Player ability?

I am new to this site and I don't want to start a thread that will be immediately deleted as I have a serious inquiry about player ability.

I am far from a great player but I have noticed alot of beat around the bush type accusations of cheating. Now I am not saying that this is not the case, but I am very curious about how it would be possible to accurately tell whether or not a person was using a chess engine. I am assuming that a person would be smart enough to not completely play move by move like a computer, but would rather only use it as a guide. Therefore making it hard to tell accurately whether or not they are.

I could play Bobby fischer and get my a$$ handed to my every single game and never see it coming. Although I would know OTB that he was playing me straight up. I have played a fair amount of OTB and I understand that CC is a different game as time is not really a factor even in one day games. A person could take 12 hours to decide on a move and play better than they ever could OTB.

So my question is a serious one, and I would like to know how one would tell if their opponent is truly cheating or merely taking the time to accurately consider the best moves?

Originally posted by Quits
I am new to this site and I don't want to start a thread that will be immediately deleted as I have a serious inquiry about player ability.

I am far from a great player but I have noticed alot of beat around the bush type accusations of cheating. Now I am not saying that this is not the case, but I am very curious about how it would be possible to accuratel ...[text shortened]... eir opponent is truly cheating or merely taking the time to accurately consider the best moves?

They can tell by matching the moves over a number of games to a certain computer loaded with a certain chess engine, like say, a 4 core Intel system running 3 Ghz with 4 gigs of ram running Rybka, and they find say, a 90% agreement with the moves that would have been made by the computer. The thing that makes it difficult and time consuming is there are hundreds of possible computer types and software matches. So Fritz running on a dual core Apple would have such and such a record and if your games match that, a bunch of games, say, then statistically it is safe to say you used that combination of computer and software for your moves.

There was one guy in Moscow who was beating 2500 players and they weren't sure how he was doing it so they put him in a room by himself and he couldn't even name the openings used and lost the rest of the games played. He had a receiver with some kind of buzzer in his shoe that communicated to a dude in a van outside with some computer/software combo that was rated something like 2700 and of course it would beat humans rated 2500, till he got caught out, anyway.

So here they have to try out a lot of different combinations of computer and software, run the same series through all of them to say one way or another X player is using a chess engine.

The thing is, matching even a player like Bobby Fischer or Spassky or Kasparov, none of those guys would even come close to 90 or 100% match move for move of a strong computer/software combo.

And it follows if THOSE dudes can't match a computer move for move exactly, have exactly the same sequence of moves, then some run of the mill master, say a real 2300 player here would be even further down the food chain of comparison to a chess engine assuming he was not using a computer but just his own mind with help from opening theory and such, which is allowed.

Some of the banned players here matched certain combinations of computer/software something like 100%, pretty conclusive evidence they are cheating with an engine. It seems the higher up the ladder you go here, more and more of them are caught out eventually. Like Weyerstrass, supposedly a real IM, there actually is one but this dude here wasn't him, matched a computer combo very well and got canned. He fooled me, I actually had PM'd him a few times on games and I had no idea he was cheating.

Originally posted by Quits
I am new to this site and I don't want to start a thread that will be immediately deleted as I have a serious inquiry about player ability.

I am far from a great player but I have noticed alot of beat around the bush type accusations of cheating. Now I am not saying that this is not the case, but I am very curious about how it would be possible to accuratel ...[text shortened]... eir opponent is truly cheating or merely taking the time to accurately consider the best moves?

Most people don't have to worry about this. Its very rare encounter cheaters rated below 2100.

I guess it makes sense comparing moves of suspect players to hundreds of engine-computer combination moves. My question is more at how players can accuse other players of engine use when it appears that unless you are a 2800 rated player you would have no understanding of a superior opponents moves to beat you.

I haven't encountered anything like this but I have noticed alot of vague accusations about engine use and i was curious about how this site deals with such accusations.

Thanks for the info,
Quits.

