Intersting thing is Hans Niemann Report (Cheaters are rare 2.0)

Kasparov learned a lot from playing Deep Blue. Most people who play Stockfish at the strong levels gain a lot from it.

One thing about the insidiousness, ugliness, nastiness, and odiousness about things like that is how quickly they go into ad hominems, cursings and rage. Not pleasant.

@LegendaryQueen said in #39:

Computers are really good to play against. Why in heaven would you think they are not?

really? once one wonders about how they were programmed in terms of things understandable in human chess land**, one might start wondering what the engine (and its few human programmers in history) is training us (the digital online era large population of mortal chess users) to do.. is it all of chess?

i think it conforts the idea that chess is tactical, and that any positional feature should have a deep material conversion...

The 2 things tactical and material conversion being tough to separate. while in reality even short term material gains, (can) have positional precursors, that are visible on the current position (stared at long enough :). That's a claim. not 100% sure, but i smell it (with some logic zest). But clearly long term position features are not being trained.. who objects to that?

** and that is a difficult undertaking, some have been trying, others have been trying not to, to spare us, the confusion perhaps, we dumb mortals, still curious about all chess though, even wanting to interpret what the engine might be training/fooling us into, some style consequence of its programming since that was enough to beat a champion long ago.

"What the engine is training us to do. . . . "

I would dare-say you have been reading too much Elon Musk. <3

Peace and best wishes.

@LegendaryQueen said in #41:

Kasparov learned a lot from playing Deep Blue. Most people who play Stockfish at the strong levels gain a lot from it.

good to test tactics, i guess. but there is no story there... and even when it does not blunder (meaning human visible blunder, beacuyse in engine land all blunder are the same, whether immedate material blunder, or immediate positional but remote material ones).

There is no strategy. or only some subset, of long term relationships between early non-material changing decisions and remote (lichess invisible) material rewards (or king safety changes when that shows it nose in some legal tree search).

so whether as boring sparring partner in whole games, or as single position "analysis" tool (single root tree search), it is not promoting your intuition and rational (together or not) thinking about long term (or short term too, but that is being picky) positional features that either chess theory, or you intuitive brain (statistical brain) picks up from experience.

it is the ultimate opportunistic machine, and the programmers never programmed any planning level thinking, that would have made it through the parameter values in its input output programmed function of full position information.

I thought i would make this thread informative about engine philosophy while at it.... maybe some engine creators would chip in, to adjust my claims, or contradict some of their assumptions (i can discuss deeper than i just claimed, i think). trying not to overwhelm the common sense of the past here. so let me be pretentious a bit..

sorry for the parenthesis , i keep adding them as i read myself, thining like a critic, and shielding against that, so i would like others to chip in, before i keep adding parentheses, or full paragraphs and bloat this post to hell.

@dboing said in #45:

it is the ultimate opportunistic machine, and the programmers never programmed any planning level thinking, that would have made it through the parameter values in its input output programmed function of full position information.

I thought i would make this thread informative about engine philosophy while at it.... maybe some engine creators would chip in, to adjust my claims, or contradict some of their assumptions (i can discuss deeper than i just claimed, i think). trying not to overwhelm the common sense of the past here. so let me be pretentious a bit..

It's okay. You're not pretentious at all.

A few quick points: The algorhythms they've used to make computers what they were have changed over time. It used to be they were as you say and seem to describe -- simply tactical, not positional, not deeper thinking and so on and so forth.

Well, even by 2012 they had made a lot of progress on positional understanding and so forth.

Still, this was done mostly by linear algorhythms and so on and so forth (i.e., "Weighting" positional factors into the machine's evaluations)

But these days it's no longer the same thing, even from 2012. Now, Stockfish is also SF+NNUE (I.e., Stockfish as well as a Neural network, and while SF 15 no longer uses the +NNUE in it's name, as far as I can imagine, Stockfish 15 does indeed have a NNUE involved. This is like an A.I.

You might look up the work that was done with the quantum computing.

https://syncedreview.com/2020/01/28/can-alphazero-leap-from-go-chess-to-quantum-computing/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-019-0241-0

https://www.unite.ai/alphazero-algorithm-applied-to-quantum-computing/

@LegendaryQueen said in #34:

It's important because as Socrates said, "The secret to change is focusing all of one's energy not on fighting the old, but creating the new."

