Why is it hard to eliminate cheating in professional chess?

The comment at the end surprised me. Surely you can separate players from certain types of technology during a game, right?

It becomes harder every year.

At what level do you think they should start using strip searches and metal detectors? County, state, nationals?

How high should the penalties be for functionaries who conspire with a player?

Do they have county or state chess championships? I’m pretty sure they didn’t when I was still playing rated chess, but that was a long time ago. :slight_smile:

At any rate, metal detectors aren’t exactly invasive: those could certainly be used at any level where it was worth the hassle of renting and using one. Certainly for grandmaster play, and national championships.

Expulsion from rated chess seems appropriate.

How about keeping the game room (and any necessary adjunct rooms, like the bathroom) shielded against radio signals? Though I suppose that’d still leave it possible to have a portable computer running some suitably powerful engine.

Body cavity search.

Isn’t it illegal to purposefully block cell phone signals?

It’s illegal to jam them, to have a device that’s creating its own noisy “signal” that drowns out the real cell signal. But there’s nothing at all wrong with just blocking them. At most, I think that you might be required to notify patrons of a public building that you’re doing so, but I’m not sure there’s even that requirement.

I’d love to see chess competitions in a Faraday cage Thunderdome.

Technology has completely ruined online chess. It is completely impossible to tell if someone is using a computer to do their moves.

This has both the problem that if you lose, you don’t know if you lost to a person or a computer, and if you win, they may very well think that you cheated. My guess is is that most online chess is done by bots against bots these days, but I haven’t played in a good while.

that it has become such a problem in real life chess surprised me for a moment, but then, knowing how hard people will work in order to look like they worked hard at something, it really should not have.

However, since we obviously cannot effectively compete against computers at chess anymore, can we build bots to compete with each other, and take credit for that?

Bot vs bot seems pretty silly, until you realize that it is actually bot programmer vs bot programmer, until of course, the programming is automated.

Maybe eventually we just see which one of us can give more juice to the matrix.

I hear you.
But it has also given us a bunch of chess24 “Banter Blitz” videos. In these, Magnus Carlsen plays online blitz games against challengers of various skill levels. And he gives running commentary on his thought process - as he handily defeats most (but not all) of them.

Even brief insights into the workings of one of the greatest chess minds of all time* are really something amazing.

  • Some would omit “one of”

The programming sort of is automated: Google’s AlphaChess, which absolutely curbstomped the previous best program, was never actually programmed to play chess. It was just programmed with the rules, and then learned how to play well by playing against copies of itself a bazillion times.

Of course, that just makes the programming even more impressive, because the Google programmers were able to create a program capable of that level of self-learning.

How about if someone wears a hearing aid in everyday life? Is the Federation going to demand tournament players remove their hearing aids because they could also be Bluetooth receivers? What if the player has a cochlear implant?

Many of the ones I have read about involve players leaving for bathroom breaks. The local jail can monitor you to ensure you don’t have a whizzinator, surely they can have an attentive bathroom attendant?

Why would a legitimate hearing aid be required for a game of chess?

And this is how we get Skynet :smiley:

Hearing the roar of the crowd after a particularly devious Knight fork of the King and Queen?

I feel like the balance of problem vs. solution is evolving appropriately, at least over the board (i.e., in real life chess; online has different challenges).

Sure, you could turn a chess tournament into a locked-down totalitarian environment, but the solution would become worse than the problem. To achieve 0% cheating, you’d need to have dress codes, pat-downs (pats-down?) at the restrooms, separate facilities specifically for the players vs. civilians, a prohibition on spectators, a limit on medical devices, and more… all to stop the rare cheater that will get caught eventually anyway. For this recent case, everyone knew he was cheating. It was just a matter of catching him in the act so that the case would be open-and-shut.

Side question: After a few days of reporting that Rausis was caught using his phone, news outlets started reporting that Rausis admitted to cheating, but I have not seen the actual admission. The quoted text always refers to his admitting that he used his phone (which is disallowed), but not that he used it for chess. Is this a case of one journalist misinterpreting the quote and then others picking it up? Or has Rausis admitted that he was cheating (which he clearly was)?

We’ve had technology-based sports for years. Motor racing is a good example.

I’m glad you posted this story. Makes me wonder, why some people just can’t find other ways of cheating? I mean, it’s a chess tournament, and you need work hard on your skills so that’s an absurd to even consider letting a machine do their thinking for them. It seems when money is involved in the game as prizes, problems tend to multiply - ruining the game in the result. So why do we need so-called professional players at all in the game of chess? (that’s a rhetorical question)
Guess the best solution should be a lifetime ban from the professional game for a cheating player, since if someone wants to cheat, well, - he/she will.
And even if you’re going to check players for electronic devices each time they enter the toilets, they will find a way.