[sharedfrog]

This is relevant to today's events because Magnus Carlsen just withdrew from a tournament[1] after yesterday's loss to a significantly lower rated opponent who had previously been suspended for cheating on chess.com. The tournament organizers have also implemented additional anti-cheating protocols starting today.

Whatever comes out of these accusations, the chess world will sure enjoy its new infusion of drama.

[1] https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1566848734616555523

[icelancer]

Wow, somehow I missed this. Pretty wild accusations from Magnus and Hikaru on this. Hans just had a horrific tournament in his last attempt, which makes this whole thing pretty interesting.

Hans didn't play engine perfect lines when beating Magnus in the Sinquefield Cup, though he obviously played extremely accurately.

[squidbeak]

Ignoring the lines (and any cheat at this level would be canny enough to avoid the top few engine moves), there's something seriously off about Niemann's analysis - shallowness and incoherence covered over with bluster. Even Ramirez seemed disdainful of his reasoning about his position against Firoujia tonight.

It's pretty grim for him if he really didn't cheat. He won't be invited to a tournament involving Magnus again.

[textadventure]

No GM would be stupid enough to cheat playing 100% engine lines, they of all people know which engine lines would look particularly suspicious. All they need to know is to avoid any serious blunders, and play some important moves here and there, and that's enough to get a serious advantage at this level.

[lovemenot]

It turns out that "Clever Hans" was reading subconscious body language cues from Magnus

[ManWith2Plans]

Do you have a source of Magnus accusations? He seems to have withdrawn relatively quietly, perhaps consciously trying to refrain from cheating accusations.

Hikaru was less reserved on the other hand. He called Hans's post-game interview analysis sub-2700 level after Hans Neiman badly mis-evaluated several positions.

[bananamerica]

I think it is important to notice that Magnus actually didn't make any actual accusation.

[bo1024]

It doesn't sound like Magnus has made any accusation, right?

[fasthands9]

I know very little about chess.

Do computers play like top humans? Or different stylistically?

ie - if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer?

[CSMastermind]

There are "computer moves" which stand out vs human players. These normally show up in lines where there are many options of roughly equal value and the computer picks a move that is infinitesimally better but out of 'theme' with the position.

They can also show up when for instance there are multiple checkmates in a position. The computer will choose the one requiring the least number of moves even if it requires deep calculation and perfect play. Humans will just trade off material and go for an easy win.

Now that chess engines have started to use neural networks in move selection the amount of "computer moves" has decreased noticeably.

> if you were a top player and looking at the moves of an opponent, could you discern if the style was more similar to a top rated human or a top rated computer?

With a large enough sample size I believe that top players would be able to tell the difference. But that sample size is much larger than a single game or likely even the ~10 games being played in a tournament.

Edit:

Oh I should also mention that in the context of cheating with computers there are more signals to look at than the moves themselves. Time management is normally a huge giveaway for cheating. In online chess this normally manifests itself as players using the exact same amount of time for each move in spite of the positions being very different in terms of complexity.

In the match being talked about above Hans, the challenger, used a suspicious amount of time during the opening sequence. He played the opening moves in around 10 minutes which is weird because if he had memorized the lines he would have played them much faster. If he didn't memorize the lines then it would have taken him much more than 10 minutes to calculate it all.

[grumpopotamus]

The top chess engines are now much much stronger than humans, and they will find some moves that grandmasters are unlikely to even consider. One recent example was Kf8 in the recent Patrycja Waszczuk cheating scandal: https://www.chess.com/news/view/patrycja-waszczuk-cheating-2.... I watched Hikaru Nakamura analyze the game on stream and he burst out laughing when he saw the infamous Kf8 move, since it was such a bizarre move for a human to play.

[faeriechangling]

I can't find a citation but I recall that computers agreed with the moves of grandmasters from the pre-computer era about 60% of the time.

Generally, the biggest heuristic for identifying cheating is identifying somebodies moves share statistical similarity to the top moves of common engines (Especially stockfish). This doesn't really work after a single game, but anybody playing the top move of stockfish 90% of the time over 100 games is a cheater. Nobody that isn't cheating can do that. Cheaters are savvy though, they will notice in a position there are maybe 5 decent moves they can choose from, so for just that position they will choose stockfish's 5th choice. Or maybe they'll only check the engine at the most critical moments of the game and turn the engine off and play normally afterwards. Notice that the person being debated in this article is somebody with a history of cheating, the evidence they cheated in this specific game is likely not as good as the evidence they are just generally a cheater.

