This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades.
People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did.
Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.
Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.
Part of it from my layman's perspective is that today, even home exercising frequently involves protein shakes. As you go into even basic body building or training, you start taking more and more "Stuff". There's no clear obvious intuitive big line between "natural talent and hard work" and "illegal chemical cheating". Reading the details of the tests involved a few years ago made me believe the line we draw is thin, porous, arbitrary and ever-changing.
The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.
Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.
I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).
Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.
Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:
3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)
2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)
1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")
--------
3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)
2: For your National-cup
1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)
It is actually most likely that they are doping, the history of revelations in these sports indicates that at various moments in the past, it WAS the case that any given elite athlete was most likely to be doping, it is probably the case now too.
It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.
It's hard to assume anything else. If you are not cheating, you are not trying hard enough to win.
If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.
You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.
EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche
I'm old enough to remember the Rosa Ruiz cheating scandal from the Boston Marathon. 40 years ago everyone kind of laughed it off as a one-off thing that could never happen again because of cameras along the route and better safeguards, but it's emerged that lots of people cheat at the Boston Marathon (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/04/22/boston-marath...) and others (https://www.marathoninvestigation.com).
For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.
The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):
... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.
It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.
It's hilarious you think this after such blatant scandals in cycling coming out.
If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones
When the top 30 100m times all belong to athletes that have been popped for doping with the exception of Usain Bolt you have to ask yourself is he just THAT amazing or is he amazing plus have the best doping team and protection.
You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.
If you’ve seen how athletes are raised up nowadays, you’ll see why people say that.
There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.
If world records were set virtually across the board in all sports with doping, and there are athletes achieving or beating these marks...
For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.
If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?
Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".
Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.
Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.
Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?
And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.
It should be the default assumption. It is difficult to believe how otherwise-astute people can fall into the feeling-good traps of "talent can beat everything" or "you need to want it more". PEDs get the user a very substantial advantage, from the ability to train more, to changes in muscles mass, to much faster recovery from injuries and so on. Apart from the health risks we all know about (which are in reality overestimated, relatively speaking, otherwise we would see former professional athletes drop like flies), they make the whole machine way better.
Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.
Isnt that even with doping you need to work incredibly hard and make the most of you talents? (since everybody is doing this, it just raises the bar throughout, doesnt it)
Go to openpowerlifting.org rankings and compare the ipf raw records to all of the existing federations. The difference is staggering.
Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.
In some cases, it’s true though. For example, the NFL didn’t test for HGH at all until 2010 and their test remains inadequate even today. It’s fairly reasonable to assume a majority of players were using it prior to 2010 if their choice was between getting a million-dollar contract and taking HGH.
Great point, which I am totally ignoring to point out that I think you meant "2020's" instead of "1920's". But great point, though, about the larger issue.
Gresham's law for chess would be noncheaters leave when cheaters move in. All that's left on Facebook is conspiracy bots chattering to eachother and suchlike.
I used to cheat on chess.com. It started as a small bit of cheating here and there, just checking every now and then if the move I was going to make was the best. Of course, the computer always had a better move and then I examine the line and told myself I probably would have thought of that! Like a drug, it escalated and I was checking moves all the time. I was never caught but I was ashamed and just stopped playing. Actually, more than ashamed, cheating took all the joy out of it as it felt like a job, switching tabs, and you don't get the dopamine hit when you think of a great line yourself. I uninstalled scid vs pc and opened a lichess account and never cheated on that. Though lichess tells me loads of opponents I've played have been banned for cheating. I never suspect a thing.
I got paired with someone rated 400 points higher than me (no idea why).
The dude was destroying me, but somewhere in the middlegame, he let his guard down and exposed himself to a mate-in-one. For once in my life, I saw the mate and I won.
The dude was FURIOUS. He immediately asked for a rematch and I said I had to go. Then the insults came ("chicken shit", etc.).
He even messaged me a few times over the course of a few months (same kind of name calling) and challenged me a few times.
Eventually, I thought, "You know what will really upset him? If I accept a rematch and win again."
So, I accepted one of his challenges and I used a computer. Obviously, he lost and he was FURIOUS again.
Not my proudest moment, but I enjoyed it while it was happening.
But yeah, regular cheating just kind of takes the joy out of the competition.
