Comment by the_af
8 hours ago
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
> But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned?
Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give in.
Thanks for the reply.
I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
Note that "AI" was not and has not been necessary for strong computer chess engines. Though clearly, they have contributed to peak strength and some NN methods are used by the most popular engine, stockfish.
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> I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games? Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong! Here is a game that emphasizes art in permutations just as chess does, but every act you make is an exercise in approximating probability so the deterministic wizards are less invasive! In any-case, I'm not so concerned for the well-being of competition.
> Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
I know a few years back valve was testing a NN backed anti-cheat watch system called VACnet, but I didn't follow whether it was useful. There is no reason to assume this won't be improved on!
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The most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move in a statistical fashion to determine if people are cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game, then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
Computers are banned in everything except specific tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to have consulted one during a serious competition your wins are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves from the model in the bathroom at those.
Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to make sure no one has any devices on them during a game works well enough if there's not money at play?