One way to get around the cameras and the invigilator in the room for a live chess match is to have a small wireless vibrating device somewhere on your body that can encode information such as coordinates and move difficulty.
Someone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
When I played (at a national level) people would have a laptop connected and playing in another room. They would play the enemies moves on the computer as the player and playing in the tournament would play the moves made by the computer.
I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
How could the top players be better than any chess engine? It seems like even in 2000 any off the shelf chess engine could beat any human. But I guess not...
It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.
EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
Super GMs often catch cheaters by creating a stale board in the late mid-game and watch opponents make pointless moves many times in a row. It becomes pretty obvious at that moment.
I think they mean a closed position without many meaningful moves available. Often times real players make small incremental positional improvements and probe weaknesses, and engines take completely different lines.
I’m not sure, maybe OP means a board where you would customarily ask for a draw as there is no way for you to win and the opponent could only get a stalemate at best.
He means that a real GM would know that the position is a draw and would offer a draw and stop playing. The cheater doesn't know so he has the engine keep playing forever.
By a stale board I mean a board state where there are no sensible moves in order to create an advantage. i.e. there are no good pawn moves, no good knight or bishop re-positions, castles mostly stuck and the engine pretty much shows no point difference.
There's a "no news" zone between a discovery and proliferation. In 1997, deep blue become superhuman.. proving the point. The average consumer engine was still like average tournament player with really weird moves. It took another decade before superhuman engines became widely available to normal people.
That decade gap is where we often mispredict the future. Once a point is proven, we expect instant impact. Reality takes time.
It took 15-20 years after superhuman chess engines were invented before they really impacted chess. Cheating is one impact, but novelty is another one. "Computer moves" are learned by GMs and played in world class tournaments. Contributing novelties is a mark of influence in chess. Even computer strategies are starting to appear in human tournaments.
Friendly reminder your GTX 1080 is more powerful than "Deeper blue" (not deep blue beat Kasparov, but deeper blue, which was a heavy upgrade) so unless you're better then Kasparov any kid could beat you through cheating.
A more realistic setup is Stockfish on a 4+ core CPU desktop, or maybe on a modern smartphone. GPU chess engines aren't as useful to the majority of machines without a high-end card.
There was also the little fact that Kasparov was not playing his top chess in the 1997 match - the loss in the sixth game was considered very bizarre at the time (him going for the Caro-Kann, while not having much experience in that opening)
His rematch against Deep Junior (the 2003 computer) ended in a 3-3 tie, so humans were actually able to hold off computer for quite a bit longer than 1997...
The difference between a super GM and stockfish is that a super GM will play moves the "feel natural" to a human given the current position on the board. A chess engine won't care about what is natural and will maximize the position 15-20 positions down the line. For this reason, they will make sometimes a weird move given the current position that will result in an advantage a lot of moves downstream.
One of the main reasons that Petrosian "got caught" was other GMs (see Hikaru's YouTube video on this) pointing out how unnatural some of his moves felt to them and considering the speed at which he supposedly calculated them.
That is true of traditional chess engines, but no longer true for neural net (self-taught) engines that learn the rules of chess by simulating millions of games against itself.
I've played an early version of one of those (its playing strength is roughly proportional to the amount of training it has done) and it was quite human-like in its behavior, even dropping pieces and making very human-like mistakes.
Look up AlphaZero and the open source port LeelaChess :) Once those become commercially available, it's going to be very hard to detect engine usage.
> EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
There is an interesting section in Hofstaeder's Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 where he speculates that, despite the rapid progress of technology, computers might never be able to play chess at a human level!
If people are determined to cheat, cheat they will. Bluetooth controlled vibrating butplugs are an off the shelf product at this point; not sure if most scanners will show internal objects.
While not a Faraday cage, for some high-ranked tournaments (like the WC title) they are now subjected to a scan almost like at an airport before entering a sealed room.
The rules state that the playing space includes a bathroom, a place to smoke, and the halls between. There are limits to what you are allowed to have in the playing space.
You would have to close the room for sounds and light, too.
To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.
It would be easy enough to have a remote friend watching a mirror of your screen. Use an inductive loop earpiece hidden inside your ear hooked up to a phone and they could read out your next moves. I suppose you could write a program using CV to decode the opponents moves on screen and translate them into chess software in lieu of a friend performing the same task, but that's a bit overkill.
Wait... You can log in to your own online bridge game and see all the hands? Did anyone expect this to not result in blatant cheating? I'm surprised it's an option at all.
Well, people could already cheat trivially by communicating with their partners, which would change the game just as much as being able to see all the cards at anything above the beginner level. It was already completely reliant on the honour system.
Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.
It is possible to disable kibitzing for a table (or a tournament, or a team match etc.), but kibitzing is a feature. It's often both educational and entertaining to kibitz high profile players and participate in the play commentary and banter.
The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner.
Chess drama is the best drama. Anyway it was sad to see armenians disqualified. They are a great team and they absolutely need not cheat. And probably did not. Not sure why petrosian kept looking down in that video, though.
Mmm, maybe it's me but I look at the pointer on the screen, not at the touchpad. I move my index finger and the pointer moves. If I'd be looking at the touchpad I would have to check where I moved the pointer to. Gaze down, gaze up, repeat every few pixels. Och. I do sometimes look at the keyboard though.