That has happened to me more than once too. I usually take the rematch because I can often win the second game too, I’ll guess 15% of the time. Almost always the better player is trying an opening trap which is dubious but will cause me to loose in the first 10 moves if I miss it. So I just make really sure to look for tactics extra carefully in the opening. If I survive I can often win. And if I loose I get to learn a new opening trap. :)
on lichess, after every game I use the analysis tool to see all the good moves I missed, and sometimes play out alternate endings. my game has improved a lot because of it, but people get furious with me because I don't accept rematches. If I rematch, I wont have the game fresh in memory and miss the opportunity to learn
Lichess will flag your account as a cheater w/o notifying you so that your opponents see the flag and avoid games. I know this because a friend of mine who is an average player got flagged that way after a stretch of games he won handily, including one against me where I checked computer analysis and noticed he made zero incorrect moves. A red flag popped up next to his screenname, I asked if he was aware of it and he said he couldn’t see it and got no notification of it.
I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
I learned the “it sucks all joy out” lesson as a child when I cheated my entire way through Goldeneye 64. I got to the end and felt so unfulfilled.
I discovered that you’re better off walking away from a game that feels so insurmountably difficult rather than cheat a bit or a lot.
“I’m not going to finish so why not cheat to see the ending?” Was always disappointing. I’d rather that mountain still exist off in the distance that I’ll never summit.
When I was a kid my dad prohibited me from using cheats in Civilization I :D And if I remember well, the cheats were readily available through a toggl in the dropdown menu
My game of choice is Go rather than Chess, but this seems similar.
When I was young I hated playing games against the AI. It always felt unreal to me and there was no satisfaction in it. Now, I immensely prefer playing the computer - it goes at my pace, I can get up and leave, I can take all the time I want for my move, and if I do something dumb I just undo back to where I feel comfortable and play better. When I get legitimately stuck I ask the computer for advice.
In this way, I basically always win against a superior player. It may not be ideal for practice, but I just play for fun and find it satisfying to win.
I recently quit online chess completely. The last straw was lichess sending me a warning because I pointed out to a guy he was obviously using an engine. The cheating just got tiresome. I’m going to go back to playing over the board with actual people.
The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational not to cheat to find an edge. People cheat for the same reason they do anything: because it's worth it.
You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
the UX with puzzles on chess.com is much better. The analysis after the game is also pretty cool. It did help me become better. (I'm a super noob) I would happily use lichess but there's a lack of feedback after games there (IMO)
I had a math exam a long while ago. One of those three hour long and the professor had me seated by myself in the math library. So I asked:
- There's tons of math books here. How can you know I won't cheat?
- Bjourne, do you intend to cheat?
- No, of course not.
- Alright. Good luck on your exam!
For some classes, especially as you get higher in fields, no amount of open books will help you in an exam. If you're able to figure out the material using a book then and there while not knowing it before, you deserve the grade.
When I was an undergrad (UC Berkeley) all Math and CS classes beyond basics (like Calculus etc) allowed "cheat sheets" in exams and some were "open book" (i.e. bring whatever the fuck you want (nothing digital of course, just paper, no calculator)). I don't remember an incident when bringing a cheat sheet was useful during the exam, maybe 1 time for a minor thing. Writing out the cheat sheet before the exam definitely helps learning though. If it's something you can look up during the exam, it's not gonna be something professor will ask you. If it's something you need to read, understand and conceptualize during the exam, it's gonna take you long enough that it'll be a significant disadvantage.
EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.
I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
My lowest level graph theory exam at university was "bring anything you think will help you". Including our teacher's book which had all the course contents and then some.
Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
yep, when I was an undergrad there was a physics prof who would give us six hour long unlimited resources exams, we were just on our honour not to ask other people for help
I had no idea lichess was FOSS and that it was written mostly in Scala [0]. I've been playing in chess.com just because it was the first platform I saw. Thank you, I'm definitely making the switch.
One way to get around the cameras and the invigilator in the room for a live chess match is to have a small wireless vibrating device somewhere on your body that can encode information such as coordinates and move difficulty.
Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
When I played (at a national level) people would have a laptop connected and playing in another room. They would play the enemies moves on the computer as the player and playing in the tournament would play the moves made by the computer.
I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
How could the top players be better than any chess engine? It seems like even in 2000 any off the shelf chess engine could beat any human. But I guess not...
It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.
EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
It would be easy enough to have a remote friend watching a mirror of your screen. Use an inductive loop earpiece hidden inside your ear hooked up to a phone and they could read out your next moves. I suppose you could write a program using CV to decode the opponents moves on screen and translate them into chess software in lieu of a friend performing the same task, but that's a bit overkill.