The only or best way to really change the world is simply to create something new, healthy, whether it's mind-state, idea, culture, wisdom, etc., -- all of this, and transplant it, strengthen it, all this. Create a new culture of healthy-mindedness, fairness, peace, and encourage it and share it and so forth.

All of this recent drama illustrates very clearly the need for a more stable organization of chess players of some kind. So hopefully this will be a good result of the horror show of this last month, thanks to Carlsen. Which, make no mistake, it was because of, along with Hikaru, Moist Critical and the drop in disgustingness by Elon.

I'm not sure if this is the best thread to have the discussion...but since the #1 post is something that completely counteracts the negativity, pollution, and damage that the cheaters do to the sport, maybe it's OK.

Edit: In response to your post, LegendaryQueen, I'd say that I'm probably in full agreement up until you blamed the reactions of GMs instead of the problem that they were reacting to.

I would say a few of the following things about the recent drama:
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1. It is completely destructive towards chess, and completely disrespectful towards one's opponent, and the chess world as a whole, to cheat. Cheating has potentially catastrophic implications regarding chess.

Cheating, in chess, is not like in baseball or cycling where we can simply test for P.E.D.s, it is nearly impossible to detect.
Cheating, in chess, is not like in other sports where the sport can easily coincide with it and survive it.

Without any hyperbole, cheating, in chess, is not only nearly impossible to detect, but it also could destroy the entire chess world.
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2. For a GM to choose to cheat and disrespect people, and to destroy the same sport that feeds them, so that they can have it easier, there is no excuse for that. If not for the chess world, (i.e. me and you and everyone else), then Hans doesn't have a career. None of them do. Now, I've been enjoying this sport much longer than he's been alive, and he's welcome to make a career of it, but he is not welcome to cheat and help destroy the game and the community in the process!!

There is no variation where cheating against someone doesn't carry the implicit inference that: "I don't owe you the time of day; I don't owe you a fair game; you are a lesser-being than me; you are worth less than me; I have the right to cheat you; there is nothing that you can do about it; either prove it or shut up; I own you and I don't owe you any cilivized amount of human decency or respect; who cares how badly cheating damages chess when I'm in the mood for it? For the next 5-10-15-60 mintues, I will use your time and energy, and you will have nothing to say about it." - The Cheater.

Cheating-has-no-place-in-chess.
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3. Now, AFTER we've discussed the problem, AFTER we've discussed the cause of the consequence, AFTER we've discussed the action that caused the reactions, AFTER we discuss the cheaters and all of the massive amounts of damage that they incur, including every toxic thread related to cheating, alongside all of the massive elevations in suspicion and pollution that the cheaters have caused in the chess world...NOW we can speak about how the honest and civilized playing chess world is reacting towards the cheaters, and if we could do a better job of that, and, if so, how.

4. I empathize with the honest GMs who've been frequenting the Sinquefield Cup for quite some time, and who've been playing one another for decades. I empathize with them because being forced to play against cheaters/recent cheaters puts honest players at a clear disadvantage.

GMs being forced to play against someone who they would rather avoid, a cheater who has earned suspicion and who multiple GMs had valid concerns about, is not fair to them. The honest chess world, and the honest GMs herein, have done nothing to deserve this situation. Cheaters/recent cheaters, like Hans, have literally placed them in a lose-lose position.
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5. So, here's Magnus, the representative of professional chess, hearing his GM colleagues voice concerns about Hans. Magnus understands that playing against suspicion puts honest players at a disadvantage, and he, being #1, is feeling pressure to react.

He can either stay quiet and maintain the status quo where '6 months off prize tournaments' is all that cheaters face after at least 4 years of dedicating themselves to cheating...and where they can then rejoin the chess world, unabated, glitch free, as though they don't represent an existential threat to the sport that feeds all of the GMs...

...or he can make a move that would seek to provide some clear dissuasion against people who are considering cheating.