> Lichess is written in Scala 2.13, and relies on the Play 2.8 framework. scalatags is used for templating. Pure chess logic is contained in the scalachess submodule. The server is fully asynchronous, making heavy use of Scala Futures and Akka streams. WebSocket connections are handled by a separate server that communicates using redis. Lichess talks to Stockfish deployed in an AI cluster of donated servers. It uses MongoDB to store more than 1.7 billion games, which are indexed by elasticsearch. HTTP requests and WebSocket connections can be proxied by nginx. The web client is written in TypeScript and snabbdom, using Sass to generate CSS. The blog uses a free open content plan from prismic.io. All rated games are published in a free PGN database. Browser testing done with Browserstack. Proxy detection done with IP2Proxy database. Please help us translate Lichess with Crowdin.
the UX with puzzles on chess.com is much better. The analysis after the game is also pretty cool. It did help me become better. (I'm a super noob) I would happily use lichess but there's a lack of feedback after games there (IMO)
The classes are open (people can enter regardless of gender), and female-only. The latter exist primarily as a means for recriuting more women to the sport, as far as I know.
> between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?
Because with few exceptions (the Polgar sisters) they didn't manage to compete on the same level as men. Judit Polgar was the highest-ranking women ever (no. 8, in 2005), but 15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight.
15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight.
I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.
I vaguely remember some studies about women underperforming when they perceive their opponent as a man (even playing online). A quick google search might get you some articles on the matter, or the papers themselves.
There is no male-only chess, women can also compete. Female-only chess clubs and tournaments are a way to encourage women to get into chess in a less hostile, more welcoming environment. Ultimately it's an attempt to bring more diversity to the male-dominated game. In 2019 for example, women made up a higher percentage of chess players then ever before, but still only accounted for 14.6% [0] of registered players.
There are so many more men playing that the chances of finding a woman strong enough to win a top tournament are slim. We would have men-only tournaments with a reverse gender ratio.
Then there are commercial and opportunity reasons. The winner of a women-only tournament is always a women and sponsors can show a winning woman to their customers. Furthermore it could help to recruit new female players. I'd like to hear from a woman about that because maybe knowing that they'll win only in a protected area, or the very existence of protected areas, could actually discourage them to play.
BTW, the same principles apply to the game of Go (only one woman ever won a major open tournament), and even the anti cheating measures.
Alexandra Botez and others have talked about it at considerable length. Suffice it to say, none of them feel discouraged to play by the existence of women's titles. And they all have pretty horrible stories of harassment or even assault growing up as young women in the chess world. Women's titles are not some sort of value reducing participation trophies, and the chess world is far more hostile as a status quo than you're assuming.
I would imagine it's not a joke. His comment is factual if you interpret "women" and "men" as a population and in context of chess performance(not in general).
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
it's true of the best chess players, and in a couple esports I know of, despite women having no innate disadvantage. doesn't stop my mom from beating me every time we play.
They still play in non-segregated tournaments, get regular titles and such. Women's chess titles, tournaments and such an extra.
Think of it like having a local league with its own rating system and titles. Countries have this, and it exists alongside international, fide titles and ratings.
This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades.
People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did.
Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.
Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
I've seen a lot of online conversations recently where the default assumption is that every Olympic sprinter, every cyclist or swimmet, basically every elite athlete is doping. It's pretty sad that we are in a world where you can work incredibly hard to make the most of natural talents and many people will assume you cheated.
Isnt that even with doping you need to work incredibly hard and make the most of you talents? (since everybody is doing this, it just raises the bar throughout, doesnt it)
work incredibly hard and make the most of you talents
Indeed, and one of the most common uses of doping is not make you stronger or perform better per se. but to let your body recover quicker so you can train longer and harder with shorter recovery time between training sessions.
That’s the thing. Without doping you can work as hard as you want and still not beat the guys who do it. Even as amateur I have seen how much people improved their physique and performance once they started using steroids or HGH and there simply is no way to compete with that.
Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:
3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)
2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)
1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")
--------
3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)
2: For your National-cup
1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)
I know for a fact that 3 isn't even used on national-cup event in France, at least for sailing, canoe and kayak events. Or rather, that the club and physical preparators from this club advise against anything other than supplements, and even the French Kayak champion (Joly) only take a few of those, only 1/3rd of a year.
How much money is behind those sports? Hint...NOT much. We Talk about Cycling, Athletics, Football and so on..
>I know for a fact that 3 isn't even used on national-cup event in France
No you don't.
BTW: I knew for a Fact that Lance Armstrong was the biggest Cycle Pro ever born and he would never need doping because he was just in another league then anyone else.
There is a lot of money in sailing, but in general most of the gains there are from better boats, so the backers putting money in aren't likely spend money on doping. (doping would help, but every dollar spent on dope is a dollar not spent on boat design)
Not the Olympic sailing...Oracle stuff yes...but do you really need doping for sailing? It's more about tactics not ultra high-end body-strength..i sailed Lasers for 4 years and it is demanding, but nothing against Street-cycling/CrossCountry
Sorry, that's BS. In some sports and some top ranks, maybe there is a lot of money behind. But that's a very narrow view of "elite athlete". I personally know some Olympic finalists in some sports, and they certainly don't see big money. They struggle to actually train full-time over an Olympic cycle (4 years) without having to have some part-time job that puts food on the table and pays for gear, trips to training camps and competitions.
