I liked the post, and found the discussion of the Go world interesting to someone who knows diddly squat about it.
But there’s a point you bring up a few times, sorta implicitly, which I wish you argued more for: that the pervasive cheating in games delegates the culture to the AIs, and that this is bad.
What does this even mean? Are the ‘cultural’ aspects of Go distinct from the entertainment value of playing games, watching games, player drama, and possibly player strategizing (e.g. if Alice always plays the X opener and has Y style, while Bob has X’ and Y’, etc.)? Pervasive cheating dampens the last, and personal cheating dampens the first, but I can’t help but sorta shrug. To be clear, I definitely don’t want cheating, but most of my objection is just the deception.
Lastly, I know you don’t have the personal experience here, but the whole time I was wondering how this differs from the chess world, and why. Aside from some famous cases possibly involving anal beads, I don’t think it’s pervasive at the high end of play (even if I’d expect an online chess school to have similar problems as yours).
If the chess world really is better about this, I’d wonder why. Some speculation: more willingness to ban players, lucky rulings early on that set a precedent, having the best player in the world make high profile tacit accusations, etc.
In Chess, cheating is rampant not at the top professional level (probably) but at the level just below that — iirc there’s a lot of IMs banned for cheating on titled tuesday on chess.com? At least, many of the top players believe that cheating is rampant on online chess (though not amongst top players), and a lot of casual tournaments (eg between streamers) have had people get caught just aping stockfish. And there’s definitely a lot of accusations thrown around for online chess cheating that are generally considered unsubstantiated (the former world champion Kramnik being the most famous serial accuser).
Online chess tournaments not having rampant cheating seems to match the stuff Ashe is saying in their post:
The symbolic camera controls – which would be easy to circumvent for a dedicated cheater – seemed sufficient to curb almost all cheating in a way that threats or impotent references to “fair-play committees” were failing to.
when you add actual barriers to cheating, even if they‘re circumventable, cheating rates drop a lot, especially at the top level.
Of the factors you mention, I’m not sure how FIDE’s willingness to ban compares to Go organizations such as IGF or EGF. Plausible the unified nature might make a difference, but I suspect FIDE’s eagerness to strip titles is not any higher than the go equivalents. My guess is the other factors probably do little if anything: Magnus insinuating Hans Niemann was cheating (or Hikaru’s more direct accusations) probably had little effect in comparison, and Kramnik‘s accusations probably made the cheating problem worse if anything.
If you’re talking about OTB chess, then those tournaments have crazy amounts of security (some would say security theater) to prevent cheating: everyone has to leave their phone outside, the players are scanned with various tools, streams are on a long delay, and so forth.
(And like in Ashe’s post, when people are caught cheating in chess, their justification is normally “I just referenced stock fish occasionally” or “I just used it to suggest moves, I was playing”, and so forth)
I liked the post, and found the discussion of the Go world interesting to someone who knows diddly squat about it.
But there’s a point you bring up a few times, sorta implicitly, which I wish you argued more for: that the pervasive cheating in games delegates the culture to the AIs, and that this is bad.
What does this even mean? Are the ‘cultural’ aspects of Go distinct from the entertainment value of playing games, watching games, player drama, and possibly player strategizing (e.g. if Alice always plays the X opener and has Y style, while Bob has X’ and Y’, etc.)? Pervasive cheating dampens the last, and personal cheating dampens the first, but I can’t help but sorta shrug. To be clear, I definitely don’t want cheating, but most of my objection is just the deception.
Lastly, I know you don’t have the personal experience here, but the whole time I was wondering how this differs from the chess world, and why. Aside from some famous cases possibly involving anal beads, I don’t think it’s pervasive at the high end of play (even if I’d expect an online chess school to have similar problems as yours).
If the chess world really is better about this, I’d wonder why. Some speculation: more willingness to ban players, lucky rulings early on that set a precedent, having the best player in the world make high profile tacit accusations, etc.
In Chess, cheating is rampant not at the top professional level (probably) but at the level just below that — iirc there’s a lot of IMs banned for cheating on titled tuesday on chess.com? At least, many of the top players believe that cheating is rampant on online chess (though not amongst top players), and a lot of casual tournaments (eg between streamers) have had people get caught just aping stockfish. And there’s definitely a lot of accusations thrown around for online chess cheating that are generally considered unsubstantiated (the former world champion Kramnik being the most famous serial accuser).
Online chess tournaments not having rampant cheating seems to match the stuff Ashe is saying in their post:
when you add actual barriers to cheating, even if they‘re circumventable, cheating rates drop a lot, especially at the top level.
Of the factors you mention, I’m not sure how FIDE’s willingness to ban compares to Go organizations such as IGF or EGF. Plausible the unified nature might make a difference, but I suspect FIDE’s eagerness to strip titles is not any higher than the go equivalents. My guess is the other factors probably do little if anything: Magnus insinuating Hans Niemann was cheating (or Hikaru’s more direct accusations) probably had little effect in comparison, and Kramnik‘s accusations probably made the cheating problem worse if anything.
If you’re talking about OTB chess, then those tournaments have crazy amounts of security (some would say security theater) to prevent cheating: everyone has to leave their phone outside, the players are scanned with various tools, streams are on a long delay, and so forth.
(And like in Ashe’s post, when people are caught cheating in chess, their justification is normally “I just referenced stock fish occasionally” or “I just used it to suggest moves, I was playing”, and so forth)