I would imagine that something like the following would have been what Magnus was calculating:

"Take 6 months off and then keep cheating until you find a way to undermine our efforts to catch you, again, for a 3rd 4th 5th time, and feel free to carry on as normal, unabated, alongside all of your honest colleagues." - Not A Powerful Dissuasion Against Cheating

"If you are a habitual cheater, who has recently cheated, all of the best chess players in the world will not want to play against you without first expressing their reticence and exposing you for being a dishonest person and a poor sport who is willing to destroy chess just so that you can cheat." - A Powerful Dissuasion Against Cheating

When the swap was announced, Magnus considered dropping out of the tournament, possibly in order to raise awareness, possibly just in protest. In all variations, this would be the case of a cheater/recent cheater taking the place of an honest player, and that would be extremely weird: "I Mr. Cheater, have conducted myself in a way that has put honest players in a lose-lose position to where they don't feel comfortable playing against me. Therefore, I should play and they should feel uncomfortable and leave." - Mr. Cheater. Weird.

"We, the Honest Players, are leaving this tournament because we can't be certain of someone's legitimacy, and playing through suspicion puts us at a deficit and sours the entire experience. So, the cheaters should play and we should not play." - Honest Chess Players. Again, weird.

So, Magnus decided to play.

We can't really chastise him for his decision because it was dropped in his lap and he was forced to make an ad hoc decision.

Then, after Hans heightened Magnus' suspicions by exemplifying several behaviours that are atypical at that level according to all of Magnus' emperical experience playing world class chess...(the miraculous preparation, being unable to competently explain the preparation in post-game analyses, the demeanour of his opponent, etc.)...all of these things converged together and weighed on Magnus' psyche.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget to add to that the pictures of Hans embracing a confirmed OTB cheater, a man who publicly named Hans as being one of his students that he was proud of.

I can't think of a better perfect storm to drop in Magnus' lap for him to decide what to do with!
What a quagmire!

And, to be perfectly clear, if all of these exact same instances had occurred while Magnus was playing Fabiano, or Levon, or any of his other long-time friends and colleagues who didn't have a current/recent history of cheating in chess...he wouldn't have batted an eyelash about it aside to maybe comment about "lucky prep" and/or "it seemed like you were distracted and you still beat me with black! I must be slipping!" or something like that.

In fact, it's completely possible, and perhaps likely, that it was only because it was Hans sitting across from him, that he played a losing game. Everyone knows that the chess suffers when we suspect that we might be up against a cheater.

Regardless, because of Hans' present/recent past...Magnus' psyche, alongside some of his long-time colleagues, was being needled by the presence of a cheater/recent cheater in their midst, and who constituted a threat to the assumption of legitimate play.

So, with all of this weighing on him, Magnus made another ad hoc decision and decided to withdraw from the tournament.

Again, it was another lose-lose situation that cheaters put him in.

There was a need to have confidence in the legitimacy of one's opponent...and Hans had taken this away from the long-time chess colleagues, and there was this funk in the air and atmosphere because of it.

Carlsen, resigning in the game online, was an ad hoc decision. He'd been put in an impossible place where he'd have needed months, and many conversations with his GM colleagues, to truly understand the best course of action. As it was, he had already declared that he wasn't comfortable playing cheaters/recent cheaters, and he made that ad hoc decision to stand on that statement.

Then, a few weeks later, Niemann and Carlsen end up in a game online, and Carlsen made another ad hoc decision to go ahead and play against Hans online, despite his earlier claim that he wouldn't. All of this is good faith ad hoc decisions, on behalf of Magnus, which he should never have been in a position to make in the first place, because cheaters should not be willing to exist.

Whatever mistakes Carlsen might have made, whatever things he could have done better, we understand that they were honest and that they were the result of the lose-lose position that cheaters put him in.

Irina Krush's facial expression while watching Hans being wanded, says it all.

Because of cheaters in chess, now, all of these close colleagues, who've known each other and played against one another suspicion-free, get to head into their games feeling violated and feeling searched, and being made to focus on "potential criminals", at the most premiere chess location, where everything, up until this year, was just about flawless amicable, and completely void of any and all suspicion-pollution.

Like it or not, cheaters, like Hans, are the outliers and the cause of this drama.
If cheaters, like Hans, have their way, then chess might no longer exist in the future.

However the chess world reacts, for right or for wrong, is a reaction, not an action.

Oh, and one more thing...if we demand evidence that Hans cheated at Sinquefield, then we also demand evidence that Magnus withdrew because of him being a sore loser.

Here, I've outlined a salient and cogent disposition that proves that Magnus had plenty to consider, and that he probably did the best that he could with what he had to work with.

