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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   47670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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How does one even cheat at chess? I'm not following that part. Let's say if one player somehow knew the other player was planning to employ a certain strategy in advance. Is it not the point of chess to see when your opponent has countered your strategy and pick a different one? I don't see how that would be considered cheating any more than being at the table and realizing "ah, he's using the x maneuver, so I will counter with y".

Other than that angle, which doesn't really strike me as cheating, I can't think of any possible way to cheat. In a casual game you could move your opponent's pieces while he wasn't looking, but I'm guessing in a tournament that isn't going to be possible. Same for making illegal moves that benefit you, of course. And there's no hidden info to uncover in chess, nor randomness to stack in your favor.

So I guess I'm just confused on how this guy is supposed to have cheated, as the game of chess seems pretty damn cheat proof to me.

You could be secretly using a computer chess program. You would just need someone with access to the program to play your opponent's moves, and a way to communicate the program's moves back to you. Hence the reference to various bizarre forms of communication that he maybe used.

Presumably, cheating can occur from having outside coaching during a match, either by having humans analyze your opponents' moves in real time, or by having a computer play the game for you.

Chess is not cheat-proof, and in fact it's very easy to cheat at chess. A computer program running on a smartphone will be better at chess than any human player who has ever existed or ever will exist. Anyone who finds a way to get the computer's recommended moves during a game will have a steep advantage.

No idea. I don't think we will find out until more information about why Magnus withdrew comes to light, which will almost certainly not happen until the tournament is over.

And it takes very little bandwidth to get the information back.

There was an incident a year or two ago in chess, probably involving one of the main parties here, where the match was being livestreamed and one player was doing moves that completely matched a popular chessbot -- right up until the livestream broke.

Figuring out how to smuggle that information into the match is a fun and interesting problem. But do not be surprised when the people running the matches decide they are sick of you.

Computers are much better at chess than humans so you can cheat by asking a computer what to do.

The primary method of cheating in chess is to use game engines to suggest better moves than a human could think of. Modern game engines are much, much better than any human players and at this level of the game it might only take a couple of key moves to sway the outcome.

Of course over the board tournaments have lots of rules and procedures to prevent this, so much so that many think Niemann could not have circumvented them and that if he cheated it must have been through spying. But the bandwidth of information that needs to be transmitted to and from an accomplice is so low that I don't think you could ever be 100% sure it didn't happen. Which is unfortunate because it means an accusation of cheating is essentially unfalsifiable.

I think you can cheat at chess if you have some outside entity feeding you moves. Especially in an online match I can imagine using some tool that analyzes the state of the board and tells you what to play. In an in-person match it seems harder. Unless you're, like, wearing an ear piece or actually manipulate your opponents pieces.

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