I replied to "basically every elite athlete is doping." That's definitely BS. So, you agree with me then?
My friend was in the finals in Beijing and in London, top-6. In London half a second from a medal. Yes doping would help immensely but those guys have too much honor to do this. No, there is no money behind. He gets sponsoring in form of a boat which is sponsored by the manufacturer. The rest of his life's expenses, all travels, housing, shipping of his equipment, bring wife and kids along sometimes, mortgage on their house, all that needs to be paid for. And it was a struggle to finance all this. Friends help, family helps, and a few local companies in his hometown chip in. He is a construction engineer and his net worth is less than half mine as a mid-30 programmer.
So yes, everybody keep downvoting me and ignore that not every "elite athlete" is some overpaid basketball or soccer pro making 8-figures a year and evading taxes.
>I replied to "basically every elite athlete is doping." That's definitely BS
True in Curling i never heard of doping. And trust me even your friend would not told you if he takes doping (no saying he did).
And again not every Sport profits from Doping and not everyone takes them but lots and lots of them do, and having a blind eye because of profit is the unfair thing for the honest and sportsmanship'ish peoples.
> And again not every Sport profits from Doping and not everyone takes them but lots and lots of them do, and having a blind eye because of profit is the unfair thing for the honest and sportsmanship'ish peoples.
Again, evidence or it did not happen. You are casting unproven claims as facts. That gives the impression that the default is an athlete is doped, and _that's_ what's unfair.
I don't see why i have to prove anything, I'm not that Anti Doping Agency. Look at the past for example Street-cycling. Russian Olympic team, the Team from East Germany etc....lots of evidence...and even in Curling.
Which is why, the conspiracy theory goes, it’s only second tier athletic disciplines that have a doping problem. In sports where the real money is, such as football and tennis, it pays to sweep results under the rug. Cyclists and distance skiers, on the other hand, seem to go from one scandal to the next.
Unless an athlete shows up that does manage to bring in serious amounts of money. In that case the lid goes on for a few years.
>In football players, doping has recently become an important matter
>>Androgen abuse has not only a direct effect on myocardial hypertrophy and fibrosis, but can also result in myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, hypertension and dyslipidemia
>>>Herbal supplements, anti-histamines and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs
I want to see a documentary that is basically what Icarus was going to be before it turned into being about international politics: doping by “weekend warriors” in amateur sports.
There is a lot of paranoia in the running community (for example) that even local municipal marathons are being won by amateurs doping (not to mention some people running with those Nike “Vaporfly” shoes with the carbon fiber plate in them.) I have my doubts about how effective it is at the amateur level. I suspect it’s like amateurs buying expensive golf clubs and golf balls hoping it will make them better when really they just need more practice and are skill limited rather than gear limited.
What bugs me about this is that there is untested powerlifting with better prizes. Go compete there if you want to take PEDs!! Of all the sports PL is the most honest in that it has that outlet at least, but it of course varies by country. The steroids taboo in some countries might discourage the creation of untested federations. That could end up having the wrong effect of encouraging athletes on the fence about punching their natty card; they might stay in the tested federation while using PEDs.
It's completely stupid because all you will get is a trophy worth probably max ~£20 and some bragging rights. I could understand it more if it was for £100k prize money. Totally pointless.
Depends on the sport. The uplift from PED usage in certain sports is obscene. I would guess that most top level amateurs in strength sports are doping or have doped, and traditional doping indicators (e.g. FFMI >25) suggest the same. There are fewer good indicators in endurance and skill sports to work with.
Jesus I just had this exact same thought. I wonder if that director ever considered retrying his original concept...
With that said I think a lot of the pedantics of "but IS doping really happening in international sports" going on in this thread could be emphatically answered with "uh, yes" by simply watching _Icarus_.
Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.
Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.
I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).
Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.
That's depending on what you consider a "performance enhancing substance". With basic food and drinks, we surely all agree that that's not the case. But the line starts to get blurry with supplements. Whey? Creatine? Caffeine? Supplement stores are full of this stuff, and a lot is really just a waste of money and exists to milk the amateur gym bro cash cow. But some of those things help. And eventually you cross the line into forbidden territory.
That line is a clear one. If you take that line, then no, not every athlete takes performance enhancing substances. But if you count, say, caffeine, then yes, most athletes do. And non-athletes too, FWIW.
Well, the line still seems blurry regarding medicines that athletes are allowed to take if they have a specific conditions... For instance, a lot of pro cyclists seem to suffer from asthma (40% vs 8% in the general population)!
“Exercise-induced asthma is the most common medical problem among winter Olympic athletes, especially among cross-country skiers. Nearly 50% of these athletes suffer from the condition, closely followed by short-track speed skaters at 43%. For figure skaters it’s 21%, Nordic combined it’s 17%, and for ice hockey it’s 15%. By comparison, around 9% of the UK general population suffers from asthma.”
The situation is something like "huh, a whole lot of Vietnam draftees seem to suffer from flat feet, somehow our drafting algorithm must have pulled in more flat feet people than exist in the entire population".
