This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Obligatory xkcd. If you want to have a chess match without cheating, place the participants and a referee in a bug-swept, sealed and EM-shielded room, take a video and release it after the match has finished. Then put all three of them into an MRI.
For a cheap, low stakes solution, contract a notary to set up a device prepared by the org holding the competition, and observe the participant during play, and publish it with a three move delay.
This seems to be a lack of imagination on your part.
A move can be described within 12 bits even if the player is barely aware of the rules. For an actually good player who can form a list of likely moves, even an advice of just three bits ("move left rook") per move would likely put them on a superhuman level.
There are a ton of ways to inconspicuously encode that information. Background noises from outside. Low intensity lasers selectively emitting light to where the cheaters eyes are, but not where the cameras are. Good old RC vibrators in bodily cavities.
Nor is it hard to get the game state to the chess engine. If you are broadcasting live, you just grab that. Otherwise, anything in a player's home can be a camera capturing the screen.
Anti-cheat spyware can at best show the lack of any known cheating software solutions. The idea that it could show any compromise by someone who has full hardware access and a freedom to chose whatever components they want is laughable. With a budget of 100k$, the modification of a computer monitor to copy the video stream, extract the chess board and modify pixels to indicate a move seems within reach. If you mandate that the player captures the output of their monitor on camera at twice the monitors resolution, this just means that the player will need to bother to add hardware to the camera to redact clearly defined patterns.
If you can become a successful streamer by playing online chess, then there will always be people for whom a bit of technical sophistication to get an edge is worth it.
Ah yes, good ol' cheater vibrating buttplug, so you can be both Fake AND Gay.
More options
Context Copy link
That's quite a bit more than three bits. Two for direction and three or four for the piece.
A bigger problem is making that information reliably detectable by the player without alerting anyone else. Remember, the player can't run advanced signal processing algorithms to dig out hidden information from below the noisefloor and is presumably surrounded by "hostile" actors who are on the lookout for any such information. The hostile actors don't even need to be able to decode the information, just detect that there may be such information transmitted.
If you want perfect information, yes. But to gain an edge you do not need that. Enumerate all pieces by their starting row from 0 to 7. Have the oracle figure out what a player with a given rating would would move each piece.
"If I tell this player to move the their queen (or queen's pawn, if that looks more plausible for them), does this have a better expected outcome than if I tell them to move their light-squared bishop (or its pawn)?"
Again, this has limitations. The player needs to be a fairly decent chess player. And a decent chess engine would still totally crush them, because the cheating player would be limited to fairly obvious moves. "Sacrifice your queen here for a decisive advantage ten moves down the line" is not a strategy you could communicate in three bits.
But it would probably make the cheater significantly stronger.
I do not have a good example for a channel which can communicate three bits but not five, though.
Sure. On the other hand, humans are also really got at filtering out irrelevant information. Luckily, sound is rather obvious (especially if your baseline is complete silence instead of what you get in a football stadium), and players do not have a lot in their field of view which can be controlled by third parties.
My gut feeling that the optimum for in-person cheating would be to have a computer implanted into your body. Some 28 years after Deep Blue, a chess engine which could defeat mere humans should fit in your guts. A bidirectional connection with a few baud should be well within technical reach, you have all sorts of nerves just waiting to be tapped. Unless you are checking if your cheater is sleeping with a Qi charger on their belly or put them into an imaging scanner, you are unlikely to catch them.
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn't it be one bit for direction? You're usually going to only have two rooks, which are either on different files (in which case just left 0 and right 1 is sufficient) or not (in which case the same 0 and 1 can be reused for top and bottom).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link