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

[Charlie]

Well, let's see the results first. If it happens that, out of 20 games (2000 end game moves analysed), there is only that specific moves already mentioned on Reddit that matches all those criteria, then, certainly, finding such move would be difficult (whatever the methodology used).

I should add this: it might end up being be relatively easy to spot such moves once one uses an automatic analysis script designed only for this purpose (if each game has 1 or 2 such moves). But we won't know what methodology was used by this anonymous Redditor to discover about this move. Without such tool, it's could still be very hard to spot such move.

It would find the move that the anonymous troll highlighted, for a start. That would demonstrate that it is entirely plausible to find such a move with a script.

Even if it were to be the only one, I have described a methodology that could be used to find such a move. The existence of even one such methodology shows that, given that the moves have already been played, finding "suspicious" ones is easily done.

The existence of those moves still proves nothing!

Regarding this case of alleged cheating, the witch-hunters have demonstrated that they are quite content to expend all sorts of effort to condemn Carlo and so I can well believe that someone would bother to write and run such a script although I cannot identify with their motivations.

(2 bots, 10 seconds a move, 2000 moves = a bit more than 11 hours of compute time = "over night". In practice, not all games go to 250 moves and some wouldn't even pass 150, there are probably less than 2000 games and one would probably stop upon finding their "evidence" so checking all of them would be improbable.)

(Simba, by admitting that he finds this thread too long and tedious to go back and actually read the whole thing (#564), has been struck off the role of diligent-witch-hunters despite his vehemence. )

[Charlie]

" And that someone who was 4d plays like 6+d?
Sorry, sorry, sorry. It is just insult to European best players who kicked their ass of studying to become that strong.
Please bear that in mind when we discuss this case. Lot of work has to be put into it, and it can be easily shown. "

How possible is it for a 6 dan player to play like a 4 dan?

[pnprog]

It would find the move that the anonymous troll highlighted, for a start. That would demonstrate that it is entirely plausible to find such a move with a script.

Even if it were to be the only one, I have described a methodology that could be used to find such a move. The existence of even one such methodology shows that, given that the moves have already been played, finding "suspicious" ones is easily done.

The existence of those moves still proves nothing!

Fair enough. But who know, we might come across some interesting results while doing this, the kind that would be unrelated to the existing case, but could be useful in some other contexts, like designing a "cheating detection tool" for future cases, or whatever. A bit like basic research VS applied research.

Regarding this case of alleged cheating, the witch-hunters have demonstrated that they are quite content to expend all sorts of effort to condemn Carlo and so I can well believe that someone would bother to write and run such a script although I cannot identify with their motivations.

As for me, my motivations are linked with my work on developing GoReviewPartner: I am interested in exploring in what ways computers could change the way to play and learn Go. I am having fun developing this tool, and for this specific case (searching for moves wrongly considered as mistake by Leela, but evaluated as good moves by Leela Zero), I already have tools that can perform 90% of this.

(2 bots, 10 seconds a move, 2000 moves = a bit more than 11 hours of compute time = "over night". In practice, not all games go to 250 moves and some wouldn't even pass 150, there are probably less than 2000 games and one would probably stop upon finding their "evidence" so checking all of them would be improbable.)

My computers evaluate ~300 playout per second with Leela, and probably less than 100/s with latest Leela Zero, so I would prefer to pass on this one.

[Bojanic]

" And that someone who was 4d plays like 6+d?
Sorry, sorry, sorry. It is just insult to European best players who kicked their ass of studying to become that strong.
Please bear that in mind when we discuss this case. Lot of work has to be put into it, and it can be easily shown. "

How possible is it for a 6 dan player to play like a 4 dan?

We discussed this matter earlier.
4 dan played could play 6d moves, but basically, he would play same amount of 2d moves. And he would also play nice sum of 4d moves.
I played games against 6+d where they made less than 4d moves, and I punished them for it.
That is simply how humans play.

But it is impossible for any human to play consistently like program.

Uberdude noticed that Carlo played some moves like LZ, but they were not impossible to find.
Of course, but sheer number of such moves and their combination is what makes a difference.