As an (ex) XC runner who has done thousands of miles in the cold and snow, the word "normally" in that article's pivotal sentence, "This can cause the smooth muscle in the airway to narrow, reducing the athletes’ ability to breathe normally" is a bit of a stretch. It's like saying these athletes all have "exercise-induced tachycardia" because their heart rate goes up when they compete. Responding to dry, cold air with narrowed airways is normal. I don't dispute that some respond to it worse than others and need medication to come back to the default response, but it's easy to stretch that diagnosis and take salbutamol until you're better than the baseline.
My lungs are currently in the annual process of acclimating to the newly cold fall air. Every year for decades I've been running in October and there are a couple weeks when the temperature crashes from the last encore of summer at 60F/15C seemingly overnight to frosty mornings and 40F/5C runs and the leaves change. I can feel that my legs are fine but I'm breathing harder than usual, and I can literally see on my Garmin that my average pace has decreased but my heart rate is unchanged or elevated. By November my VO2 max will be up a bit and my pace will be mostly back to normal.
Does it feel like I'm breathing through a slimy straw on those first frosty mornings? Yes. Am I in danger of asphyxiating from it? No, and I think that's a critical distinction - some of my friends are, they should use an inhaler to counteract their body's over reaction to the conditions. Can I get over it without medication? Yes. Would I be faster if I had blood salbutamol levels of 800 ug/L instead of 0 and an unrestricted airway? Yes, whether I used it in training to work out at a higher level than I otherwise could, raced with it, or both.
I'd be interested in an analysis of those cross-country skiers if they compared the mucus and muscle response of the undiagnosed and diagnosed athletes with and without their inhalers. Do an EVH test and take an ultrasound of the larynx/trachea to measure smooth muscle constriction and mucus production after 15 minutes on the treadmill at 68F/20C and 50% RH, open the door and do it at 32F/0C and 5% RH, then take a hit of an inhaler and do both again (with appropriate breaks between tests). It could also be interesting to look at the responses of non-winter-sport athletes transplanted from warmer climates versus those who have been working out in those conditions for a few months.
It would be hypocritical not to admit that I occasionally take a pseudoephedrine throughout the fall because my nasal mucus membranes get more productive when raking dusty leaves or running through fields of ragweed - which is, again, pretty normal. To me, the main difference is that suffering through the snot doesn't lead to overcoming it, it's just gross and annoying.
In the Salazar circle, TUE's for asthma were downright endemic. Everyone knows what's going on, you just need to catch these guys. We got Salazar, and most of his athletes know in the back of their minds we'll get them sooner or later.
Let's take hormones. Once upon a time there is an athlete who has naturally high level of certain hormone. Research is conducted and the anti-doping agency moves up the level of how much the hormone is legal to have in the blood.
Now all competitors will take additional hormones to reach, but not cross said level. As long as this works, they think of themselves as not doping and levelling the playing field. But they are taking hormones.
Morally, taking that hormone is still wrong. And so should it be according to the rules too.
If you now answer that it's unfair that the person with naturally occurring higher levels can have it but those with lower levels can't "level" the playing field, well, tough luck. That's just the lottery that gives some people an advantage in certain sports. We all accept that some people are naturally tall and therefore have advantages in basketball. Or some people have naturally stronger VO2 max and thereby advantages in endurance sports.
The competition is how far you can get with the _natural state_ of your body, plus training. Not how far you can get as long as everybody pumps some substances up to a previously-agreed-upon threshold. Those thresholds are just the sad plan-B solution of anti-doping agencies if they can't directly measure doping substances and need to resort to measuring the effects instead. That actually disadvantages those with naturally higher effects.
Nobody would think of restricting maximum leg length, and as long as your legs are not longer than that it's fine to surgically extend them.
To allow half the planet's population to also be competitive in sports. And often times, the style/technique slightly differs between them too.
In some sports you even have different weight classes. Rowing has 2, wrestling has 6 (olympic), boxing has 8-10 (olympic). The techniques there also differ slightly.
And there are other partitionings of the population too that restrict in who can participate in a competition. You have world championships, but you also have nationals. And regional competitions. And junior leagues. And school competitions.
Then there is also the paralympics.
You can find all that reasonable or ridiculous, but I'm not sure how that's related to doping.
Sorry, i=I don't mean this in a demeaning manner, were you an elite athlete competing in olympics, playing in NBA or premier league? When people say every athlete takes PEDs, it's usually athletes at the very top of their game. And yes, when there are millions or billions (if you're Cristiano Ronaldo or Lebron James) of dollars at stake, athlete's will take any advantage possible.
Do I think every professional athlete is on PEDs? Yes. Does it make what they are doing any less super human? No. It's like your typical person looking at a bodybuilder and saying, I could look like that if i did steroids. Which is total bullshit.
I had just reached an international level, but I was never at the olympic level. But a whole group I trained with for a time all became professionals, and some of them competed in the olympics. I knew them then before they got there, and I knew their level and their attitudes, and I saw nothing in their professional performances indicating that they had at any point moved into doping. How sure can one be? Never totally sure. But trying to be "sure" about the other possibility (that they were doping) will need more than "yeah, I'm sure they do".
