Ideas for dealing with engines.

Originally posted by Ravello

Do you really believe that any 1100 or 1200 player can come up with a 100% match with Fritz moves?

An analisis showing it is a sufficient proof.

We are not speaking of a 2200 player who plays near GM levels,we are speaking of people who has a really crappy rating and plays 100% GM moves.

ok , u have a point there! 😉

Originally posted by Ragnorak
Maybe a 'suspect' flag could be automatically set to people who's ........ moves can be shown to match up with Fritz/CM.

i think thats a great idea.

whilst it stops having to ban players / refund money and accuse them outright of cheating, it lets others know that x% of moves are made by an engine


a good idea?

Originally posted by Ragnorak
I don't know how you could automate it.

I don't think you can ban people either, cos that would open up a whole can of worms. Maybe a 'suspect' flag could be automatically set to people who's rating suddenly shoots, or who's moves can be shown to match up with Fritz/CM. I know this isn't too scientific as people like dustn may get flagged, due ...[text shortened]... doesn't affect my experience on here. I still get a game of chess in the end of the day.

D

Good idea Ragnorak.

I also think that such people who are red-flagged should not be permitted to play in tournaments or clans either.

I see that most of you are not leaning towards the "witch hunt" method perfected by Ravello, Grayeyes and me. I find this method to be the most entertaining, even if it's a little evil and unfair 🙂

Well,it resulted not to be so much ''witch hunt''...........

Originally posted by Ravello
Well,it resulted not to be so much ''witch hunt''...........

okay, maybe witch hunt is not the right term. but playing detective was pretty fun for a while there... 🙂

Grayeyes, could you explain to me a few things. I have a downloaded ChessbaseLight with a Fritz4 which I use to analyze my games after they are finished (a humbling experience usually). It gives two moves and the analysis will change if you give it more time (obviously it's running through more possible moves). Is Fritz8 or the newer programs different? What I mean is, how do you determine when a move "matches" an engine: would you count either of the top two moves in Fritz4? Or do the newer programs suggest one recommended move?

At one point we were having a discussion on how to prevent engine use on the site and it was suggested that the pgn's of a game not be able to be downloaded until after the game was over. I cannot find this discussion and I assume it was in one of the deleted threads. As this would make engine use difficult, though not impossible (you could still manually input games but if you have 50 or more games it would be pretty time-consuming), do you have an opinion on this? And anybody feel free to tell me if there are specific technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

Originally posted by no1marauder
At one point we were having a discussion on how to prevent engine use on the site and it was suggested that the pgn's of a game not be able to be downloaded until after the game was over. As this would make engine use difficult, though not impossible (you could still manually input games but if you have 50 or more games it would be pretty time-consuming ...[text shortened]... tell me if there are specific technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

I think it was a Trackhead's suggestion.

My main objection to it was that I NEEDED to be able to download all my games PGN's when I had a dial up account. I'm sure some people still are on dial up.

Cheaters would still just input the moves. If you creat and save the pgn from the start of the game, then it is no hassle whatsoever to a wannabe cheater.

D

Originally posted by no1marauder
At one point we were having a discussion on how to prevent engine use on the site and it was suggested that the pgn's of a game not be able to be downloaded until after the game was over. I cannot find this discussion and I assume it was in one of the deleted threads. As this would make engine use difficult, though not impossible (you could still manua ...[text shortened]... tell me if there are specific technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

I currently have a 2 hour commut to work (for only two more weeks now thankfully), so I have got into the route of downloading PGNs on to a pocket pc (with chessgenius set to 2-player mode no analysis). This has helped keep me sane over the last 3 weeks. Hence the idea of blocking pgn downloads mildly horrifies me.

However taking up the more general point: no action will ever stop the cheaters out right; should we be really be considering draconian measures. I personally would love to see a function whereby all my games requiring a move would be put into one pgn database.

Give us more functionality and leave the cheaters to their own sick world. Though an anonymously published (and be damned) set of suspect moves - as discussed previously - may be a way forward.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Grayeyes, could you explain to me a few things. I have a downloaded ChessbaseLight with a Fritz4 which I use to analyze my games after they are finished (a humbling experience usually). It gives two moves and the analysis will change if you give it more time (obviously it's running through more possible moves). Is Fritz8 or the newer programs d ...[text shortened]... tell me if there are specific technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

I'll go through a few things
Firstly you can increase the number of lines shown by Fritz4, right click the Fritz4 box or press the + key.

