I do not think that with "anti-cheaters" you mean everybody not cheating. You also do not even mean all organisers, referees, server admins investigating. Apparently, you only mean those officials being rash with identifying alleged cheating.
No, I mean ALL. Remember how keen you are to promote the idea of accurate reading. I wrote 'unwittingly'. maybe you didn't understand it and so skipped over it, but 'wit' has the same root as German wissen. And that unknowingness is what makes the whole business so nastily insidious.
I have no solutions, and don't believe anyone else has. So-called solutions just create more problems. That's why it's nasty.
It's not the fault of the good people you mention. It's the bad apples. But it takes just one bad apple to sour the barrel, just as it takes just one selfish idiot to spread the virus.
I do not share your thought that every player who opposes cheating or anybody advocating strong skill, such as accurate resding, would contribute to the problem initiated by cheating. I only agree that bad solutions contribute to the problem.
Concerning the specific suggestion that advocating accurate reading would contribute to the problem, you need to explain why you think this instead of thinking that everybody should strive to reach this aspect of skill of the strongest players.
Concerning the specific suggestion that advocating accurate reading would contribute to the problem, you need to explain why you think this instead of thinking that everybody should strive to reach this aspect of skill of the strongest players.
Your English is clearly too poor to have this conversation. I am referring to the fact that you did not read what I wrote accurately, which is ironic because you advocate careful reading, albeit of a different type. You (a) skipped the key word the first time and (b) ignored me when I pointed the keyword out to you. To repeat, my point is that good people who think they are providing good solutions can (and do) UNWITTINGLY (UNWISSENTLICH, UNBEWUSST, UNBEABSICHTIGT) cause problems. Good intentions are never enough. And bad solutions do not always reveal themselves at once.
Bill Spight wrote:Here is a post on statistician Andrew Gelman's site about an accusation of cheating on chess.com.
You should note that Chess.com rescinded the ban, which is about as close as you'll get to an admission that they were wrong.
This case was particularly amusing given that Mr Horton was a contributor to Kingpin and a foe of the dishonest writers/administrators/whatevers
found a weakness disagreed is a double-purpose move, based on the assumption that misread didn't see the double purpose makes clear that was a bad move says that makes no sense since didn't misread.
Indeed, but since you didn't reference it as an false accusation of cheating I thought it proper to mention this explicitly.
I don't remember if Ken Regan's analysis of these games was made public or not.
I recently read that most online chess servers take no action against sandbagging. That is an interesting choice given their policies.
Bill Spight wrote:the take of a top level statistician would be of interest.
One should study very many human - human, computer - computer, human - computer games to know what has happened and therefore, related, what can happen. (More can happen than what has happened but everything new happening is expected to be somehow near to what has happened.) The problem is to assess what happens / has happened. The only absolutely clear date is the result of each game. For just one particular game, its result is insufficient data for deciding whether cheating has occurred.
Therefore, the idea occurs to also measure moves.
Who suggested that one could identify one player's cheating by only assessing his moves but ignoring the opponent's moves? The player's and the opponent's moves have an impact on how the player's moves are perceived! Besides, both players might cheat.
Next, for the purpose of measuring moves, some measurement criteria and some interpretation criteria must be chosen with justification for each criterion, the combination of all criteria, their choice and the ommission of other criteria. The chosen criteria must be checked against what can happen in comparison to what has happened in the very many analysed games.
A top level statistician won't hurt for applying all this:) Regardless, arbitration involves much more than statistics. E.g., an alleged verdict only based on statistics can be rendered void if the suspect could not have accessed any electronic device or related transmitted information during the game.
I wonder about the value of a top statistician, given the original poster's interest: "There's a beginner beat all the high dans and a few of the players suspected he cheated using ai. we need a solid proof before disqualifying him."
It is literally impossible for a beginner to beat a high dan, let alone "all the high dans." It seems they are just looking for evidence to confirm what they already know. As others have said, if you create a world where cheaters can plausibly offer any other explanation for their behavior, they will.
It depends on what weiqiasia means by "beginner". If he means roughly what I understand (10 kyu or weaker), my initial compromise solution is a solid proof because a beginner wins 0% against ca. amateur 3 dan test opponents, let alone more than 50%. If, however, he means "beginner among want-to-be qualifiers", establishing evidence can be difficult.
RobertJasiek wrote:It depends on what weiqiasia means by "beginner". If he means roughly what I understand (10 kyu or weaker), my initial compromise solution is a solid proof because a beginner wins 0% against ca. amateur 3 dan test opponents, let alone more than 50%. If, however, he means "beginner among want-to-be qualifiers", establishing evidence can be difficult.
Yes, if beginner means kyu player then his known rank or a few FTF games against high amateur dans should be enough to disqualify him from representing any region in national competition. Even if arranging such games requires the cost of travel and accommodation, that should be cheaper than hiring a programmer or statistician.
