Are computers capable of manipulating the outcome of games - cheating? :eek:
Computers are capable of doing anything they are programmed to do. Computers that are programmed to cheat will cheat.
Err, what do you mean?
Well obviously I don’t know what’s in Garfield’s mind, but my wife is convinced that when she plays Scrabble against the computer because it must have access to the allowable words database (or whatever it’s called) it can just look up a suitable word that fits. I know that she’s beaten it a few times but she says that’s the computer just keeping her interested in playing.
I don’t think she’s paranoid about it but she does call the computer HAL now. 
Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure what you could do to write a scrabble player that was ‘fair’ in that sense… intentionally cripple the pattern matching algorithms to make them more like a human player maybe. And maybe set up a subset of the allowable words list that the computer player doesn’t “know”
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. They’re not conscious. If the game is programmed for the computer to “cheat”, then it will. And many computer games do.
As others have said, eh ?
OK, computers are perfectly capable of cheating at any given game they’re playing be it Scrabble, Chess, Risk, Etc. BUT only if they’ve been programmed do.
This is obviously easier in games such as Scrabble, or Poker, where you are trusting the computer with inforation that is revealed at the end of a turn. You’d notice a computer game cheating at chess, for instance, just as you’d notice a human.
Your scrabble program is not going to one day decide, “Hey, I keep losing, I’ll cheat”, computers aren’t sentient. Yet. It may be programmed to cheat, or it may be poorly programmed and cheat by accident.
Now, the scrabble program may appear to be cheating but that’s simply because it can search thousands more letter combinations and knows far more words. In fact, to make it not-impossible for the player, the computer will make deliberate ‘mistakes’ where it picks a non-optimal move to give you a chance. This is one of the way different levels of difficulty are put into games. Easier difficult levels make more deliberate mistakes.
Occasionally computer do cheat at computer games. In some computer stratagy games the computer is giving a head start or other advantages that an ordinary human would have access to playing in the same position. This is supposed to be to provide the human player with an extra challenge, but it also sometimes done to make up for poor play on the computers part (due to poor programming of its intelligence).
Of course, that may not have been what you were asking, in which case I can only hope someone finds this post useful.
SD
Sorry, I meant to ask what the OP meant, not Garfield. I just replied a moment too late.
In most strategy computer games (I’m refering to classic games like chess, here), the computer cheats because otherwise it doesn’t stand a chance against a human player (except the most casual players).
I’m currently playing a wargame, for instance. The computer “cheats” in the sense that it produces twice as much as me (and has also some little other advantages). In this case, the game’s author mentions it, and I can disable this feature. But it’s a freeware. In most commercial games, it’s not mentionned or even actually denied. “Hardest difficulty level” generally means “the computer will cheat more”.
I meant I’m NOT refering to classic games like chess.
I don’t think a computer is really capable of cheating at Chess.
Unless while you’re playing it, it makes your clock run faster.
Indeed the computer can’t really “cheat” at chess, only be set to a very high standard. The same can be said with scrabble, allowing the computer access to a large databank of words isn’t cheating, it’s just setting the computer up to play as though it is a person with a very large vocabulary. However, if the computer could change the letters available to it whilst playing scrabble, that would be cheating.
Well, if it moves its bishop horizontally or vertically, switches the position of your pieces, or captures straight ahead with its pawn, then it’s undoubtedly cheating, and there’s nothing you can really do about it given that it controls the game board, aside from turn the program off.
Maybe better to say that it can’t cheat at chess without running a high chance of the opponent noticing, as SpaceDog has already pointed out.
A very early computer chess game went:
- Ng1-e5 (illegal) d7-d6
- g2xf7 mate (illegal)
But it’s pointless to cheat at chess when the moves are recorded. Chess offers full information on every player’s legal moves. (The difficulty is that you just can’t handle the massive amount of possibilities.)
Now the computer can play some endings perfectly. If you have a total of less than 6 pieces left, there are databases with every legal combination of positions, which are linked so as to provided a clear statement of the best move, whether the position is a forced draw or not, and how many moves it will take to prove it.