I have never been a Magnus fan, but I understand enough to know that none of this is his fault and that the only intentionally maligned actions have been on behalf of the cheaters.
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6. With that said, I also think that it makes sense to have some kind of a path to redemption that cheaters can follow in order to fully redeem themselves.

Just like how GMs need to acquire different norms in order to achieve that title, maybe cheaters could follow a similar program where after they successfully complete the mandates, that they could be considered completely cheat-free, and where they could then participate, unsuspected, by their opponents.

These measures might include:

• Community service in anti-cheat capacities.
• Having to play live with several camera angles.
• Having to offer expansive and logical GM analyses of their high-level games.
• Being banned from all chess for a dissuading amount of time.
• Being fined a dissuading amount of money in order to return.
• Possibly, having to be outted for an amount of time and having to spend some time with a scarlet "C".
• Possibly, they should have to fear the idea of criminal charges for fraud.

Also, I believe that the requirements should be different if a person confesses before being caught, as opposed to if it takes them being found out and publicly outed for them to make a forced admission about some of their cheating.
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7. Also, I think that it's terrible for chess that different anti-cheat measures have now become more public. I empathize with anti-cheat investigation teams who will now have more work to do. Anti-cheat teams have done nothing to deserve this.

8. Also, it'd be lovely if Hans chose to stop cheating after 2020...I really hope that's the case; however, it's also entirely plausible that Hans finally discovered one of the more effective counter-measures after 2020, and is now ducking it.

9. But all of this is secondary and beside the point. All of this is trying to shut barn doors after the horses are out.

The real and only answer is not penalties against cheaters...and it's certainly not forcing GMs to have to play at a disadvantage against cheaters and/or recent cheaters.

...the real and only answer is human beings choosing not to cheat in the first place...

...or, at least, immediately choosing to quit and to never reoffend.

It's starting to look as if Hans is possibly both a very talented and very disrespectful GM who might be capable of world class chess. I certainly hope that this is the case. If it were ever found out that Hans has been cheating, it would be devastating for chess because people would feel even more free/pressured to cheat than they already do.

Anyway, In a few decades, I imagine that his character will mellow out and he won't be so pretentious anymore.
All will be forgiven and forgotten and there will be other things to be concerned with.

@Onyx_Chess said in #47:

You are clearly biased against Hans.

@Nomoreusernames said in #48:

You are clearly biased against Hans.

Unless you're a speed reader...you missed how I proved that I'm not actually biased against Hans.
I simply explained the mechanics of cheating in chess, and the hit dogs hollered.

Also, there is no variation where cheating against someone doesn't carry the implicit inference that:

"I don't owe you the time of day; I don't owe you a fair game; you are a lesser-being than me; you are worth less than me; I have the right to cheat you; there is nothing that you can do about it; either prove it or shut up; I own you and I don't owe you any cilivized amount of human decency or respect; who cares how badly cheating damages chess when I'm in the mood for it? For the next 5-10-15-60 mintues, I will use your time and energy, and you will have nothing to say about it." - The Cheater.

So...who is actually against who, here?

I'm pro-chess.
Cheaters are anti-chess...and highly disrespectful.

Further, while no other sport can be destroyed by cheaters, cheating could be catastrophic to chess.

@LegendaryQueen said in #42:

yes. i think people can talk about their experience, but projecting intentions and before one could doubt, building on that right away to divide the whole world of online chess players, or even resticted to lichess, into morally unlikable personalities, is obscuring the factual premises shaky grounds... In the uncertainty, one ought to refrain from speculation built on speculation (am i telling that to myself? :). At least not devolve into lessening an argument just made, by distracting or insinuating (with same effect) into who is saying what..

focusing on the what is said about the main topic would have been great from the start. but given the shaky ground of factual sources, and the appearance of quantitative data, it had to float away into personal impressions.

this is a forum.. a priori chess players or chess citizens of lichess accounts, that also participate here, should not have curiosity limitations.. and work toward keeping the atmosphere welcoming for all, opinions..

But again, when facts are scarce, and when imaginations and the love of debate is strong (isn't chess a debate in material thingies mobility on the one board, first before any one had the thought of cheating or rating)., I guess one should expect derailing and interjections.. And we should also be able like you did, to appeal back to try to make thread contained arguments.

well, i may have buried my opinion. again.