Sure. I have no specific qualifications, experience, or expertise in this area. I don’t live in a vacuum either, the recent trial of Heard had me looking at the laws in more detail, but mainly my conclusions come from broader experience in life in seeing how such matters tend to work out rather than in the details of how they get there. I am eager to hear from what you have to say about the matter if you have more significant qualifications yourself.
Carlsen, people. C-A-R-L-S-E-N.
Cool. I know nothing about libel law. My wife doesn’t practice it, just teaches business law at a community college (and arbitrates other disputes). According to her, libel and slander is one of very few causes of action in which the burden of proof switches as I described. She may well be incorrect. Perhaps someone with more specific experience will check in. Apologies if I confused things.
And sorry to the extent I misspelt either/both name.
Which is even more bizarre. If he’s legitimately good enough to be able to beat Carlsen, even Carlsen on a bad day, especially when Carlsen is playing white, then why the heck would he have any reason whatsoever to cheat against random strangers? Anyone good enough to be even able to do that ought to mop the floor with random strangers.
For the benefit of chess novices, by the way: In chess, the player with the white pieces makes the first move in the game. This gives the white player a small but definite advantage, and at grandmaster level, even a small advantage makes a big difference. Further, in high-end play, draws are extremely common. Between these two facts, it is rare for the black player to win: The conventional wisdom is that black is attempting to play for a draw, while white is attempting to play for the win (as an aside, also due to these two facts, a chess match is always an even number of games, not an odd number as is common in most other competitions). Meanwhile, Magnus Carlsen is, by objective measure, the strongest human chess player in the history of the game. So, yes, it would be very rare indeed for a human opponent playing black to outright win against him.
Because it’s not really random strangers. It’s random people within delta of his ELO. There hundreds of titled players there: Rapid Leaderboard - Chess Rankings - Chess.com
I’m no expert when it comes to chess, but I am interested in the current ‘scandal’. This video, from a guy who is pretty good with research, breaks down the situation quite well.
It comes down to do you believe that Niemann only cheated twice and got caught both times? Do you believe that his coach was only cheating when he was caught?
Latest news:
(Chess Investigation Finds That U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More than 100 times.") This is in chess.com games.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524
Nothing definitive, and doesn’t address over-the-board cheating, but not a good look for him.
The list of alleged cases:
The weird part (to me) is that one of their detection methods is to detect toggling between browser windows. That would be trivially avoidable by just having a separate machine next to the main one. I guess talent in chess doesn’t translate to general-purpose intelligence…
Apparently, some of those games (25, IIRC) were live-streamed by Hans, too. Plus the report also mentioned that 4 of the top 100 grandmasters admitted to cheating in chess.com events. I would say crazy stuff, but I’m not exactly shocked.
Against Nepo and Danya, too? I’ll have to check Danya’s channel later on and see what he has to say.
I figure this is about as far as we will come in this saga, unless FIDE comes out with some interesting analysis of his OTB play. But I don’t think there will be any “smoking gun.”
Agreed, unless they actually found the cheat device. Any one game can be an anomaly. We already know Carlsen played poorly in that match.
4/100 admissions seems like the tip of an iceberg. Cheating online just seems so inviting, with such a low bar to entry.
And if Carlsen had some information about what chess.com just revealed… If you were in his shoes, and found out that you were about to play against this guy, how would you have responded?
Probably no differently, but it should be said that OTB play is very different beast than online. Cheating online is trivial; it could almost happen accidentally in some cases. Cheating OTB would require serious planning, with accomplices, some kind of device, etc. Even if the mindset is the same, it is a huge escalation in effort, like shoplifting vs. robbing a bank.
I think he should have played through and made his feelings known later. It kind of screws up the round robin format to duck out mid tourney and affects the other players.
But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.
As I understand it, that’s what he did: He played through, and lost, and made his feelings known, and then came up against Niemann again and immediately conceded.
I’m guessing that it wasn’t public knowledge that they were tracking that. It’s sort of like the Enigma question: If you’re cracking the enemy codes, do you act on that information, and thus tip your hand to the enemy that you’ve cracked their codes? You do if it’s an important enough situation. chess.com might have decided that a controversy involving the strongest human player in history was big enough that they had to speak up, including speaking up about precisely how they’re so confident.
Oh, and to all of those folks mentioning broadcast delays, Faraday cages, and signal monitoring… A cheat device doesn’t necessarily have to be a communications device. If a player is able to smuggle in a device somehow (be it in a shoe or in… anything else), the device could itself be the computer running the chess engine. You’d have to come up with some sort of interface for it, of course, but even the most trivial and obvious way for encoding chess moves only needs twelve bits per move, and it’s not too hard to come up with some way for the human to communicate twelve bits to the computer, and vice-versa, in the amount of time allowed for a move.
In the Sinquefeld cup, when he lost against Hans with black, he immediately resigned the tournament. I think it was the third round? The one where he conceded and played one move before resigning (but continuing the tournament) was the next tournament (Julius Baer Generation Cup. Magnus went on to win the tournament convincingly.)
Maybe I’m just paranoid as a computer professional, but I would assume they track everything it is possible to track.
As an example, I subconsciously make small mouse movements when my hand is on the mouse and I am concentrating on something. But that is going to look different–maybe to the point of the mouse not moving at all–if I’m doing a lookup on a different system. It wouldn’t be conclusive by itself, but when correlated against other patterns of behavior, it could help the case.
That’s certainly a reasonable approach for them to take, but I can still imagine someone not knowing (until they’re told) that they’re doing so. And I can also imagine someone not knowing (until they’re told) just how extensive “everything it is possible to track” is.
Of course, now everyone does know that they’re doing that, so it’s likely that now, cheaters will make sure to use a different device to run their engine. Their detection ability is now diminished. But like I said, they might have figured that this was big enough that they had to speak up anyway.
But chess.com players already knew the use cheating detection software. People get kicked off that site left and right for cheating. That part is not a secret.
ETA: I guess that gets into your point about them maybe not knowing the methods they use (like clicking on another tab where your chess engine is running.)
I just saw this:
Scroll 15 hours back in this thread and you will see it again. 