Life In 19x19

This is the cheating accusation that I have been forwarded by one of the team captains earlier this year:

Good morning:

Firstly, sorry for my poor level of english.

I'm member of AGOA, and AEGO for some years. I send this email to inform about some people that are cheating in the Spanish Team ...

Hi, just a quick update:

I made some cleaning in my list of SGF games: I removes games with very weak bots that would play almost randomly, and also remove some clones bots of the two I selected. In the end, I ended with ~600 games for each.

I prepared the data, and had a first try at training a ...

Federico,
Have you checked games for program usage?
It is much easier, only 1 player is involved, and it coincides with availability of programs.
If those games started in this year's league, then you have only few programs to check.
I thought a little more about this. Yes, I will use AIs to ...

How should I proceed if I wanted to establish a "fingerprint" of a player's style?

Has anyone ever reliably done this? Are you willing to put in the amount of work needed to achieve this? If you do it thoroughly I imagine that the amount of work might be comparable to a significant portion of the ...

What is the rating difference between the two supposedly exchanged players?

Below a certain threshold your quest is almost impossible to complete.
Variable over time, but you can assume it's 300+ GoR. Though I would prefer the analysis tools didn't give weight to skill difference between the two ...

You are wasting time with such analysis.
In League A topic, if direct similarities between Leela and suspicious games were not good enough for some - and they were measured by program itself, and program plays very consistent - how do you think that you can compare two human games against each ...

For information, how many games from player A and player B do you have? (excluding games between player A and B). I might try with those numbers.
It depends on which subset of games you'd like to use. I would assume 19x19 only, no handicap? Or also ranked and no bots?

Let's say approx. 1,000 and ...

Would something like this work? Choose Black or White to identify, and then after each move by that player, ask whether it is by Player One on Player Two. By the end of each game you should be able to get both a prediction and a confidence factor. Correct guesses are rewarded.

Early plays are ...

Leagues C and D Manager (so referee too) here. I guarantee you that no, I wouldn't be able to monitor 20 games at once.


I hope you realised, but I wasn't serious about this possibility. Webcams seem basically useless in the current format.
I wasn't certain and I wanted to make sure no one of ...

Because it seems to be difficult to separate the message from the (jocular) medium, I'll spell it out:

I believe that in light of pro-level-AI-free-for-everyone it will be impossible to prevent this kind of cheating. Not even webcams and screen mirroring will help because the player can just look ...

I am the manager of Leagues C and D of the PGETC project. One of the teams in one of my leagues has been accused of cheating by player substitution. What I mean is that, according to the accusation, when player A was supposed to play, player B (who has a higher GoR) took player A 's place and used ...

Please, try to stick to the subject.
Sure, the tournament's format can be changed, but that is not part of this discussion.

We all know that in face to face tournaments this kind of trick is much harder to pull off [but not impossible]. The lower leagues of the PGETC are valuable especially for ...

I am the manager of Leagues C and D of the PGETC project. One of the teams in one of my leagues has been accused of cheating by player substitution. What I mean is that, according to the accusation, when player A was supposed to play, player B (who has a higher GoR) took player A 's place and used ...

Having a local observer preferaböy an oficial from the local clubor associtaion is a step toward controlled play. Later we might tighten the control if feasible. Do you want to discard this solution?
I want to be sure about its feasibility before it's considered.
I've played on my team for a ...

I think that if someone really has the will to cheat, a webcam won't help: as we saw in chess, it's possible to cheat even in face to face tournaments without detection.
But it may be a good deterrent for people that do not have a good incentive to cheat, i.e. that don't care enough to cheat to set ...