[Uberdude]

Uberdude: Your teammate, who played Carlo himself, is now quite convinced, that Carlo cheated. It's quite hard to believe, that you are still not sure and in your review, you are talking like nothing happens.
That Carlo's mess in the fight and sudden rise of black's winning rate is "the clever part" in Carlo's cheating (we know, he is experienced in that). He either tried to read the fight by himself or intentionally messed it up, to prove us, he did not cheat. He knows, how big power is behind Leela Zero and that he will catch up soon easily, so such a local loss is not a big deal for him at all.

I tried to make the review fairly objective in terms of the comparisons to LeelaZero's moves as I planned to interpret that evidence and make conclusions about cheating in a later post. If you read it you will see there are quite a few moves of Carlo's I found somewhat suspicious, none a big red flag but little suspicions can accumulate. There were also some of Chris's good moves that LZ liked you could find suspicious. I agree Carlo played more consistently in that game, so apart from that connecting atari and related sequence there were no major mistakes. A concern I have is that if someone applied the same approach to Chris as he is happy to apply to Carlo then there is a fair chance that he himself could be convicted of cheating with an AI (which I don't believe he did, and so wish not to happen). I will explain more later.

[RobertJasiek]

it is impossible for any human to play consistently like program.

Whether this is so depends on what exactly you mean, so please explain. 100% same moves? Same playing style? Something else?

[Charlie]

As for me, my motivations are linked with my work on developing GoReviewPartner: I am interested in exploring in what ways computers could change the way to play and learn Go.

Those are motivations that I support without reservation and, were I not working on my own stuff in that vein, I think that the experiment might be worthwhile.

4 dan played could play 6d moves, but basically, he would play same amount of 2d moves.

You keep writing that, but why? Why must he necessarily play 2 dan moves to match any 6 dan moves?

At best, one could argue that a player that consistently played 6 dan moves would be 6 dan but a single game might definitely be biased. There's no guarantee at all that an even distribution of strong and weak moves fall into one game.

[Bill Spight]

And to whose analysis you referred here?
viewtopic.php?p=232635#p232635

As for the 98% matching evidence, you must understand that matching one of a bot's top three choices was chosen in order to generate impressive matching numbers, not through any theory of how a player might have cheated. (This motive may have been unconscious.) And restricting the possible matches to the fifty moves between moves 51 - 100 is also suspicious. In addition, it is confirmatory evidence instead of disconfirmatory evidence. IOW, it is not just unsound, it is crap.

The 98% matching evidence is the original one of Leela's top three match in the range, moves 50 - 150.

At first I chalked it up to statistical naivete, but as more time goes on I suspect that the evidence was chosen for effect. Not maliciously, or as part of a witch hunt, but more like, Wow, look at this! The manufactured 98% match impressed a lot of people. Matching only the top choice, for instance, would not have been as impressive.

Edit: Or perhaps the 98% matches came from a belief that Metta was cheating by using Leela to pick all his moves. Matching one of Leela's top three choices and restricting the range to moves 50 - 150 produced results that fit that belief.

Edit2: I see I made a typo in what you quoted. I meant 51 - 150, not 51 - 100.

Edit3: I have found out that the 98% analysis was presented with the original complaint. That fits with the idea of presenting the evidence in the strongest and most favorable way for your side. That may be appropriate when filing a complaint, but that is not the same as doing a scientific investigation. The statistics sucks.

[Bill Spight]

4 dan played could play 6d moves, but basically, he would play same amount of 2d moves.

You keep writing that, but why? Why must he necessarily play 2 dan moves to match any 6 dan moves?

I expect that, overall, a 4 dan will make rather more 2 dan plays than 6 dan plays. That does not mean that the 2 dan plays are all mistakes, however.

[Simba]

I'm going to step out of things at this point; the main reason I came onto here was to highlight the censorship and make sure that the Reddit thread was in everyone's awareness. I'm satisfied that this has been done at this point. I hope that appropriate lessons have been learnt by the administration, and I appreciate as a community owner myself that sometimes some administrative decisions can be difficult. Mistakes are fine, so long as we learn from them.

I'm spending most of my time here trying to explain and reexplain things to some who unfortunately and repeatedly fail to understand what's being said or claimed, while others are arguing that "X doesn't prove he cheated" when no one on my side is arguing for X in the first place. I really don't have the patience or time to keep going with that.

This sort of forum format clearly proves tricky for some people to keep up to date with all the posts, and to keep everything neatly tied together in their minds. I can appreciate that this is a very long discussion, but there is very little point in continuing to debate in favour of oranges when the response is "no, pears are awful, how can you favour pears!"

