The interesting thing I learned about this is that the big names in chess all agree that they don't need to be told what move to make. In a recent interview Magnus Carlsen said:
> The people who get caught are those who cheat in a really obvious and stupid manner. The problem was that he [i.e., a player caught in 2016] was not good enough to see what would’ve made sense.
> Had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would’ve just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning, and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible, which does frighten me.
So all you need is a buzz or maybe two - "caution" and "opportunity," "defense" and "offense" or whatever.
The difficult part is getting the game state to the device. In streamed games this can be done with a medium amount of trouble but in non-streamed OTB games you'd need the player or a confederate to be silently inputting moves for the engine to respond to. Not impossible but... difficult. Nevertheless, when the prizes are in the hundreds of thousands, people may try to find a way.
The Fritz chess engine program has a feature where when playing against the engine, and there’s a winning move in the position, an indicator light will come on.
These hints are helpful at all levels, because if you’re playing fritz and a move says there’s a strongly winning move, you’re going to look more at bold moves that involve things like sacrifices that lead to a scary attack, any move that takes a piece, any move that gives a check, and less at passive moves like moving your king around. You can ignore variations that obviously lead to no change in the status quo. Often it will be the case that only one move COULD be the winning move because only one move causes any meaningful effect on the position so the fact the tactics light is flashing means you can just play it without further calculation. Computer hints allow the human brain to basically filter for better candidate moves far more efficiently.
What if moving your king is the winning move. Plus, what’s stopping a good “AI” from incorporating this meta game into it’s calculations for showing the indicator?
Hikaru analyzed some of Niemann’s games and at certain points he was very surprised by the move, but said that if he was told that there was a strong winning move in that position he would have found the move easily.
Kind of similar to what Magnus said that he wouldn’t even need the move, just a hint like “strong winning move on the board” would be enough for him to find the winning line because he wouldn’t have to look at defensive or passive moves.
A king move can be the one strong move in a position, but let me be more clear. Early into the game your king is usually pretty far away from the action, so even if it is the best move, moving it usually doesn't affect things in a direct enough way so as to have a massively positive effect on the position. It's possible, it's just not very likely. It's only in positions where the king is really getting into fights with the other pieces where it becomes likely a king move is the one strong move.
These kinds of heuristics doesn't need to be perfect to give you an edge.
> I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better
I feel like people keep looking past this line, and suggesting that the device transmit things like "caution" or whatever. In another thread, someone suggested it could warn you if the most tempting line was a bad one.
These all rely on the idea that Stockfish can think like a human and say "Carlsen will be thinking of X, I'll warn him that's a bad idea."
I've never seen any indication that Stockfish can know what a human is thinking, novice or grandmaster.
Instead Carlsen suggested something else: he asks about two moves, and Stockfish tells him which is rated higher.
That's totally doable by stockfish, but means all these suggestions require an input, such as a butt-squeeze detector.
Stockfish rates moves by chasing them down a game tree and evaluating positions. I can imagine several heuristics for a "non-obvious move here" buzzer based on that architecture:
- Hidden gem: The best move has similar value to others if exploring a few moves, but becomes clearly better at depth [n].
- Trap: There is a move that has similar value to others on shallow exploration, but offers opponent a checkmate at depth [n]
- Material exchange: The best move involves a major material loss in the first few moves.
I would love to see these tested in practice, but it seems very plausible to me that some combination of them could make a very useful one-bit (erm, one-butt?) signal.
> I've never seen any indication that Stockfish can know what a human is thinking, novice or grandmaster.
But it's incredibly easy to train ML models to predict what a human thinks is a good move. Then you just send a signal when "most probable move" is different than "chess engine strongest move".
I have worked on this problem. I would not say incredibly easy. Maia chess (linked in other reply) is pretty good but only has an accuracy of around 55% iirc, and that’s with enough data to train on. Grandmaster level games are rarer and have less data.
Most popular chess tournaments have a live audience. So that would be another vector.
Any delay would have to be significant like 30min to avoid players just waiting for the broadcast to match the board state during a critical move where they wanted to cheat.
And then if you see the players exit the playing hall while the board is 30min behind, do you just fast forward broadcast the remaining moves? That kind of takes the drama out of the most interesting part of the game. Or do you just keep the feed on delay and ask the players not to indicate if they won/lost yet? I’m sure their body language would be obvious.
For any tournament where it matters, they're being paid as a form of entertainer/athlete. It's not ideal, but it's also not unreasonable to put restrictions like that on them. It's already reasonably common to have things like interviews afterwards.
> It seems not too crazy to have a morse code format to input moves too, right?
At 3 minutes per move for the standard format, it's totally reasonable. It might be a bit less feasible during speed chess (which is used as a tie breaker).
Overtime you can learn to isolate pelvic floor muscles and anal sphincter, so a cockring and buttplug, or vag-toy and buttplug, could enable rapid input, and greater bandwidth using cords.
Yes. But you need to tell the AI the current board state anyway (ie via transmitting what moves have been made). So adding some more input is not necessarily that much harder.
The benefit of getting the AI pick a move from the top two you are considering is that play looks more convincingly human.
Exactly this. Many top games have one or two critical moments where a player makes a blunder or even just a small mistake. Often this is not picked up on, but if a top player is made aware this has happened, they can quickly find it and punish it.
> The people who get caught are those who cheat in a really obvious and stupid manner. The problem was that he [i.e., a player caught in 2016] was not good enough to see what would’ve made sense.
> Had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would’ve just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning, and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible, which does frighten me.
So all you need is a buzz or maybe two - "caution" and "opportunity," "defense" and "offense" or whatever.
The difficult part is getting the game state to the device. In streamed games this can be done with a medium amount of trouble but in non-streamed OTB games you'd need the player or a confederate to be silently inputting moves for the engine to respond to. Not impossible but... difficult. Nevertheless, when the prizes are in the hundreds of thousands, people may try to find a way.