See here:
http://www.logicalchess.com/resources/tablebase/egtb/index.html
The position they give is based on a study by Reti, in which the White King amazingly can either overtake the black pawn, or assist his own to queen. So this is a draw with best play.
Or maybe by moving, then moving for the opponent, then making another move itself. Which would then rely on the opponent noticing (maybe it’d decided that the player was above due to inactivity, or the game had been paused) or later remember that they hadn’t made that move.
Kinda sorry I threw chess into my list there as it’s not an easy game to cheat at, particularly against the less casual players – but it’s not impossible.
Much easier to cheat at games where there’s some hidden information.
I’d still like to know what, exactly, the OP was asking.
How about if it changed your letters, even while you were looking at them. Wouldn’t that be galling?
Or more realistically, if it “peeked” at your letters and incorporated that information into its decision making. For example, it notices you have a Q without a U, and that there’s an open U on the board. It decides to play a word blocking that U, even though such a play maybe scores fewer points.
I doubt that any Scrabble computer game cheats like that. It seems unnecessary. Instant and perfect “dictionary recall”, along with blazingly fast pattern matching, already give the computer huge advantages over the human — for this particular game anyway. If anything, the challenge for a Scrabble program is probably to handicap itself enough to be fun for humans.
To summarize what others have said: in games that lack perfect information for all players (e.g. Chess and Go have perfect information, but Scrabble and Poker don’t), it’s certainly possible and often undetectable that the computer is cheating, using information that it’s not properly entitled to. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily. That kind of cheating can actually improve the game play, making it more enjoyable, if the program is otherwise too weak without the crutch. It’ll just depend on the particular game.
(There was a recent discussion here of various video games and their cheating ways, generally unpopular ones though.)
For that matter, a computer game is free to violate the laws of physics in the simulated world that it presents. In fact it can display anything that a big rectangle of pixels can display, which includes a lot of things that are unfair, illegal, impossible, outrageous, or disturbing. The only important question, really, is Did I get my money’s worth?
I’d argue that when the computer makes an illegal move or moves twice in a row that it’s not cheating at chess. It’s simply no longer playing chess.
OTOH, take a card game or a dice game. . .if the computer was peeking at your cards, or changing the roll of a die or distributing itself better cards, those are all typical ways of cheating in real life and easily controlled by a computer. If the programmers set a computer up to do that, I’d call it cheating.
As for something like a first person shooter game. . .it seems like it would be cheating if the computer does not force it’s avatars to follow the same rules as the player (moving through walls, bullets that change paths mid-flight, whatever).
Making the computer AWESOME (or even unbeatable) within those boundaries wouldn’t be considered cheating.
I don’t see what’s amazing about that position. If white immediately takes the black rook (the obvious move), he secures a draw by insufficient power. If white makes any other move, black has enough time to get the rook to safety and to capture the white pawn before white’s king can possibly get over to it to protect it, leaving black with K+R and possibly Q vs. K, a simple textbook win. This is about as straightforward as chess positions can possibly get.
This thread has a surprising number of replies for the vagueness of the OP. Nada needs to come back and be more specific. I mean, here:
RandomNumber = Rand(1,9)
print (’“I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10. What is it?”)
input (HumanGuess)
if (HumanGuess = RandomNumber) then RandomNumber = RandomNumber + 1
print("Sorry, the number was ",RandomNumber)
There! 
Actually, I’d write that as:
RandomNumber = Rand(1,9)
print ('"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10. What is it?")
input (HumanGuess)
if (HumanGuess = RandomNumber) then
{
do
{
RandomNumber = Rand(1, 9)
} until (RandomNumber != HumanGuess)
}
print("Sorry, the number was ",RandomNumber)
That way, the human has no suspicion that you’re cheating… 
Other than the fact that he never wins, anyway
As for the OP, I never play video poker or other computerized gambling games for that reason.