On top of this more empirical analysis, there's more subjective analysis. Humans tend to try to simplify games when they're ahead to reduce computational complexity, but computers don't do this as it's not a good strategy for a computer. Humans will tend to follow a narrative and follow a general idea throughout a game with ideas they calculated earlier in the game or in their preparation, whereas computers don't care about narratives and will completely switch plans on a dime. In the endgame the computer starts having a LOT of winning moves that it hasn't calculated to the end and can start making very offbeat choices, whereas humans tend to use a set of rote memorised strategies that are known wins. Again though, a skilled cheater realises all this and will choose weaker more human-like moves that are probably the engines 2nd or 3rd choice.

There's also metadata. Cheaters usually take a few seconds to think about a move that a human would make instantly (this came up in the article where it took the cheater 20 seconds to make their first move), they probably exhibit different browser/app interaction habits. Humans have all sorts of particularities about UI interaction and time management. A lot of people play blitz and bullet chess because cheaters struggle to cheat convincingly under time pressure.

[bjourne]

Yes, you could very easily do that. However, the theory is that cheaters would let the engine decide only 3-4 critical moves during a game and that would be enough to turn the tide in their favor. In chess small advantages compounds so this computer help would be enough for grand masters to beat the world champion. A cheater that understands cheating countermeasures could easily fly under the radar that way.

[seanhunter]

There are certain moves that players will absolutely call "engine moves". These are usually moves with no discernable purpose (even when calculating deeply) that later on turn out to have been crucial dispite the fact that they don't seem to progress any conventional goal or deal with any current concrete threat. If you analyse a game with Stockfish you'll often see it suggest (say) a calm-looking king move that no human would ever play in the middle of a massive attack but that turns out to resolve some deep positional issue later on.

The clearest example in modern play is a4 and h4 as white (eg early h4 vs the King's Indian Defense) or a5/h5 as black. These are now frequently played in various positions because since they were discovered a few years back by alphazero, they have been extensively examined and found to be good, but prior to that, no strong human would play them.

[camjohnson26]

If every move was an engine it would be suspicious, but it would be easy to just use the engine a few times at important moments in the game to get a huge advantage, and it would be very difficult to detect. The top player normally know the best few moves on the board and choose between them based on long term strategy.

[ummonk]

Top humans tend to pick a slightly weaker move than computers every few moves. By letting the computer veto their chosen move sometimes but not all the time (and only doing so when the computer's chosen move was one they were strongly considering), they can have stronger performance without anyone catching on.

[ken47]

The top chess engine was ELO rated at 3546 in 2021. The top rated player ever was Magnus at 2882. To put that ELO difference in context, even if Magnus gets the first move, the chess engine is expected to win 0.979934616 of the time. Within that gap, there are many moves that can be played that are superior to human moves by varying degrees.

It would be very hard to detect a sophisticated cheater solely by examining their moves in a vacuum. They could pick moves that appear to be "human" e.g. moves that appear to be chosen based on the common heuristics that strong human players tend to rely upon, rather than moves based on very deep brute force calculations, where we could never match the strongest chess engines.

The giveaway is usually in the time required for each move. Humans will tend to spend varying amounts of time on each move, with significantly more time spent at critical moments in a game. A computer will pretty much spend the same amount of time for each move. But even here, a sophisticated cheater could disguise this side effect by only using computer assistance at critical moments.

[1] https://wismuth.com/elo/calculator.html#rating1=3546&rating2...

[thret]

Agadmator covered this game and explains a disgusting computer line quite well. Note that under time pressure, a human can only calculate so many lines. They will immediately see a range of possible good lines, explore them to some depth and choose the best looking one. This engine line takes a bad looking path which comes good only after 19 moves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64o62MrhvXc&t=1400s

[colechristensen]

There are some grandmaster chess streamers who play random people on the internet and pick up rather quickly when they are playing against a chess engine instead of a person.

In a nutshell, computers do some things that are very unlikely for humans to do. A lot of the play is similar, but some things are outliers and high level chess players will notice the unusual style and high accuracy moves of a person assisted by a computer.

[hocuspocus]

In the moment I doubt a top GM would notice. Everyone is preparing using state-of-the-art chess engines and taking inspiration, even from moves that would have been considered crazy a decade ago.

After the fact, it'd probably be more obvious. Human players will typically avoid unnatural moves that require long sequences of perfect play before they pay off.

But top players are also the best qualified at cheating in a way that wouldn't raise suspicion. Many games are lost or drawn because of small mistakes or inaccuracies during the endgame. And playing a perfect endgame is not implausible at this level.

[veidelis]

I don't understand why a GM would need to explain some of his moves precisely and with a deep understanding of the position as some commentators here point out. Why is that so indicative of cheating? It's known that classical chess has a lot of theory, and Hans himself admits that he checked an engine line the evening before the game. So what? Here's the quote:

" I didn’t guess it, but by some miracle I checked this today, and it’s such a ridiculous miracle that I don’t even remember why I checked it. I just remembered 12…h6 and everything after this, and I’ve no idea why I would check such a ridiculous thing, but I checked it, and I even knew that 13…Be6! is just very good. It’s so ridiculous that I checked it. " https://chess24.com/en/read/news/sinquefield-cup-3-niemann-b...

