resistance to to that, the argument being that exceptions just mean you have yet to understand enough. I'm not entirely convinced. There is also a movement to be exploitive. Magnus Carlsen is the top player in the world, and he uses exploitive technique a lot. He seeks positions unmemorized to allow rawer talent to shine and is really successful with that technique. And many of the top players do this more and more. There is little of this in computer play.
There are at least 6 players by my calculations who wound up tied for the top score at this event and therefore split the top prize fund money, approximately $5,000 USD apiece. That is not an easy living if one is trying to survive on chess alone. This probably explains why some cheating at chess is so blatant, because one has to finish at the very top to get any money at all let alone turn a profit. Otherwise a rational cheater would do it sparingly and possibly versus lower level opponents.
Others have already posted, but from a pragmatic standpoint if you could select 2 or 3 candidate moves and do a quick check on them to see where they would go, it would be a much greater advantage than doing the analysis in your head.
The guy should get the hammer...
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
Chess tourneys should be played by naked participants in a large faraday cage.
If you think about it that really helps the sport appeal to younger people - instead of advertising a "chess tournament" (what is this, the middle ages)? you get to advertise the event as a STEEL CAGE CHESS MATCH TO THE FINISH!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you suggesting that somehow makes it OK?
Because my take would be to strip him of titles, and bar him from future competition.
Saying he only cheated a little is meaningless.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I would have taken the phone and then sat back and watched the guy fall to pieces. Only after the match was complete (and the guy presumably lost) would I have busted him.
Since 'literally' literally no longer means literally, I'm wondering if they guy actually jumped up out of his seat and sprinted to the toilets after each move. Maybe it wouldn't have been so suspicious-looking if he just casually walked to the facilities.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Oh no, his behavior was a flagrant violation of the rules; and they can selectively destroy his ability to interact with 8x8 black and white tiled surfaces using a cold war mycotoxin for all I care.
If anything, my intended thesis(that even a relatively weak or computationally limited computer could be a substantial aid to a reasonably skilled human) suggests that even modest machine assistance is quite dramatic cheating in terms of allowing you to beat people above your skill level. Being reasonably good just serves to make the computer's job markedly easier in this case, which then allows it to make your job markedly easier, which defeats the point of involving humans at all.
And no one noticed he had to poop every move?
That he got away with visiting the toilet between every single move up to now.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
... and why is that unusual? I use the same one at work. There's 3 just in that room and there's several rooms to chose from.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I guess I am getting old - the relentless Slashdot decline is finally getting to me. Slashdot couldn't be bothered to report (much?) on *either* of the chess world championships (the Women's just finished), but they pick up the story about cheating ... and it's not filed under "Games ... Classic Games", but ... wait for it ... filed under iPhone. And then only 20% of the comments are intelligent, and the rest are silly snarks about what is basically the biggest issue facing chess today. You'd think with the brainpower this site commands when we're not exhausted fighting Beta, there could be a couple of cool chess discussions...
So I'll reply to you because your guesses are very close.
Unlike that Romanian guy from last year, this guy is not a putz. He is well into the high master range, leaving the first question "exactly how high without help". So let's just suppose at least low 2400's. As well as checking proposed moves, there is a huge component of "energy saving" where you just let the program "blundercheck" so that in a nightmare mess on the board, just tell the program "look five moves ahead and don't drop a piece or get crushed". So while your opponent is doing things to his hair trying to work out the interlocked chains of variations, the computer just says "hey, take a serious look at this other rook move - looks like it holds everything together for your requested five moves or more". So you play that, and a couple of the resulting forced followup moves, and then four moves later you're fresh and finally, out of exhaustion, your opponent blunders and you just mop up.
And it's getting so bad that AC's are wondering about bathroom rules ... just do the math on 175 bodies in a room for over four hours. You can't easily at all start a regulated tracking system on that!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Cheating is rampant in all things anymore.
He's a grandmaster until he gets caught cheating. Until then, he dominates the field and the pressure is on for others to cheat as well just so the playing field is level. ( The Tour De France comes to mind, as does US Baseball's Steroid issue, Online Gaming / Gambling, Standardized Tests ( like the SAT, ACT, Bar exam, etc. etc. )
It makes it impossible to compete unless you're bending the rules also.
Makes you wonder of all the "winners" out there, what percentage of them made it to that pedestal legitimately ?
In fact, you are wrong on several points.
First, the strongest program is Stockfish 6. It's still improving at a rate of 50 ELO points at each version, and is already is above Komodo:
http://www.inwoba.de/
You can see that Stockfish 6 is already 200 points above Rybka.
