The article suggests just allowing engines and scoring players by how far they can deviate from the engine and still win. But this is no longer chess - it’s more like golf - so it doesn’t solve the problem of people cheating at chess.
It's also not even clear that a specially tuned chess engine couldn't generate an "optimal" set of deviations from the default engine behaviour such that the person playing those moves would win anyway.
At least right now, cheating in chess online has not happened at the very highest level of the game. There have been GMs that have been caught cheating but as far as I know never a top 100 player. The ideas in the article seem focuseed on solving a problem that does not yet exist.
On the topic of combined human/engine chess, this is something that does exist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess. It hasn't really gotten any serious traction, but I think it would be something interesting to see. I suspect that chess engines are so far advanced now though that humans would add nothing.
Why is cheating reportedly such a big problem in chess?
I have a guess about it in online shooter video games: I've been thinking it might be mostly adolescents and teens who are still developing a sense of character, and who enjoy the "winning" part and/or the god-mode griefing of others.
I think more some people put a value on the external experience of 'winning' over the internal experience of the game or being true to themselves. That somewhat combined with cultural or enviromental attitudes and expectations towards cheating.
It's a problem in any game, chess is just a low barrier for entry to cheat and is easy to hide. Open a new browser tab and off you go, don't make too many perfect moves and pepper your game with decent evaluation but not perfect and it's hard to prove you're cheating.
It's just like any other sport that attracts cheating, doping, and so forth. Lance Armstrong got his whole cycling team using illegal steroids, baseball pitchers put goo on the ball to make it curve harder, and there was a lady who won the Boston Marathon by taking the subway to near the finish line instead of actually running the whole race. The usual incentives of money and recognition are enough to motivate an awful lot of crappy behaviour, in sports and everywhere else.
neilv's hypothesis is much more likely, you won't win money cheating at chess or online shooter games and those who do cheat usually do so because of character flaws. Can't really compare no-stakes recreational cheating with high stakes pro sports where everyone is trying to cheat in some way or another because of the money / status incentives.
I struggle to label it as character flaws because it implies that it is an immutable property of the person. In reality, a lot of the no-stakes cheaters are compensating for something else. People often use video games as a means of escapism. There’s no reason not to think that people cheat in video games as a means of experiencing success, while living in a world that increasingly becomes difficult to succeed in.
There’s another group of “cheaters” and that’s just people who like pushing the game to the limits. Most video game speed running nowadays involves exploits and bugs. There’s often a fine line between labeling something as “cheating” vs “a whole new way to experience media”. I wouldn’t label those people as people with character flaws, even if they use these exploits maliciously. Some people don’t see the video game as something holy and untouchable. They see it as a testing ground, like how a pen tester might see a company’s infra. And their innovations sometimes produces great benefit for the gaming society, for example advances in speed running, etc.
I think the people that cheat in online chess probably fall in the first category. But I wanted to produce the second category because they might also be labeled as “cheaters” with character flaws.
The other thing is that it’s (in the absence of specific bot detection) really really easy to cheat at online chess. Just crack open your chess app of choice and crank the AI skill to max.
With marathons you have to sneak on and off the course, with steroids you have to find a safe and reliable source of steroids and even then still train a ton, with shooter games you have to find an aimbot specifically designed for your game of choice - but here any old chess app with a bot function works as a cheat.
> with shooter games you have to find an aimbot specifically designed for your game of choice
One thing I'd really like to see is a aimbot that uses machine learning to detect character heads from raw screen graphics.
Bonus points if it runs as a smartphone app that can interface with a (preferably off-the-shelf, to maximize the number of people who can use it) USB mouse. Because fuck anti-cheat DRM.
This exists for CSGO. I know several people in the CSGO cheating scene that do this. (Note that it is OVERKILL for regular competitive matches, since VAC sucks, there are open source cheats that have been undetected for years. it's only worth it on third party anti cheat platforms like Faceit or ESEA).
However, a direct memory access (DMA) card that reads player positions from the RAM is more popular as it just requires an arduino between the mouse to overwrite some of the mouse movements to aim towards a head (in addition to the DMA card). it requires a few hundred bucks in hardware and skill in firmware to make sure the DMA card cannot be detected. But in exchange you play on a semipro level mostly undetected. Search "Project EPO" and "Lohouse" on youtube for more info; he's a real skilled programmer who even sent a build to a famous youtuber in order to bring awareness to it.
I was deep into the CSGO cheating scene, and yes, it is just as toxic and cringe as it sounds, 99% 14 y/o toxic skids.
I was a kid who always would try to break every system I came across, no matter what it was. I disassembled our FiOS fiber box when I was 11 just to see if I could get us onto the 1Gb plan somehow. I bypassed the "free beta over" modal on a major photo retouching program to get myself free $99 license keys when I was 12 (inspect elem ftw). I was just always in this mindset of "how do I get around this" even if there was literally nothing of desire behind it.
So naturally when it came to anti cheats, I spent a lot of time reverse engineering and had the same mindset. I never cheated against others in a way to benefit; sometimes to just troll, sometimes to joke around with friends, and occasionally I would be a dick to others who were being a dick as well. I started developing and contributing to other cheats and talking to other programmers as well. I still have a lot of the contacts, especially the people that sell thousands/$ cheats that get used by top 100 in country players (not pro, but tournament players)...
But I will be honest. It got really painful when I realized cheats that I contributed to were being used against my favorite youtubers. I know it sounds stupid, almost like doublethink, to watch and enjoy famous youtubers who vehemently attack cheaters while cheating myself. But in Tom Scott's words [0], "everyone draws the moral line of what's acceptable just slightly below what they're actually doing". But I've nearly entirely given up with playing the game because I have found far more enriching uses of my time, than doing something that actively harms so many people.
If you develop cheats, it's a challenging problem that you can make a good bit of money if you are successful. As for the users, some do it to win money in competitions, some just like to play on god-mode. It's definitely more prevalent in free games since there's no financial disincentive when you get banned. There are also other ways to cheat that aren't actually cheating, like smurfing where a good player just makes new accounts to play against low level players or intentionally loses higher level games to bring them back down to low-level games.
The writing is kind of a confused mess. It jumps around without making connections between paragraphs, has no unifying structure, and somehow credits the actor Michael Caine with knowing a lot about a subject because he happens to play an expert in those subjects? Does that make Richard Chamberlain an expert in medicine because of his long-running role as Dr. Kildare?
Chess is an art, it only has meaning because humans give it meaning, and has a human audience. Keep the win-tie-draw scheme but apply bonus points in top-tier tournaments for “beautiful” wins, as determined by a large-ish group of Master and above players in near-real-time. Like style points in Olympic sports. The Internet makes such a scheme workable, and the chess community gets more entertaining games to watch as a result.
