“Decision: case of using computer assistance in League A”

[Uberdude]

Bonobo, you are correct that it is syntactically ambiguous, but semantically it is clear enough (even without a comma you can imagine an implied "thus" after the "and").

The English mistake that stuck out to me was "convince": either this should be "convict" or "convincingly show that" (and then "of using" -> "used").

[dfan]

I am a native speaker of English and thought that the sentence was clear enough as written, although adding the comma doesn't hurt.

[John Fairbairn]

Am I mistaken?

I'd say you are (i.e. it's not essential). At least I can't imagine any native speaker reading it the alternative way you give, except perhaps an ultra-rationalist on a bad hair day.

It's hard to give a precise reason but the rhythm of the sentence is given by the two "that"s and the fact that the last portion (after "and") doesn't have a "that" marks it out as different. When we read the sentence we therefore automatically put in a very slight pause before the "and". Inserting a comma here would run the risk that we put treat the items as a list (i.e. assume ellipsis of another "that") and so end up with the very alternative meaning you are trying to avoid!

Standards may have changed in recent years but it was long a rule in the UK legal world that all legal documents had to be written without commas. For somewhat different reasons journalists also tend to avoid commas. I found the English of the whole sentence somewhat stilted and if I had been wearing my sub-editor's hat I would have "corrected" it to:

Therefore we do not think that it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that Carlo Metta broke any rules. The decision made by the league manager should be reversed.

This reflects in part another aspect English speakers of at least my generation will recall from junior school - being told time after time not to use "and" (as in: "Write what you did in your holidays." "I went to the seaside and I had an ice-cream and I went on the Big Dipper and I was sick all over and I the man was rude to me and I cried and I had a nice time.") We were also taught that it was not nice to use nice. I suppose the modern version is it's not cool to use cool. Innit?

(I didn't plan it that way, but I notice that I seem to have written all that without a comma....)

[Bill Spight]

The appeal was successful.

[…] Thus, we do not think that it was proven without a reasonable doubt that Carlo Metta broke any rules, and the decision made by the league manager should be reversed.

I’m not a native speaker of English, but I think the comma I added here is essential, otherwise it could also be interpreted as follows:

we do not think that [it was proven […] and] the decision […] should be reversed.

Am I mistaken?

English has a word meaning and not, namely, nor. So we might have, "We do not think A nor do we think B." Which has the same meaning as, "We do not think either A or B." Which has a different meaning from, "We do not think both A and B." For the interpretation you are concerned about, I think that or is the conjunction, not and.

[RobertJasiek]

Which body has made the appeals decision?

[Uberdude]

Which body has made the appeals decision?

I presume the Appeals Commission of the league, which comprises Victor Bogdanov, Ales Cieply, and Frank Jansen.

[goTony]

Reading over some of the posts in this topic it seems that we expect someone to use a computer for much of the game.

It turns out that that has been, and still is, a pattern of cheating in chess. You have players whose every move is, according to top chess engines, neither a blunder nor a mistake, and who play only a few inaccuracies per game. Their rating never topped 2200 and suddenly they are playing like super grandmasters.

Such moves will typically be among the top three choices of any given chess engine, which is where I suppose the match one of the top three choices heuristic came from.

The lavatory one was humorous and disappointing at the same time.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/che ... atory.html


and from the US Chess Federation report on the FIDE Congress 2017 https://new.uschess.org/news/walter-bro ... ting-news/

¨The Anti-Cheating Commission (ACC) meeting was next for me. Members of the Commission feel that the measures in place at the 2016 Olympiad in Baku were a good starting point but can and must be improved. An example would be a player who is to play in a round and takes his cell phone with him. He is checked when he walks in and hands over the cell phone for safe storage. He finishes his game, and goes out and collects his cell phone. He must now exit. He cannot go back in to watch his teammates if he has his cell phone with him. They want even arbiters and other officials not to have cell phones in their possession while in the playing area. Some cases were discussed and it was mentioned that in a few countries, cases are being prosecuted by the civil authorities on fraud charges.¨

The sad fact is it only takes relying on a computer for a single move to be cheating. I do not think serious online tournaments will be an option. Unless you have independent monitors with the players and very strict guidelines as in live tournaments.

[quantumf]

Everyone who naively thinks, that EGC 2018 will be happier place after the decision, are completely wrong. This decision will actually make it much worse, since most of the top-players are super-angry about it.

Moreover, we all should mind one thing: In the official message from the appeals committee, there is not a single word of innocence...

Lukan, can you elaborate on why you think EGC will be an unhappy place? Was the recent WAGC an unhappy place?

Why are most top players unhappy?

