Detecting Chess Cheats Taxes Computers 159
First time accepted submitter jeffrlamb writes "Cheating in live chess matches — fueled by powerful computer programs that play better than people do, as well as sophisticated communication technologies — is becoming a big problem for world championship chess. Kenneth W. Regan is attempting to construct a mathematical proof to see if someone cheated; the trouble is that so many variables and outliers must be taken into account. Modeling and factoring human behavior in competition turns out to be very difficult."
Headline... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's cheating in the same sense that using a dictionary in Scrabble is considered cheating if you agreed to no dictionaries before hand - not trying to use qzjkh as a word. In this case, rather than consulting a dictionary, they're consulting a computer to come up with a better solution than they could come up with on their own.
Re:Obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, are the Olympics obsolete because the world's fastest sprinter can't even beat a moped, much less a Ferrari? Are painters obsolete because of photoshop? When the competition is man vs man, the abilities of machines shouldn't make it obsolete.
Re:It's finite. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's finite. (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't really grasp the concept of exponential growth, do you? Computers are able to beat humans in chess, but chess will *never* be solved. The game tree complexity is, by some guesses, around 10^123, and yet there are only 10^81 atoms in the entire observable universe.
Re:Obsolete (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why I love chess boxing.
5 minutes of chess, 5 minutes of boxing, keep recycling.
Yes IT's hard to move pieces while wearing boxing gloves.
Re:Obsolete (Score:3, Insightful)
No human can play a decent game of chess (Score:4, Insightful)
The classic remark by Dreyfus, "No computer can play a decent game of chess", has been inverted. Today's commercial chess programs, running on ordinary desktop machines, or even laptops, can beat any human. No grandmaster has won a tournament against a chess program since 2005. Pocket Fritz 4 on a phone now plays at the grandmaster level.
Hence the cheating. About once a year, a major chess player is caught cheating. [wikipedia.org]
It turns out that, even at the grandmaster level, about 1 human move in 10 is clearly suboptimal. So, one computers got close to the grandmaster level, they could beat humans just by not making mistakes.
Re:Obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
Sanity has convinced most of us to give up lifestyles that might include triathlons.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFS, they intend to "construct a mathematical proof" to show that a given move, or number of moves, indicates cheating.
This is impossible to prove because it's always possible that the human made those moves on his own. By the same logic that you can assume a human player can only go so deep in the search tree, you can't assume a human player to arrive at a move solely by use of an optimal or deterministic process. A meatbag can see any valid move and decide to play it for any reason. You can't mathematically prove cheating unless you see them cheating. For all you know the player is just lucky,.