EditAdd: I did know people who were fascinated about EPO-like medication, and asthma medicine when used without actually having asthma. That was when they were quite young, and that's also a long time ago. I never ran into any of them actually using anything, and they were in the minority - I met just two, and sadly one of them died in a traffic accident before he got to a professional level.
I know exactly why I "didn't progress" and they did, as you kind of put it.. I decided not to. They decided to continue. I stopped training, they didn't. When I was still active I progressed same as they did - and I saw nothing super-human in their later performance. Obviously I only have intimate knowledge about my own field, I know nothing about e.g. 100m sprinters, jumpers and the like. And, as everybody else, I'm pretty suspicious about pure muscle-based sports like weight lifting.
That's a ridiculous claim because it can't be falsified as long as you are not arguing with an unbeaten olympic champion. As long as an athlete has been beaten by somebody, you can always pull the "yeah well you know why you didn't win? Because you're clean, but everybody above you doped."
Just like arguing "well we only lost the election cause the other side cheated."
What many people in this thread don't realize is that sports is more than NBA and soccer.
In fact, less commercialized sports are much more interesting to watch and participate because they are not just full of over-hyped over-payed over-celebritized evening-entertainment shows designed to milk the audience of most money possible.
If "athlete" ends for you at what's on pay TV and on ads at bus stops, sure. But that's a very limited view of sports. And quite sad, frankly.
Another question worth asking: did any of the athletes you knew take PEDs at any time in their past, but stopped once they approached a level where getting caught would mean the end of their career?
None of the ones I knew well enough to call friends or acquaintances did, and of those who continued to a pro level none of them arbitrarily stopped. They continued until their careers naturally started to decline, and then changed careers - some of them sports related, some not.
I'm curious what sport. My wife is a swimmer and had to make the choice to either dope and compete at an international level or give it up. She chose to give it up. And this wasn't a shock or anything. She knew the decision was coming since she first showed promise in high school.
The public also thinks of doping as taking something that has effects active during the competition, but many PEDs are not like that.
The example I know best is steroids. A younger athlete, before getting into high-level competition, or during the offseason, does a "cycle" or two of steroids. The effect is to build more strength or size. When the athlete ends the steroid cycle some, but not all of the strength or size is lost, assuming they continue training.
What this means is that they have a foundation to build on that's already above what the athlete who doesn't use steroids has. A year or two down the road, there's absolutely no trace of steroids in the athlete's system, so they easily pass drug tests. However, the benefit was already gained.
So for athletes the limits are time-bounded, not dose-bounded.
When the top 30 100m times all belong to athletes that have been popped for doping with the exception of Usain Bolt you have to ask yourself is he just THAT amazing or is he amazing plus have the best doping team and protection.
You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.
I am almost 100% sure that Bolt is taking something. It was the same with Lance Armstrong. Pretty much all the guys he was beating got caught one after the other. It didn’t seem possible that there was one athlete who is so much better than everybody else without doping. It’s already hard enough to win with doping.
Yep, sprinting is the prime example. If an honest but genetically lucky and hard working sprinter came along today, there would be no way they could convince everyone that they were clean. Not getting caught doping is assumed to mean you are just too good at hiding it.
The dopers have basically ruined sprinting and a number of other sports for anyone who wanta to compete cleanly and does well.
It's entirely possible that Bolt is clean and is a Phelps like genetic outlier, but there will always be suspicions that can never be disproved, no matter what he does.
Or Bolt is an anomaly? We are talking about a third world country here. There isn't any money to have the best chemist etc. How bolt is different is that he is tall and has the same turn over as a small guy. Chemicals don't get you this, only genetics. It was the long held belief that tall people cannot run short distances. Now, every coach is looking for a tall runner with same turn over as a small guy. Bolt just changed the paradigm.
Don't worry, it will be all 50 eventually. The 100m is often decided by photo finishes and yet, Usain Bolt has had to look behind him AND slow down before crossing the finish so that he's not too far ahead of the others.[0]
IIRC, the Jamaicans basically defunded their drug enforcement, hired known pro-doping coaches, basically have a "team chemist". The Jamaican sprinting explosion followed.
I want to make clear that Jamaica is not an outlier or "bad guy". Really they are small fry in the industrial olympic sports machine. What they really are is a window into what the big time countries do.
It of course helps that sprinting is a national obsession in Jamaica, so the best athletes do sprinting. But that's been true for a long time.
Personally, I do not think humans can run faster than 9.90 in the 100m without "aid". or under 20.00 in the 200, or under 44 in the 400m.
I do not think a human can run faster than 13:00 in the 5000m, or 27:00 in the 10,000m, or somewhere around 2:08 in the marathon.
If you’ve seen how athletes are raised up nowadays, you’ll see why people say that.
There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.
In some cases, it’s true though. For example, the NFL didn’t test for HGH at all until 2010 and their test remains inadequate even today. It’s fairly reasonable to assume a majority of players were using it prior to 2010 if their choice was between getting a million-dollar contract and taking HGH.
Part of it from my layman's perspective is that today, even home exercising frequently involves protein shakes. As you go into even basic body building or training, you start taking more and more "Stuff". There's no clear obvious intuitive big line between "natural talent and hard work" and "illegal chemical cheating". Reading the details of the tests involved a few years ago made me believe the line we draw is thin, porous, arbitrary and ever-changing.