If most top players believe the player to be guilty, on what basis is this belief based?

How do you know it is "most?" I know you're a strong player, but some strong players have come out strongly, in public, in favour of a better process for deciding on situations like this. I am not aware of public statements condemning the decision to reverse the original ban - I guess yours is maybe the first?

While this was not a court of law, I think the common understanding is that someone accused of a crime is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The appeal has concluded that he cannot be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, hence innocent.

[Javaness2]

Everyone who naively thinks, that EGC 2018 will be happier place after the decision, are completely wrong. This decision will actually make it much worse, since most of the top-players are super-angry about it.
Moreover, we all should mind one thing: In the official message from the appeals committee, there is not a single word of innocence...

Perhaps it is fair to phrase it as "No word of innocence. No word of guilt." The reality for most of us is, you don't have any idea who you are playing, and if they are cheating. I remember one match where all our opponents disconnected at once - I thought nothing of it at the time, but afterwards somebody said to me "Normally that means they were all in the same room". Is turning on webcams going to solve that? No, not if you are strong at cheating. I mean, you can just have some headphones on and say that you are listening to music, but actually you have Sai talking to you

Putting suspicions aside, I think Carlo has a unique style. His opponents were not used to it, and so it helped him perform well in the league this year. Next year people will know what to expect, I think his results will suffer.

[RobertJasiek]

"a 4-dan level of play in compare to 6-dan level of play is something completely different and the difference is very visible."

Please tell us what is the difference regardless of the dispute and regardless of a particular player's games.

[figgitaly]

"Dragos is a top-European player, who used to have GoR close to 2700 at some point. He can accidentally lose to a 4-dan (it can happen in approximatelly 10-15% cases) of course, but definitely not in this way. Maybe it's not so evident from the game, but it was a complete domination of white stones on the board and I don't know anyone in Europe, who would be able to smash Dragos so badly like this (not even EGF pros)."


Here just to mention that Dragos was "smashed so badly" (or even worse imho) in the last round of PGETC by a 2316 GoR (3 dan) serbian player.

Maybe you need to recalibrate your judgment not to be so extreme, maybe go games abilities can fluctuate more than you think, or maybe Go ranks are slightly different online, it seems that strong player got "smashed" by weaker players more often in online tournaments than in real ones.

[Uberdude]

Thanks for your post Lukan. How much of your view (and those of other strong players you talk to) is based on the initial announcement of Carlo's conviction, and how much did you independently conclude from looking at the games yourself before that? I didn't interpret the appeal announcement as having a subtext of "he was probably cheating but there's just not strong enough evidence to convict".

I see three main aspects which people are citing as evidence of Carlo's guilt:
1) statistical arguments of similarity to Leela's choices, the famous 98% match of top 3 in moves 50-150 of the game vs Reem.
2) history of player rating and comparison to recent offline games (WAGC): Carlo's been 3d for about 6 years, up to 4d in 2017 and game results suggestive of 6d strength in the 2017-18 online league.
3) analysis of the moves in the league games themselves by skilled go players, do they look like a 4d human on good form, 6d human, bot etc.

The initial conviction announcement and related facebook post solely used arguments of type 1 (perhaps there were others in the unpublished report). I was disappointed at the lack of details about a control group and suspected poor use of statistics (plus the 98% figure is dangerously misleading) so did my own analysis. Unless the referees report was both significantly more thorough (which I hope but doubt) and had different results to my analysis I think it was unsuitable to support a conviction. I should clarify that the type of cheating I am considering here is using Leela to play almost all the moves, as that's what the 98% figure suggests. Using Leela to play just a few moves in a game would also be cheating but would be much harder to detect with statistical methods (at least the crude similarity matching approach).

As far as I know the conviction was based solely on the game vs Reem, rather than looking at other games this season or type 2/3 arguments. Indeed, if other games were considered it would have raised doubts about using the similarity metric as evidence, as Carlo beat stronger players than Reem with rather normal Leela similarity (I've reproduced my table at the end of this post). Based on Lukan's post, it seems that these type 2/3 aspects are what he and others and primarily considering so I think they deserve attention (Stanislaw's analysis was a type 3 with reference to Leela and he considered it was not suggestive of cheating).

Type 2: improving from 4d to 6d is hard so doing so in about a year is impressive/unlikely, more so if you had been 3d for ages. Just checking some top Europeans, Lukanwent from 4d to 6d in about 2 years, but he had been improving about that rate from 1k. Tanguy was also about 2 years. So for someone to improve that fast, coupled with bot-like play could naturally arouse suspicion, but set against that it would be terribly sad if someone did work hard to improve fast and was incorrectly accused and then convicted of cheating. There are some fast improvers on the UK team so whilst unlikely I think it's possible.

