Some thoughts on anti-cheating systems

[Matthew Turner]

If we are lightening the mood, I have just lost to a 1491 and the worst thing about it was he wasn’t cheating.

[John McKenna]

Not cheated by your opponent, Matt.

What about the rating system - 1491 is near to a bog-standard default online rating for a new player.

Now, to deaden the mood, I'll just add this from Godel's Lost Letter -

The diagonal lemma (in logic) underpins Kurt Gödel’s famous 1931 proof that arithmetic is incomplete. However, Gödel did not state it as a lemma or proposition or theorem or anything else. Instead, he focused his attention on what we now call Gödel numbering. We consider this today as “obvious” but his paper’s title ended with “Part I”. And he had readied a “Part II” with over 100 pages of calculations should people question that his numbering scheme was expressible within the logic.

[Michael Farthing]

Just tought I'd add some totally useless information to lighten the mood.

I hope that you don't do that when you are chairing the online ECF Finance Council Meeting on Saturday 18th July. It needs to finish in time for Council members to play their games in the ECF Online Counties Championships in the evening.

Rest easy, David, the rules don't allow it to go on past 6.30 pm. [Though actually, I'm hoping we'll be done and dusted long before then].

[Kevin Thurlow]

"It is called kutosis"

Thank you - I like words I don't know. I can just imagine the look on Richard Whiteley's face if someone had said that...

[John McKenna]

kurtosis
[kəːˈtəʊsɪs]

NOUN
statistics
the sharpness of the peak of a frequency-distribution curve.

Origin
early 20th century: from Greek kurtōsis‘ a bulging’, from kurtos ‘bulging, convex’.

[MartinCarpenter]

It's a neural net, which needs to be trained by examining games:

There's probably a very simple answer to this question but, if Paul is correct in stating that Lichess use a neural net, would I be correct in thinking that the statistical approaches discussed here wouldn't apply, which would open up a rather different discussion?

Just for completeness here.

Yes. Mostly because we can see how Ken’s statistics work, how reliable they are, when they might fail etc etc.

Neural nets are absolute black boxes. Obvious issues in this context.

[Matt Bridgeman]

Another reasonably well known player may have been booted from the 4NCL.

[Nick Grey]

Why? When? Who? What team?

[Matt Bridgeman]

I can’t say as you say it’s not necessarily foolproof. But I suppose the figures on the banned list are still rising.

[Nick Grey]

Published round five so will be nice at end.

I had been asked at work why I do not play chess on line. My reply too much cheating and some organisers banning toilet breaks and wanting too much webcam and audio control.

[NickFaulks]

Yes. Mostly because we can see how Ken’s statistics work, how reliable they are, when they might fail etc etc

When might they fail?

[MartinCarpenter]

Discussed at more length than really sensible above

Neural nets are great but they are prone to ocassionaly amusingly daft doing things like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03013-5

Makes them rather dangerous for trying to pick out really rare conditions in a broad population.

[NickFaulks]

Neural nets are great but they are prone to ocassionaly amusingly daft doing things like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03013-5

Thanks for that link. The issues raised are new to me, although I do not find them even slightly surprising. A neural net is just an even more unchallengeable form of "expert", and we know what they're like.

[Steve Lovell]

Sorry to ask what is almost certainly a repeat question here, but I don't seem to be able to find the answer.

I've found lots of references to Ken Regan's software for cheating detection, and FIDE's online "screening" tool. However, I've nowhere been able to find details of how to access these things.

I'd like to make use of something like this for an event I ran today (one game looks especially suspect to me), and for future events. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Adam Raoof]

Sorry to ask what is almost certainly a repeat question here, but I don't seem to be able to find the answer.

I've found lots of references to Ken Regan's software for cheating detection, and FIDE's online "screening" tool. However, I've nowhere been able to find details of how to access these things.

I'd like to make use of something like this for an event I ran today (one game looks especially suspect to me), and for future events. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Please contact me at [email protected] and I will assist!