The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
I'm curious why you take such a hard line. People only take protein powder when they want to be big, and really it only saves you from having to eat such massive amounts of food. If you're skinny and not used to overeating, eating the reccomended gram of protein per pound of lean body mass for muscle growth can really be quite sickening.
> As you go into even basic body building or training, you start taking more and more "Stuff".
This is because there's not a lot of money in telling people to lift heavy stuff that's literally all around us and eat commonly available protein-rich foods. What is there to sell? In comes the gadgets and supplements.
How are protein shakes and such 'stuff' at all approaching performance enhancing chemicals? Performance enhancing chemicals make the body do things it wouldn't normally do, directly modifying behavior to be different than it could be without that substance. Protein shakes are just providing nutrients so the body can make full use of exercise. Giving the body a nutrient rich liquid food is very different from a drug.
The one that seems a bit borderline but perhaps small enough effect and also already so commonly used by the general population anyways that its not too reasonable to consider it to be "doping" which would be caffeine.
First it is protein shakes. Then creatine and other supplements. Then pre-workout stuff. Then the better pre-workout stuff someone at the gym recommended. Then you find out that pre-workout stuff was banned by the FDA for containing amphetamine analogues. Whoops, you were cheating!
A good example is the "Deer Antler Extract" that Vijay Singh took. It sounds like something akin to Fish Oil. Imagine if Fish Oil from CVS were banned. For all I know, it could be.
You do realize that transfusion of your own blood, even with zero 3rd party chemicals, is also doping? But it only provides nutrients too, or to be more precise concentrated result of those nutrients.
Blood doping increases red blood cell count and compensates for physiological changes which happen during an event like the Tour de France, it's disingenuous to call it nutrients.
Lance Armstrong and his Postal teammates routinely did blood doping during the Tour de France. They smuggled frozen blood in a hidden compartment and arranged secret transfusions in hotel rooms. All the sordid details are in "The Secret Race" by Tyler Hamilton.
>As you go into even basic body building or training, you start taking more and more "Stuff". There's no clear obvious intuitive big line between "natural talent and hard work" and "illegal chemical cheating".
yep, it is all individual. Some people have nice biology, some will get nowhere without "stuff". A recent blood test showed some anemia (that explained why
i had such low level fatigue and tiredness threshold in the recent times, and you couldn't just make through it on pure will because it is like an engine with closed air intake - no oxygen, no burning) Started to take B12 and iron - things improved remarkably, physically and mentally. If i were a competitive athlete should i be forbidden from such a "cheating" way of increasing of blood oxygen carrying capability?
My understanding they ban testosterone which also increase the blood oxygen carrying capability. Which means that you're lucky to be born with high testosterone, and you're doomed otherwise (like me - i'm on a lower side). How is that a level playing field then? No exercise can compensate if you get less oxygen.
There is a huge natural variance between individuals that goes far beyond testosterone and includes height, bone density, vision, other hormones, etc. No one realistically expects a level playing field. But everyone has to play by the same arbitrary rules. In practice those differences only matter at elite levels; at casual amateur levels you can overcome natural disadvantages by training harder and playing smarter. The best player on your company softball team probably doesn't have a super high testosterone level.
Testosterone supplementation can induce erythrocytosis, but you can accomplish that more directly with EPO. (I don't recommend doing that.)
>at casual amateur levels you can overcome natural disadvantages by training harder and playing smarter.
no, it is just a feel good fairy tale. You're missing the point - amount of oxygen defines your speed/endurance/etc that you can reach. It is basic law of physics. Put a gas mask on and narrow the pipe half or even just a quarter - no amount of training will help you overcome that. I was an amateur boxer - 4th at University 30 years ago - so i'm not just armchair talking.
For the last decade i've been running and hiking regularly and there recently was a deep in my performance - pushing harder didn't work, it was just like hitting glass ceiling - which got corrected once i saw the anemia and corrected it with supplements. Did i instead have to accept the low level of performance, accompanied by easily setting fatigue, etc. just for sake of "naturalcy"? And if I to run some competition should I stop the supplements and try to run with anemia?
>No one realistically expects a level playing field.
exactly. So why wouldn't we try to to level it as much as possible. Wouldn't it make the competition more honest as it would allow to win the ones who train harder and play smarter than the ones who just accidentally got better DNA?
None of that is correct. VO2max can be trained. You might not have the genetics to be able to reach 80 ml/kg/min like an elite professional endurance athlete but you can improve significantly from where you are now, if you're willing to put in the work. But just doing a bunch of running and hiking won't get you there. You'll have to follow a focused, goal oriented training plan. And it's going to hurt. This will also tend to boost natural testosterone production slightly, so there's a bit of a positive feedback loop.
If you have a legitimate medical condition then you can apply for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) to take banned supplements while still being allowed to compete.
everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
But at that level, everyone is operating under the same rules. That's just the nature of competition, no? People will take any edge they can while following the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
Hell, even in the context of "on their own, unassisted", some countries directly support their Olympic athletes in terms of training, coaching and facilities, while other athletes have to pay out of pocket for that sort of thing and figure it out on their own and thus are more "unassisted", but there are no rules about that...
At the end of the day, all you can hope for is that the rules are applied justly & transparently.