Someone on the site pointed out that I was using Fritz 8 to check games played by CM10, I did check that they matched 100% in CM10, to check it was an engine. Next I put the game through fritz to see what the match up was, It came out 95% of the moves in the top 3 on the basic Fritz setup. Each engines has a certain style of play but they can all be put under a few headers. Fritz syle, Junior style, Tactics style (Crafty etc) Positional Engines (Hirces etc). The good thing about Fritz8 is that you can change a lot of its basic settings, I could have just copied out the moves from CM10, wrtiing them down but that would have taken about 3 hours to write for a whole game. I just tinkered Fritz till it matched CM10 95% of the time then let the games run through, while still not perfect they produce close enough results.

The number and the strength of moves matching up should be left to the discression of the admins as the variables will change case by case (well game by game) An engine like Nimzo (Nimzo thinks the sicilan and english rock :-) ) will only match up to 50% odd of Fritz8 moves. Nimzo will however match up to maybe 80% of Crafty moves.

However all engines try to pick moves in the same way so the more lines you list say 5, the top lines from each engine will cross over.

I certainly dont think PGN's should be banned, think about it is someone who let their rating get up to 2000 going to let it drop because they cant copy a pgn. Besides you can just use the "Setup Position" option its not like copying a chess board takes more than 20 seconds.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Grayeyes, could you explain to me a few things. I have a downloaded ChessbaseLight with a Fritz4 which I use to analyze my games after they are finished (a humbling experience usually). It gives two moves and the analysis will change if you give it more time (obviously it's running through more possible moves). Is Fritz8 or the newer programs d ...[text shortened]... tell me if there are specific technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

it was also brought to our attention that the fen could have been extracted frmo the analyse game page by hitting "view suorce", again by our friend charles.

Originally posted by Grayeyesofsorrow
I certainly dont think PGN's should be banned, think about it is someone who let their rating get up to 2000 going to let it drop because they cant copy a pgn. Besides you can just use the "Setup Position" option its not like copying a chess board takes more than 20 seconds.

I dont think having chess mods would stamp out all cheating, I can still think of several ways for people to cheat. But it will certainly stop the blatant cheaters who at the moment think nothing of matching up 95% to the top fritz8 moves, because they are totally safe. If you can drop the % of matching up to the top fritz move to 30% and force them to choose a lesser Frtiz move (If they just pick the top two thats really straight foward as well) It would give everyone a chance to win and make their game less enjoyable since they are only cheating to win.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Grayeyes, could you explain to me a few things. I have a downloaded ChessbaseLight with a Fritz4 which I use to analyze my games after they are finished (a humbling experience usually). It gives two moves and the analysis will ...[text shortened]... technical problems with locking the game pgn's during the games.

Another thing id like to add, before someone askes it. Is can you detect someone who uses mutiple engines, say using fritz for even moves and crafty for odd. You can but it takes a little longer, anyone looking at the game would probably notice something wacky. Im sure a lot of us have looked at our past RHP games, and noticed we've done something silly like move 20, moving the bishop to f5 then move 21 playing Bg4 with no forced reason for doing it, its just that the second time you look at it you think Bg4 is the strongest move even if last time you decided Bf5 is the best. That is just the temperament of humans, yet someone playing with two engines would run across this problem quite a bit. The engines would have different settings and therefore different reading of the position and choice lines. It would just be like playing a game where you take turns with somene else to move the white pieces, you both would view the game differently a lot of the time.

One suggestion to reduce false accusations - maybe the "accuser" can be required to submit an engine analysis of the game in question along with his alert to the mods.

Originally posted by lucifershammer
One suggestion to reduce false accusations - maybe the "accuser" can be required to submit an engine analysis of the game in question along with his alert to the mods.

I think that would exclude a lot of the people on the site. I guess the mods would expect the accuser to have some pointers tho. So maybe they would have to have an engine anyway or a friend with one.