As for the WAGC games, they are not 6d level results so it's not so easy to quash these allegations. However, although it's making excuses I could well understand that with all the pressure and stress of this case Carlo couldn't play his best, plus you've got jet lag possibilities. So I'd say they weren't evidence of his innocence, but aren't great evidence of guilt either.

Another question is do you really need to be 6d in offline games to get the results of 6d+ 5d+ 6d+ 4d+ (Lukan's suggestion is he stopped cheating here) 6d- 3d+ 7d- 5d- 5d+? I'm a European 4d (and weakish one at that, never over 2400) and have beaten some strong players in the league e.g. Victor Chow EGF 6-7d (in a fairly dominant way from opening through middlegame, Leela Zero gives me 95% win but then he played strong and I weak endgame so ended up only half a point) or was also leading big against Pavol Lisy 1p (LZ gives 90%+) but then ballsed up a ko in overtime. Or I beat Dinerstein 3p on OGS but that's correspondence so I played out variations. So perhaps the non-cheating hypothesis should be more like Carlo is 5d, and getting two 6d wins in a row is nice but not so amazing.

Type 3: I'm interested Lukan chose the game vs Dragos as evidence of cheating, as my impression reviewing that game was that whilst Carlo indeed played well, it was more Dragos who played a terrible opening and herpy-derpy empty triangle, badly dealing with Carlo's 3-3 strategy, and Carlo then managed to maintain his lead for the rest of the game. Here's the game with some comments from me:



- My view, though not shared by Leela classic or Zero and probably many humans, is that 5 shoulder hit is mistake, at least to continue joseki allowing white to jump out on left which reduces black 4-4s top side moyo. At least we can say white has real territory and black has to show in later play how the outside group is valuable.
- r17 3-3, of course Leela classic doesn't consider, it's an AlphaGo or LeelaZero (which was kyu back then) style. Ponnuki joseki I prefer white a bit as r10 odd and maybe q6 became bad direction exchange (b e3 block worse later).
- c14 I just can't understand, surely f17 is loads better (c7 makes left side small, black wants to reduce w top side potential)?! Both Leelas agree (but only -3%, I expected more).
- s17, p15 in sente is normal, then f17 taking advantage of b not playing there, Leela classic prefers e18. I'd have expected black to kick or pincer or something more kiai than just defend corner, is simple territory Dragos's style? I checked the game vs Serbia figgitaly just posted and that seems like both players were having a competition who can play the most boring territory style game ever but then they had some fight and Serbian cut and made miai to attack 2 groups and killed one.
- c9 is odd, it looks bad and unimportant place to me, Leela classic likes it initially but switches to p4 with more sims, Leela Zero doesn't even consider but says not much minus.
- f15 seems kinda slow but solid given the close j16, and Leela classic doesn't even consider (LZ a little) but I suppose it's reinforce top against h17 etc and reduce b left side potential. Both Leelas prefer to play f3.
- n3 attach is try to make sente exchanges to close lower side with e3 block seeing as black didn't play there
- k4 is the first move from Carlo that I think is notably strong for me. I'd also think about k3 or l4 and Leela classic prefers k3.
- Sorry Dragos, but wtf is l4? If cut LZ gives b 40%, but with this ugly bulge and connect and obvious jump jump he plunges to 20%. I wish my 6d opponents gave me such gifts.
- Then he doesn't jump at l9 but makes thick d6 connection in gote (with weird b8 cut, was he really worried about w cut if direct double hane?) so Carlo gets to play there, even a 10k can enjoy playing such a lovely cap.
- Some obvious shape attack from white, but the cut would scare me. Dragos cuts and then o6 defends because white doens't have the ladder.
- Carlo's q15 to start a fight to activate the ladder is skillful, but it's the sort of thing I could find on a good day so I don't think it's indicative of cheating (and neither Leela find it, seems a very human strategy to me though I've seen Zen do things like this). After that the game's pretty much over and nothing much else happens except normal yose.