[ebiester]

It's subtle, but the sheer amount of time that it takes to become a top level GM make it such that there's a bit of "GM Speak" that all of them seem to do. So, there is first a cultural variation: the way he speaks doesn't sound like the rest of the experts. By itself, it isn't damning.

However, people at the GM level also tend to have an ability to look at a position and remember what they were thinking at that point of time. They internalize lines in a way that is a branch of moves. So, in this case Be6! is such a sharp position that you would expect them to talk a bit through it because it takes a lot of prep.

Further, when they turned off Stockfish analysis, his analysis goes down sharply.

Further, he was banned from chess.com twice because he was cheating with an engine.

Further, when he was talking about a set of analysis, he made something up on the spot involving a match between Carlsen and GM Wesley So, and Wesley So said that what he had said was impossible for multiple reasons on another chess streamer's twitch.

It's a lot of little things that don't add up. It's like if you were in an interview and asking a developer to explain some code on their Github about ML, and they sounded like they didn't understand the basic principles of the model they coded. It doesn't mean they didn't write the code, but it casts suspicion.

[runnerup]

It's just one signal among others. All other GM's who have beat Magnus in classical format tournaments have been able to explain themselves very clearly. This guy can't. He might be a more "intuitive" player, or he might be cheating.

There's no smoking gun to show laypeople like you and I but people familiar with the scene and its norms do find this to be a salient point of data against Hans.

[nsv]

What people are speculating is that Magnus' prep got leaked to Hans leading to him researching this line. Of course just speculation, no hard proof. I tend to be of the mindset of "innocent until proven guilty".

[queuebert]

I know some fairly high rated players who've had accounts suspended for cheating because they got angry and used an engine to cheat a cheater. So you can be a good player and a cheater.

Edit: For clarification, after losing to an obvious engine user, they used an engine themselves to strike back.

[pvillano]

A speed running cheating expert on YouTube has observed that many cheating scandals start with a genuinely skilled player breaking records legitimately. However, that player starts cheating later in their career to maintain their status when they can't keep up with the brutal grind of being the best.

[zibby8]

Is there any evidence Hans Niemann was suspended specifically for cheating? I’ve seen multiple unsubstantiated claims, but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating.

[sgjohnson]

> but no source that definitively states he was suspended for cheating.

And no source will. I'm not sure why chess.com didn't make it public (by a notice on his profile that his account was suspended for Fair Play violations).

But yes, the only 2 entities that can definitively state that are:

1. chess.com

2. Hans himself

Not sure why chess.com won't, but Hans won't for obvious reasons.

[avip]

This makes little sense no? With 200 ELO diff Hans should beat Magnus ~1/4 games.

[icelancer]

Only by K factor; those calculations don't hold at the highest levels, the distribution is skewed. Magnus also rarely loses with the white pieces in classical; his last loss was in 2018 at Biel vs. a much better player than Hans.

[sdwr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeJrItfQqw&t=377s

I don't see a cheater, I see someone who's been grinding for a while and finally popped off. Dunno if he can keep it up though, might be one of those miracle performances that he never recovers from (ex. Linsanity). He comes across as arrogant and a little affected (the hand flourishes, stylistic pauses), but I like him a lot better than Hikaru. Hoping he continues to see success and smooths out his interview performance over time.

If anything, I'm suspicious it's was a throw from Magnus, or at least subconsciously choosing when to relinquish the throne. This is the guy you want to see in the spotlight. He's interesting, confident, and puts his heart into the game.

[tzs]

That was the result of the four games they played at the FTX Crypto Cup in Miami about 3 weeks ago.

Hans, playing back, crushed Magnus in their first game. Then afterwards when an interviewer tried to interview him about the game he just said "The chess speaks for itself" and walked away.

A lot of commentators interpreted that as a bit of trash talk about Magnus, who convincingly won the remaining 3 games.

[tzs]

Elo gives expected outcome in points, not wins. If the formula says ~1/4, it means you should get ~1/4 of the points, not ~1/4 of the wins.

If Hans were to score 1 point off Magnus in a 4 game match it would be far more likely to be be by drawing twice than by winning once.

[epigramx]

I'm not sure why wasn't that blatantly obvious until today. Chess is an extremely unsuitable sport for online because you are 100% free to use the strongest computers on it without 100% no cheat protection at all. It should be ..100% restricted to person-to-person tournaments for keeping score.