I worked a swimming pool decades ago, and saw parents giving their pre-teen kids some drugs like Guronsan (https://www.drugs.com/international/guronsan.html) before swimming competition. It might be legal, but it was sending the wrong signal to those kids. That a pill could give them a boost or an edge.
It's hard to assume anything else. If you are not cheating, you are not trying hard enough to win.
If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.
You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.
EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche
That mechanical doping suspension was interesting to learn about. The rider wasn’t caught with a motorized bike, instead the bike was found in their pit and (supposedly) didn’t belong to the rider but due to the rules the rider was treated as if it was their bike.
> Van den Driessche had been taking part in the inaugural under 23 women’s event, which was won by Britain’s Evie Richards. The Belgian and European under 23 champion had gone in as a pre-race favourite but did not feature at the front. She was eventually forced off her bike on the final lap when she was struck by mechanical problems and ended up walking with her bike.
> Van den Driessche’s bike was taken for inspection along with several other bikes after the race. It quickly became apparent that something was wrong with her bike and news of the discovery quickly spread; however it is only this Sunday morning that they revealed their discovery. It gives Van den Driessche the dubious honour of being the first rider to be discovered to be using a motor. Incidentally, Van den Driessche’s brother Niels is currently suspended for doping.
According to [1] it was literally the bike she rode the race on.
Her claim is the motorised bike belonged to a friend, was handed to her in error, and she rode the race on it without using the motor as she didn't know it was there.
> If you are not cheating, you are not trying hard enough to win.
I wonder if we're using different definitions of "win" here. To my way of thinking, if a person has cheated, they didn't win, regardless of what the official judges conclude.
(Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the point you're trying to make.)
> OK, but then almost no professional or Olympic athlete has won anything in the past 30 years.
I don't know what fraction of those athletes cheated. But I consider my definition of "win" to be reasonable regardless of how many competitors cheat.
This reminds me of a famous quote[0]:
> When Abraham Lincoln was asked by a prosecuting attorney, “How many legs does a sheep have?” He replied, “Four.” The attorney then asked, “If you called a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would he have?” Lincoln replied, “Four. Merely because you call a sheep’s tail a leg does not make it one.”
"I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but I think I get to decide how many bedrooms there are, don't you? "Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has an oven in it! This bedroom's got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom's over in that guy's house! Sir, you have one of my bedrooms, are you aware? Don't decorate it!"
To paraphrase the only real rule in another famous sport: "The winning player shall be the first player that wins."
If you are the top of any sport, there's money, fame, groupies, etc. There's a real incentive to do it.
Moreover, the audience wants to see superhumans and world records broken. To paraphrase Futurama about women's basketball "good fundamentals, but can't dunk". The governing bodies of all pro sports look the other way.
With the carbon fiber shoes, there is now essentially mechanical, uh, "assistance" in running.
Improvement of equipment is always a massive gray area. Cycling (aside from electric motors) has aerodynamic bikes, wind tunnel access. XC skiing has environmentally bad teflon wax. Swimming, theoretically the most naked/equipment-less sport, has sharkskin suits and buoyancy aids.
There are other advantages like expensive altitude tents.
Wax and aerodynamic equipment certainly make a difference, but a bucket of fresh Amgen red blood cells is even better- and for cycling at least, works uphill, whereas aero doesn't matter under 18mph.
Well at least in bodybuilding they are open about and silently condone PED usage rather than making it a game of who can do the most without getting caught. It does make it so that you need to be doing very large amount of PEDs to even have a chance at winning Mr Olympia though.
I don’t feel qualified to remark on other sports but based on casual observation of the opinions of bodybuilding fans or even wrestling fans/people into Hollywood, it seems most regular people are very ignorant about PED usage as a phenomenon.
There are limits to the rate that you can pack on muscle mass or how much you can maintain at a low body fat percentage which are telltale signs of PED use (not that I judge it, but just to temper my own expectations). I think many people’s ignorance of these signs are fueling body dysmorphia and insecurity. It’s better if people are aware of how common PED usage is in bodybuilding, Hollywood, and “instagram bodybuilders”
It's hilarious you think this after such blatant scandals in cycling coming out.
If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones
If world records were set virtually across the board in all sports with doping, and there are athletes achieving or beating these marks...
For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.
If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?
Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".
Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.
Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.
Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?
And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.
It is actually most likely that they are doping, the history of revelations in these sports indicates that at various moments in the past, it WAS the case that any given elite athlete was most likely to be doping, it is probably the case now too.
It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.
I'm old enough to remember the Rosa Ruiz cheating scandal from the Boston Marathon. 40 years ago everyone kind of laughed it off as a one-off thing that could never happen again because of cameras along the route and better safeguards, but it's emerged that lots of people cheat at the Boston Marathon (https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2019/04/22/boston-marath...) and others (https://www.marathoninvestigation.com).
For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.
The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):
... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.
It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.
>>> The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes
The Olympics is first and foremost a political event. Sports come second.
It hurts to realize but that's a fact of life. The next thing that's hurting might be to realize that many athletes are likely to be missing because of logistics/visa/costs issues.
Go to openpowerlifting.org rankings and compare the ipf raw records to all of the existing federations. The difference is staggering.
Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.