Originally posted by Quits
...My question is more at how players can accuse other players of engine use when it appears that unless you are a 2800 rated player you would have no understanding of a superior opponents moves to beat you. ...

it has nothing to do with that.

a 2800 engine plays completely different from a 2800 human. or any human. the match-up analysis isn't measuring how strong a player is, it's measuring how engine-like his playing is. and as a human player, you learn to feel that difference over time.


how the site deals with it? they kill the thread and forum ban the guy who outs the cheater.

Originally posted by wormwood
it has nothing to do with that.

a 2800 engine plays completely different from a 2800 human. or any human. the match-up analysis isn't measuring how strong a player is, it's measuring how engine-like his playing is. and as a human player, you learn to feel that difference over time.


how the site deals with it? they kill the thread and forum ban the guy who outs the cheater.

how the site deals with it? they kill the thread and forum ban the guy who outs the cheater.

Is this serious or just being facetious? I feel silly for even asking...

Q

Originally posted by wormwood



how the site deals with it? they kill the thread and forum ban the guy who outs the cheater.

They ban the player who outs the cheater? This seems odd. It would seem very easy to spot an engine user if a 2800 player plays differently than a 2800 engine user. From what I have read it should be very easy to ban cheating players.

Not sure what to think about this comment.

It has become very difficult.
There have been that many threads on how to catch cheats the cheats are
fully aware of how to avoid detection.

And what happens when they get caught?
Big cheers all around and three weeks later they rejoin the site
under a new name sometimes inventing an imaginary profile about being
away from the game for the past 20-25 years and off they go again.

The real wise guys don't have a profile and never post in the forum.

The Mods do have access to a few more things than us normal Joes but
a stealth user is nigh impossible to nail.

The Mods need 20-30 games v good opposition and they must be 100% sure.
They give the benefit of the doubt to the user.

The loud good players like Skeets and Atticus can smell the silicon and take it
out in the forum by dropping hints and picking up the occasional forum ban.

Skeets recently PM'd me a game that if the programmers of Rybka knew about it
would sue her opponent for breach of copyright. Soon after that she simply jacked
in all her games as a protest against her ignored FTP.

The silent good players simply grit their teeth.

The mods do a good job but they need more than one game and the clever
people are just not getting caught anymore. It would not surprise me if there
was a site somewhere showing you how to use Fritz on a chess website without
getting caught. It may even be in the latest Fritz 'Help' file.

Interesting to say the least. I am not to this level of play and will likely never encounter such tactics, but I am curious nontheless.

I thank everyone for the input and I hope for the sake of the pureness of the game of chess that this can be resolved for those individuals that are at that level.

I personally don't understand the need to win by engines and how there can be any enjoyment out of such tactics, but I guess it takes all kinds in this world.

Originally posted by PhySiQ

Is this serious or just being facetious? I feel silly for even asking...

Q

it's been the official site policy for a couple of years. which why a lot of people have resigned their subs and stopped playing here.

Originally posted by Quits
It would seem very easy to spot an engine user if a 2800 player plays differently than a 2800 engine user. From what I have read it should be very easy to ban cheating players.

Not sure what to think about this comment.

Originally posted by Quits
It would seem very easy to spot an engine user if a 2800 player plays differently than a 2800 engine user.

yes it is. trivial you might say.

From what I have read it should be very easy to ban cheating players.

detect, yes. ban, apparently next to impossible.

Originally posted by wormwood
it's been the official site policy for a couple of years. which why a lot of people have resigned their subs and stopped playing here.

If this is true than it is extremely sad. Especially if talented players are leaving because of such tactics.

It does appear as though there are some bad vibes running through this site as of now. I only hope it can be resolved sooner rather than later if this is the case.

It is not my intention to stir the pot so to speak, but it would seem to be rather plausible to resolve these issues.

This is a noble but misguided ideal my friend. Stir the pot all you like. It's almost at whirlpool speed already. There's never so much fun in the forums as when it starts spilling over the edges. The only way to resolve the issue is for the cheaters to be gone. It used to happen fairly frequently. Now apparently not at all.

Thread 114715

Very informative.

I guess I will not worry about such things as my level of play isn't high enough to be bothered by such tactics.