[pk2200]

The tournament Carlsen withdrew from today isn't an online event. All the games are played in person at the St. Louis Chess Club.

[rcxdude]

It's pretty easy to detect the blatent cheaters who just copy moves from the top engines: you just run the engines on the game and compare the moves between the player and engine: a close enough match is certainly cheating. More sophisticated cheaters who actually know the game well themselves are harder to catch.

[bumbledraven]

Maybe Ken Regan will investigate.

HOW TO CATCH A CHESS CHEATER Ken Regan Finds Moves Out of Mind Chess Life, June 2014 https://cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/personal/JuneCLarticleKWR.pdf

[runnerup]

I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work":

1) Feet could be stimulated using electrical voltage (low level shocks).

2) Cheaters could put one foot on their knee and the system would only activate vibration when it was near a 90-degree rotation.

3) Cheaters could incorporate a vibration-damping polymer like sorbothane, probably a particularly low durometer to absorb vibrations between shoe insert and floor plate.

I believe the answer is going to have to be establishing a "secure" zone that can't be crossed by anyone without a full x-ray scan of all personal effects and mmWave scanners. If clothing blocks the mmWave scan, people would have to don lighter / more form-fitting clothing while going through the mmWave scanner, send their preferred clothes through the x-ray machine, and then swap into their desired clothes in a secure changing room/bathroom.

The main downside to this is increased cost; I'm not even sure how much this would cost to operate. And for which events would FIDE make this extra cost a requirement? Every FIDE rated event seems completely unreasonable - many of these are small local events with very little budget and lots of 1200 rated players. Perhaps any rated event which includes any of the top-10 players? Is there enough money at that level of chess to fund a requirement like this?

Still some potential for hiding cheating devices in relatively private areas like bathrooms, changing rooms, utility closets, or even "planting" large objects like potted plants/etc with hidden compartments. Most likely I'd imagine the player wouldn't grab these, they'd have someone they trust hide them in the weeks before the event and have a person retrieve these and then drop them in a secure bathroom stall/etc. These would be, for example, identical shoes to the ones they came in with.

Perhaps worth having players go through the scanners again right before they sit down at the table, including in the middle of the match if they take a bathroom break/etc. Maybe that would work, but I'm still concerned about the price -- that would need a separate analysis. How much money is available for each of these matches?

The stakes right now are pretty personal but if nations governments get involved in the cheating for reasons of national pride like they do for the Olympics[0] then I'm not sure anyone would be able to stop the cheating.

Another strategy might be to change the format of the top level of chess to "allow" cheating by giving everyone access to whatever engine they want, powered by identical hardware and watt-limited. So the competition would be "man+machine" vs "man+machine". There's been some chat about this but I'm not sure that matches wouldn't be so insanely even that you'd need 300+ games to build a reasonable confidence interval so that you can even determine which player "won". Currently the TCEC (highest level engine vs. engine championship) uses 22 games per matchup to determine a clear result. Even that would be excessive.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#....

[gs17]

> I considered that you could have vibration sensor plates under player's feet but I can imagine several ways this "doesn't work":

There's also no reason to expect the shoe form factor to be used repeatedly. One cheater was accused of morse code blinks, although he also had a camera on him [0]. When people talk about vibrating shoes there's always someone joking about a wireless buttplug instead, which would probably not show up in the mmWave scan (I don't know exactly what they look like but I doubt they have huge antennas sticking out). A Faraday cage would go a lot further for the price than airport style scanners IMO (and make every match a cage match, which makes chess sound way cooler), but it's probably still overkill.

[0] https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/chess-players-extr...

[systemvoltage]

Hans seems like a cool guy, I watched his interview afterwards.

PowerPlayChess covered the game, it was a magnificent performance but also not perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n27zd_dVtFw

Those saying it he got banned on chess.com, it was total bullshit, here it is of how it happened live on Han's stream when he was an IM: https://livestreamfails.com/post/84343

More info here, if he was really cheating he would have been banned for life. It was a suspension for 60 mins: https://twitter.com/boomer_chess/status/1566872068922265606

Alireza was also banned on Chess.com for cheating but there was none. I don't think HN crowd realizes how easy it is to falsely get banned on Chess.com, don't assassinate someone's character based on that: https://www.chessdom.com/alireza-firouzja-was-banned-for-che...

[jonwachob91]

Hans admitted to Chess.com he cheated, that's why he was allowed back in cash tournaments such as Titled Tuesday.

Firouzja was 11 years old at the time of his ban and he was an unknown commodity at the time. He was quickly unbanned b/c it was revealed that he was just a kid developing very fast.

Hans' situation and Firouzja's situation are not the same.

[PKop]

He got kicked off of chess.com twice for cheating. Doesn't seem so cool.