So yes - my final words here at least for the foreseeable future:

- I still believe without even the slightest shadow of a doubt that CM cheated against me, and find the opposite viewpoint to be generally very naive and idealistic. Don't get me wrong - I wish this wasn't true, and I wish we weren't dealing with this. But we are. All is not well; don't turn a blind eye or others will learn that they can get away with this sort of thing against a mountain of evidence from many directions and will be more likely to do it in the future in light of that.

- I won't touch PGETC again if he isn't convicted and thrown out as per the rules, nor will apparently the entirety of Serbia based on what someone said a few pages ago, and I'm sure a few other strong players won't either. If the officials would rather keep this cheater in exchange for a bunch of legitimate players, then that's a shame but it's their prerogative. I do however want to make very clear that I do not in any way support any action against the Italian team as a whole (other than having CM's games all counted as losses). Yes, the rules stipulate they should be heavily punished too, but I think this would be horrifically unfair.

- I also would want to see a proper process for this kind of situation constructed in advance of next season. I would be interested in helping with this, to a point, but am too busy to be the main organiser of this.

Bojanic: If the appeals committee refuse to restart things after their EGC excuse, please contact me directly by email and I'll open a new complaint against him.

Lukan: Thanks. I appreciate what you've said, and you're probably the only one on this forum strong enough to actually have any kind of grasp of understanding how ridiculously overpowering his play was - even you say it'd be far too strong for you, and you're stronger than I am.

Generally: This thread has contained me speaking from a business/professional standpoint - do not take anything personally. I hold no personal ire against any of you, no matter how poorly I view you in this context; I understand that you're simply trying to debate for your own beliefs rather than coming from a place of deliberate malice.

Simba over and out.

[MircoF]

I have found another simple reason, why Carlo should be unseated from EGC main referee's position. The Italian side experssed, that he is depressed and afraid to speak on public. Following this logic, will not he be afraid to speak on public also on EGC, where he has to control 1000 players?

Oh, Lukas this is terrible, are you sure? I saw him last week and he was quite serene, he won the tournament here in my city, Bologna .

We spent a good time together. Are you sure, who tell it to you?

[Fenring]

I'm spending most of my time here trying to explain and reexplain things to some who unfortunately and repeatedly fail to understand what's being said or claimed, while others are arguing that "X doesn't prove he cheated" when no one on my side is arguing for X in the first place. I really don't have the patience or time to keep going with that.

Honestly, I did not see anyone not understanding what you were claiming, just people finding that this claims were clearly wrong.
I find it scary than some basic logic mistakes persist like this in the discussion.

[theoldway]

I have found another simple reason, why Carlo should be unseated from EGC main referee's position. The Italian side experssed, that he is depressed and afraid to speak on public. Following this logic, will not he be afraid to speak on public also on EGC, where he has to control 1000 players?

As said properly by Jan.van.Rongen, we are in phase 3 of witch hunt. The phase of disinformation, propaganda and fake news.

[Jan.van.Rongen]

Jan, it would be good if you checked your records. I have not written the original "98%" analysis.

Sorry, I was mistaken. I have now found the facts. The original "98% analysis" was submitted by the Israelian team captain Amil Fragman together with his offcial complaint on 2017-12-13. Together with two other "independent" analyses.

But they used exactly the same method (50K simulations, no pondering) - and of course the results were very similar to each other.

These data and this method were then used (without discussion?) again in the rest of the procedure. Your only role was to ask an independent analyst (Lukas Podpera) and you were also consulted about the results of these analyses and asked whether you supported the verdict. Which you did - I think.

So IMO my question is still valid: what was your reaction to the much more detailed and much more solid Italian expert report?

[MircoF]

Actually, in Bologna we had an unexpected guest Hayashi Kozo 6p sensei that filled me with happiness:
http://bolognagoclub.altervista.org/fot ... ogna-2018/

Having the lunch together, he told us of our ranking system that is the best in the world. I wanted to say it to Ales that I know has developed it and thanks him for the work he has done for the European go community.

I hope we could have better times to meet e to know each other, may be in Pisa if you came next July.

I apologize if I were rude in some e-mail, but this is my character that in Italian language I can try to mitigate, but in English it results much more difficult to me.

Best regards, Mirco.