Stockfish is improved by a community and by using a distributed network: http://tests.stockfishchess.or...
The current version is already stronger than SF6.
Secondly, Rybka has been demonstrated as a copy of Fruit (an open-source chess engine), with only bit-tables added.
There has been an incredibly detailed decompilation about Rybka http://www.chessvibes.com/plaa... which leads no doubt about this.
The only difference in recent versions of Rybka is that the evaluation function has been improved by GM Larry Kaufman, but he works now on Komodo.
I have no doubt that Stockfish is stronger than Carlsen, except that it does not use a creative style.
Why the frak would they let a competitor get up and leave the playing area at all, much less after every single move? Were they playing in someone's garage drinking cheap beer and no one gave a shit? They should treat these competitions more like a casino, where cheating is expected and overcompensated for by paranoid surveillance, especially when money's on the line.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Stop being abusive. Honestly that post is very close to being a form of assault.
The reason there's a Women's Chess Championship is that it's a "safe space". All men are capable of rape. Even grandmasters. We need a separate chess league to keep us focused on the game and not distracted by the potential of being abused. It has nothing to do with being worse at chess. Women are not worse at chess. We're just as capable as men so clearly there's something wrong with the SYSTEM.
Also men are guided into chess by the educational system and women aren't. Men don't just start studying chess on their own. How many grandmasters ever learned by themselves or from books?
But clearly you wouldn't understand because you're too busy being an abusive, threatening white male.
> Smart enough to master of chess, but not bright enough to secure his phone.
Chess is some mix of high level strategy, getting in your opponent's head, visualization, and habituation.
Securing a phone is a technical problem. The two fields don't really have overlap.
Died in 1984.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Where was that, already?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
There isn't a smartphone that can take on a GM, especially under those conditions. If he used it for every move, he would probably lose on time, you get close to 3 minutes a move(40 moves/90 minutes, 30 seconds added per move, then 30 minutes sudden death). He would probably use most of that time round-trip, his opponent would get serious time odds against a smartphone! It's not going to come up with anything amazing in 30 seconds.
But, you could setup a powerful server at home to run a chess program like Houdini and access it remotely with your smart phone. You would still have to carefully pick when you used it and memorize multiple lines.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Of course, his death may be greatly over exaggerated.
In fact, you are wrong on several points.
On which points?
First, the strongest program is Stockfish 6. It's still improving at a rate of 50 ELO points at each version, and is already is above Komodo:
http://www.inwoba.de/
You can see that Stockfish 6 is already 200 points above Rybka.
Stockfish is improved by a community and by using a distributed network: http://tests.stockfishchess.or...
The current version is already stronger than SF6.
OP gave a brief intro and history of 3 programs. He said that Rybka took an early lead in strength, but then others have since improved on that. Your point about SF6 being currently stronger than Rybka may be true, but it doesn't invalidate anything that the OP said.
Secondly, Rybka has been demonstrated as a copy of Fruit (an open-source chess engine), with only bit-tables added.
There has been an incredibly detailed decompilation about Rybka http://www.chessvibes.com/plaa... which leads no doubt about this.
The only difference in recent versions of Rybka is that the evaluation function has been improved by GM Larry Kaufman, but he works now on Komodo.
I have no doubt that Stockfish is stronger than Carlsen, except that it does not use a creative style.
OP made no claim about the source of Rybka. He said Houdini was built on Rybka.
Your comments are informative and add value to the conversation, but your opening statement saying the OP was wrong on several points doesn't seem to have any merit.
The Georgian's career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion.
Also under suspicion: The intelligence of his opponents in those tournaments, because they apparently didn't notice the most obvious strange behaviour ever.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm really surprised that no one pointed out that the photo in the article captioned "A photo shows Gaioz Nigalidze’s match sheet and confiscated iPhone. (Dubai Chess and Culture Club)" is an iPod Touch, with the WiFi turned off.
Thanks, have a nice day :)
http://www.educa.net/curso/tec...
His Nexus 6 wrapped in toilet paper was hidden in the adjacent stall...
Hopefully a Roy, not a Leon.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
His oppnent WAS NOT THE TIGRAN PETROSIAN who was world chess champion about 30 years back but another Armenian with the patronymic Petrosian. Apparently this Petrosian's father named him as Tigran in honour of the original Petrosian.
It will not heve escaped people that hiding a device in the toilet cistern was the exact same trick described in THE GODFATHER.