Besides, from a statistical and evidentiary point of view, comparing the difference between the player's online moves and FTF moves is more telling than comparing the similarity between the player's online moves and AI choices.
Besides, faced with the choice of having to prove his mettle over the board, the player may choose to withdraw, allowing the second place finisher to play in the national compotition.
The Adkins Principle: At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins
I come back to this thread because of news from a totally different field in Britain. If you are not British you will perhaps need a bit of background.
We have a class of workers called sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, the latter predominating by far, I believe. They have a special place in British life. So much so that they were once a stock character in films and novels. They run post offices, sometimes in conjunction with a grocery store, in villages and other small communities, holding a sort of franchise for what used to be the nationalised Royal Mail, which was eventually turned over to the private sector.
Especially in villages, the sub-posties shops formed a focus for community interaction, not just because they may have been the only grocery shop around, but because the post-office was where people collected their pensions, child benefits and so on in pre-digital days. On top of that - and this is what made them a stock character in fiction - they used to either have the only telephone in the area, or they ran they only telephone switchboard and could listen in to calls. They knew all the gossip. And soon all the village knew all the gossip.
The typical sub-postie was just like your grannie. The last person you could ever imagine would commit a crime. Also the last kind of person who did actually feature on lists of criminals.
I'm sure every nation has a similar class of person. The widows of war veterans in France come to mind, although it's a different age. Whoever they are, we are shocked and disbelieving when even ONE turns out to have their collar felt.
But then the new boys with their MBA diplomas took over the Royal Mail, all these sweet old ladies magically turned out to be Moriarty types with skeletons in their cupboards and evil in their hearts. Not one or two but HUNDREDS were arrested because the fancy new computer program the bottom-liners had installed PROVED they were defrauding the new shareholders. For reasons that completely escape me, but at a guess must be something to do with blind, quasi-religious faith in the then new religion of computer programming, they were all found guilty. Very many were imprisoned, and quite a few died there. Others were fined, got criminal convictions so lost their livelihoods and couldn't replacement jobs except as cleaners and so on.
As the number of prosecutions began to mount very, very many people nationwide began to voice disbelief. But the prosecutions just kept on coming. The computer program showed more and more fraud, even though most of the apparent fraudsters were now in gaol!
A campaign to revisit the evidence was strongly resisted by the Post Office. The algorithm was secret. But the basic stupidity of the prosecutions and the resistance could not be hidden. Still, it took years and years just to prise open the merest chink. But once the dam was breached, a flood of overturned convictions followed. It turned out the algorithm was faulty. Today I read that the Post Office has agreed to pursue a review of even more cases after PM Boris declared this was already the biggest case of miscarriage of justice ever in Britain.
Yet here in go we have a group of self-appointed people working on a secret algorithm that will similarly be used to trash the reputation, unaccountably and without recourse, of fellow go players around the world (and in chess, too, of course). All because of religious faith in numbers spewed in an unknown way from somebody else's computer.
I would not characterise my fellow go players as sweet old grannies, but I've met thousands and I would seriously never believe that more than a tiny handful would stoop to cheating.
I recognise that there is some cheating, and agree that it is VERY annoying, but given my real-world experience I have to conclude that the anti-cheating programs are a prime example of treating a headache with a lobotomy.
Digesting the Post Office news in Britain today, however, I also have to conclude that we are in grave danger of letting our distaste for cheating and fraud make us overlook the far worse risk of allowing the lobotomists and MBAs to run riot.
John Fairbairn wrote:Yet here in go we have a group of self-appointed people working on a secret algorithm that will similarly be used to trash the reputation, unaccountably and without recourse, of fellow go players around the world (and in chess, too, of course). All because of religious faith in numbers spewed in an unknown way from somebody else's computer.
Of course it has to be a secret algorithm. Otherwise cheaters would learn how to circumvent it and then someone else would have to develop another secret algorithm.
On a serious note, I feel this is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. Either we do nothing and risk players quitting online go due to cheaters or we start banning "cheaters" and risk losing players due to false positives. The situation isn't that bad yet in go and we can only hope that due to go community being much smaller than the chess community, it won't worsen. I'm not all that optimistic.
schrody wrote:Of course it has to be a secret algorithm. Otherwise cheaters would learn how to circumvent it and then someone else would have to develop another secret algorithm.
An algorithm meant to reveal truth is open so that everybody can judge whether the claim of truth is fulfilled. Algorithms weaker than establishing truth should be avoided for judgement. If this means that there is no such algorithm, do not use any for arbitration.
Cheating relies on the false so must avoid all algorithms that establish truth. This does not mean that cheaters get away with it but it means that arbitration must (also) use what it has always used or could have always used: means of judgement other than algorithms.
found a weakness
disagreed
is a double-purpose move, based on the assumption that 
didn't see the double purpose
makes clear that 
says that 