While not a Faraday cage, for some high-ranked tournaments (like the WC title) they are now subjected to a scan almost like at an airport before entering a sealed room.
You would have to close the room for sounds and light, too.
To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.
If people are determined to cheat, cheat they will. Bluetooth controlled vibrating butplugs are an off the shelf product at this point; not sure if most scanners will show internal objects.
> Perhaps thinking of Lance Armstrong, he added: “I was a big fan of a certain cyclist and a part of me understands the pressure to succeed at all costs. ..."
Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing.
There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.
"Doping" sounds bad like he's taking drugs, but isn't doping just putting your own blood back inside of you to get higher red blood cell counts? How is that much different from living on top of a mountain for a few months and then coming down on race day with elevated red blood cell counts? Is the latter cheating as well?
Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing.
But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race.
Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?
So did Festina, and so did practically every other cycling team in the EPO-nuts 90s.
Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
Readit News
This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades.
People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did.
Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.
Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.
Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.
I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).
Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.
Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:
3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)
2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)
1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")
--------
3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)
2: For your National-cup
1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)
"Of the 50 fastest men's 100m sprint times ever, only 15 have been run by an athlete NOT banned for drugs. All 15 were by Usain Bolt."
https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1164654855329329152...
It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.
If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.
Notice the discontinuity around 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_metres_world_record_pro...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5000_metres_world_record_progr...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_1500_...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_sta...
You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.
EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche
For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.
The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):
... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.
It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.
If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones
You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.
There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.
For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.
If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?
Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".
Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.
Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.
Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?
And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.
Sports are a theatric illusion.
Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.
Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.
Anti doping agencies are always behind in doping research and many athletes have access to the best clinics there are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
Gresham's law for chess would be noncheaters leave when cheaters move in. All that's left on Facebook is conspiracy bots chattering to eachother and suchlike.
Story:
I got paired with someone rated 400 points higher than me (no idea why). The dude was destroying me, but somewhere in the middlegame, he let his guard down and exposed himself to a mate-in-one. For once in my life, I saw the mate and I won.
The dude was FURIOUS. He immediately asked for a rematch and I said I had to go. Then the insults came ("chicken shit", etc.).
He even messaged me a few times over the course of a few months (same kind of name calling) and challenged me a few times.
Eventually, I thought, "You know what will really upset him? If I accept a rematch and win again."
So, I accepted one of his challenges and I used a computer. Obviously, he lost and he was FURIOUS again.
Not my proudest moment, but I enjoyed it while it was happening.
But yeah, regular cheating just kind of takes the joy out of the competition.
If you haven't played in a while, then glicko will give you a wide ratings deviation, and pair you against much stronger or much weaker opponents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system
Well, as the saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Maybe we should just move over to computer-assisted human chess and compete that way?
I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
I discovered that you’re better off walking away from a game that feels so insurmountably difficult rather than cheat a bit or a lot.
“I’m not going to finish so why not cheat to see the ending?” Was always disappointing. I’d rather that mountain still exist off in the distance that I’ll never summit.
When I was young I hated playing games against the AI. It always felt unreal to me and there was no satisfaction in it. Now, I immensely prefer playing the computer - it goes at my pace, I can get up and leave, I can take all the time I want for my move, and if I do something dumb I just undo back to where I feel comfortable and play better. When I get legitimately stuck I ask the computer for advice.
In this way, I basically always win against a superior player. It may not be ideal for practice, but I just play for fun and find it satisfying to win.
The one sure way to find / detect players with cheats was... to use the same cheats. It saved my sanity but cost me the joy of playing.
I now can't play FPS's anymore but am limited to MMO's :(
You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
Edit: Links.
1. https://lichess.org/source
2. https://github.com/ornicar/lila
EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.
I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible.
There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.
[0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila
Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.
EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.
Trivial with the Stockfish open source chess engine
Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing.
There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US...
[2]: http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/
Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
So, yeah, the issue is someone getting an advantage, which in turn puts pressure on athletes to have to dope or take PEDs to have a career.
I'm not sure what the equilibrium outcome is if the restrictions are lifted, but the usual assumption is that it's a race to the bottom.
But WADA clearly has a perverse incentive to ban more and more drugs simply to justify its own existence.
Maybe the solution is to let athletes themselves figure out the rules, since they have to live with them.
Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.