John Fairbairn wrote:If you mean uberdude, yes but it's only a matter of time before computer preparation becomes common-place in go (it's happening already but is not reliable enough yet to be common-place). And once that happens, I'd expect online cheating during games to become the norm (I gather that in chess you can assume your opponent has either prepared something on the computer or is using one live, so the only defence is seen to be to use a computer during the game yourself. Then the question is: is self-preservation a heinous or an excusable form of cheating?)
It's a good topic for an ethics course.
This is an interesting issue. Having played OTB and correspondence chess a fair bit, although never at a very high level, there are some parallels and there are some differences between the situations. In OTB chess, it's been generally considered that any form of assistance of any kind during the game by a book, computer, or anything else, is unacceptable. I understand that when chess title matches went overnight though it was considered acceptable to discuss the position with seconds (I suppose if it's a world championship, the theory is that the second shouldn't be a fundamentally stronger player anyway), but that was pretty much the extent of acceptable external influence. Outside the game I've never heard of complaints from using chess opening databases or using engines to test new ideas on existing theory. This is sort of considered to be "how everyone does it", and almost all the opening novelties these days come from players (or their seconds) coming up with a novel idea with practical appeal, and testing it out on engines until they find lines they're happy with, which then subsequently get memorised. There is certainly no acceptability for using engines in the game itself once the players sit down.
In correspondence chess, it was a bit looser. It was equally strongly frowned upon to use engines in game (and most correspondence sites will perma-ban a player caught doing it - a lot explicitly disallow their use even if advertised specifically as an engine player). The only difference is people would expect opening databases to be used quite extensively during the game, which gives a lot of very high level grand master games to analyse and draw from .... but doesn't give the insights of a "player" several hundred ELO stronger as the lines are playing out. I had a good experience with a certain Italian correspondence grand master in the early 2000's who was very keen on playing computer engines in correspondence chess. He was very successful at finding their weak points in analysis and creating positions they'd misplay, and seemed to thrive on the challenge. Of course, chess engines now are about 1000 ELO stronger than they were then, and I suspect it's not something that's really possible now, but other than him most other players seemed to find the idea of playing engines either just uninteresting or outright dirty.
In Go, I find it interesting that there was no objection (other than it making the player weaker) to a certain teammate using a joseki book in the children tournaments in Hikaru No Go. The equivalent in chess would definitely be disallowed. The whole idea of bots being simply superior to humans at Go is such a novel issue that I suspect the ethics side of it hasn't caught up with reality yet. I have no idea if there are cultural tendencies towards finding it "acceptable if explicitly declared", acceptable full stop (outside of issues where clearly someone is sandbagging by playing as themselves normally and then turning the bot on now and again just to destroy their opponent), or unacceptable. I would assume tournaments and serious play will have to be cautious of the possibility (maybe even to the point where devices to record the game on are banned, as it will be relatively easy to set up a private web server to suggest moves to you instead of just being innocently entering your game as you play), but otherwise I suspect the only people encountering the issue will be at the very, very top end of play.
ADDENDUM: Actually, one thing that interested me in the discussion between Andrew and the 9d who clearly admitted to using a bot. There is a side discipline in chess that has seen very little attention called Centaur chess (actually, now called Advanced chess I believe). It's quite possible with Alpha Zero and other neural network developments in chess that such a setup will cease to exist as AI becomes simply far too strong for humans to even help with, but the idea of centaur chess was a hybrid team, where the strong players would deliberately guide the engine into lines where it would thrive. People would develop opening books purely for their choice of engine to get positions that it was extremely strong in against other engine players in complicated tactical situations, and often had a strong titled player to help pick choices that a computer engine was less likely to misplay. For a while there were some very interesting hybrid tournaments held, but as of about 2-3 years ago (and pre alpha zero) the popularity was declining as pure engine play was becoming so strong that it was beating even GM/engine teams.
I do somewhat wonder if the comments in the 9d game imply that at the moment there is some real possibility for professional strength players and engines to form an interesting hybrid team. I would be very interested Andrew, if you did a best of 21 or something against that guy, whether the match result would be close or not.
). 