Code: Select all

+-----------------+------+----------------+------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
|      Black      | Rank |     White      | Rank | B top 3 | W top 3 | B top 1 | W top 1 |
+-----------------+------+----------------+------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
| [Carlo Metta]   |  4d  | Reem Ben David |  4d  |    * 98 |      80 |    * 72 |      54 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6374/original/WWIWTFDSGS.sgf
| Andrey Kulkov   |  6d  | [Carlo Metta]  |  4d  |      80 |    * 86 |      68 |    * 62 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6314/original/AMTRMFSDAB.sgf
| Dragos Bajenaru |  6d  | [Carlo Metta]  |  4d  |      74 |    * 78 |      50 |    * 60 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6354/original/JRZPCWSANY.sgf
| [Andrew Simons] |  4d  | Jostein Flood  |  3d  |      80 |      88 |      54 |      62 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6612/original/XSJUGZZTOX.sgf
| Geert Groenen   |  5d  | [Daniel Hu]    |  4d  |      74 |      66 |      40 |      46 |   http://britgo.org/files/pandanet2016/mathmo-GGroenen-2017-01-10.sgf
| [Ilya Shikshin] |  1p  | Artem Kachan.  |  1p  |      56 |      76 |      38 |      60 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6384/original/RYSGTEGMXT.sgf
| [Andrew Simons] |  4d  | Victor Chow    |  7d  |      84 |      76 |      44 |      44 |   http://britgo.org/files/pandanet2014/RoseDuke-Egmump-2015-01-13.sgf
| Cornel Burzo    |  6d  | [A. Dinerstein]|  3p  |      74 |      66 |      40 |      48 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6349/original/SCNSFSJXTI.sgf
| Jonas Welticke  |  6d  | [Daniel Hu]    |  4d  |      54 |      64 |      34 |      42 |   http://britgo.org/files/pandanet2017/mathmo-iryumika-2017-12-12.sgf
| [Park Junghwan] |  9p  | Lee Sedol      |  9p  |      74 |      64 |      64 |      38 |   http://www.go4go.net/go/games/sgfview/68053
| Lothar Spiegel  |  5d  | [Daniel Hu]    |  4d  |      66 |      58 |      48 |      42 |   http://britgo.org/files/pandanet2016/mathmo-Mekanik-2017-04-25.sgf
| Gilles v.Eeden  |  6d  | [Viktor Lin]   |  6d  |      82 |      70 |      56 |      46 |   http://pandanet-igs.com/system/sgfs/6616/original/FMKVQBHBBV.sgf
+-----------------+------+----------------+------+---------+---------+---------+---------+

[jlt]

To visualize the above table:

Capture2.PNG (8.88 KiB) Viewed 11552 times

Capture.PNG (9.92 KiB) Viewed 11552 times

[Bill Spight]

Since I'm a bad mathematician and I'm not familiar with statistics much, I don't base my opinion on them.

Wise and good. Especially since the statistical method used is dubious. (Not that you would know that, OC.)

And when those legendary 98% had been published, it was a proof to me, but not really 100% convincing one, because there was not enough information published (I have already expressed that in the facebook discussion).

But it turns out that you were influenced by the statistics, considering the 98% match with one of Leela's top three choices to be proof, but not quite convincing. Not to rehearse the problems with the statistics, but the matching-one-of-three statistic is relatively insensitive. Would you have been as impressed by a 72% figure? Carlo's play matched Leela's choice 36 times out of 50. Unusual to be sure, but common sense tells us that it is well within the realm of the possible, without cheating. It may be enough to raise suspicions, but that's all. Carlo played a lot like Leela, but playing like Leela is not the same thing as cheating. So far, no one has put forward a reasonable theory of cheating that would explain Carlo's play.

However, those suspicions would justify analyzing the game record for evidence of cheating. That has been done by some players, with some discussion in this thread.

[Charlie]

And if Carlo stays a chief referee of the Main Tournament, it could actually cause even more troubles, doesn't matter if he is guilty or not. The decision simply devides the Go community in any case.

There's no doubt that the outcome of this matter divides the Go community and I tend to agree with you on one count: everyone, but Carlo most of all, is caught between a rock and hard place.

Personally, I believe that an acquittal is an acquittal: it doesn't matter whether Carlo is guilty or not (that's a hidden state that we will never be able to observe) but he was cleared of the charge and so it is wrong to discriminate against him as if he was guilty. Removing him from his role as referee would be wrong.

If I were in Carlo's position, I would probably resign the role voluntarily in order to diffuse the controversial situation but that would be a self-sacrificing course of action and it is terribly unfair for anyone to be forced to take that course, should they be innocent. Carlo has been called innocent. (I don't know how much value Carlo personally places on the role of referee - it could even be an unwanted burden to him - but the principle stands.)

Should the EGC organisers fail to honour the outcome of the appeal? Should Carlo give up some of his own involvement in the Go community? All choices are wrong. The "Cheater" bell has tolled and nobody can truly reverse it.

Once again, this brings me back to my overwhelming conviction that the original judgement was rash and irresponsible. Pandora's box *has* been opened and I am still waiting for someone to find the Hope therein.