It should be the default assumption. It is difficult to believe how otherwise-astute people can fall into the feeling-good traps of "talent can beat everything" or "you need to want it more". PEDs get the user a very substantial advantage, from the ability to train more, to changes in muscles mass, to much faster recovery from injuries and so on. Apart from the health risks we all know about (which are in reality overestimated, relatively speaking, otherwise we would see former professional athletes drop like flies), they make the whole machine way better.
Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.
Gresham's law for chess would be noncheaters leave when cheaters move in. All that's left on Facebook is conspiracy bots chattering to eachother and suchlike.
Great point, which I am totally ignoring to point out that I think you meant "2020's" instead of "1920's". But great point, though, about the larger issue.
> Perhaps thinking of Lance Armstrong, he added: “I was a big fan of a certain cyclist and a part of me understands the pressure to succeed at all costs. ..."
Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing.
There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.
So did Festina, and so did practically every other cycling team in the EPO-nuts 90s.
Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
"Doping" sounds bad like he's taking drugs, but isn't doping just putting your own blood back inside of you to get higher red blood cell counts? How is that much different from living on top of a mountain for a few months and then coming down on race day with elevated red blood cell counts? Is the latter cheating as well?
Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
If he did this on the first day of the Tour de France, yes, they are the same thing.
But if he is pumping fresh blood on the ten or twenty day of the tour, it's like you take a few months in the mountain recouping before you run the next day race.
Do you think it's OK if one cyclist is running stages day after day while the other cyclist has a week to recoup between stages to recoup? Is this even the same race?
> “In his games there were abnormalities, sequences that he played godlike, but there were blunders as well,”
The is the secret to successful cheating: knowing where to use the engine and where to go on your own. It is easy to run engine evaluation after the fact and see if your moves always match up with the engine. However when sometimes they do an sometimes they don't it is hard to know if you just happened to stumble on the best move. Particularly since most everyone regularly studies with an engine and so the best players sometimes will pick out the types of lines the engine will prefer without help.
Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.
Yes, but its not a strategy to win every game.
It will make you play at slightly higher level.
Also there are moves that if you don't understand will look odd - computer like. That is also how suspicion can be raised.
Anecdotally i remember other cheating story.
In online FPS like Counter Strike some top level players have been caught using aim enhancer (aimbot) that move a mouse towards a target. But they had it set to only move mouse 1px. Otherwise it was too obvious, but 1px adjustment at top level is a great competitive edge.
And still people get caught. And people still cheat. Its infinite cycle.
It is enough to go from top 500 class to number 1 though. Obviously you need to be good first, but once you are that good you can sometimes quickly figure out the computers plan by looking. Remember the tree of possible moves in any games quickly gets far too wide for a computer (much less human) to search, but if you are given one move you can often see a plan that you didn't think of. (this plan might not be what the computer saw!)
The effects of adulterating the culture of a competition on a micro level work on a macro level as well. Saying it's caused by "pressure to succeed," is kind of dumb. If you want to know why cheating happens, look at the rewards of being seen as a winner vs. likelihood and consequences of being caught, and like cycling, there is an equilibrium change after which it becomes irrational not to cheat to find an edge. People cheat for the same reason they do anything: because it's worth it.
You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
I have mostly played in face-to-face tournaments. The first time I played in an online tournament, I was ahead of my opponent. Then, he started inquiring my whereabouts during my moves. I replied out of politeness and lost by timing out. I didn't mind losing this way, but the way he left without saying a word.
Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.
I had a math exam a long while ago. One of those three hour long and the professor had me seated by myself in the math library. So I asked:
- There's tons of math books here. How can you know I won't cheat?
- Bjourne, do you intend to cheat?
- No, of course not.
- Alright. Good luck on your exam!
For some classes, especially as you get higher in fields, no amount of open books will help you in an exam. If you're able to figure out the material using a book then and there while not knowing it before, you deserve the grade.
My lowest level graph theory exam at university was "bring anything you think will help you". Including our teacher's book which had all the course contents and then some.
Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
I studied mathematics too. Algebra and Number Theory.
I believe people should be able to have pretty much any book (not software) at their disposal when doing university level math exams. It is stupid to fail because your overworked brain forgot some formula (did not happen to me, but easily could). And people who did not study beforehand will not be able to cheat their way through, at least not in the time limit needed.
This isn't paramedic training where you need to do the right thing in seconds.
When I was an undergrad (UC Berkeley) all Math and CS classes beyond basics (like Calculus etc) allowed "cheat sheets" in exams and some were "open book" (i.e. bring whatever the fuck you want (nothing digital of course, just paper, no calculator)). I don't remember an incident when bringing a cheat sheet was useful during the exam, maybe 1 time for a minor thing. Writing out the cheat sheet before the exam definitely helps learning though. If it's something you can look up during the exam, it's not gonna be something professor will ask you. If it's something you need to read, understand and conceptualize during the exam, it's gonna take you long enough that it'll be a significant disadvantage.
EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.
I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
At Caltech the exams were nearly always open book, open note. Furthermore, they were not proctored (by institute policy), and you could take them home and do them, and you were trusted to adhere to the time limit.
I.e. it was so easy to cheat there was no purpose to cheating. In many colleges, students brag to their peers about getting away with cheating. At Caltech, I never heard anyone brag about cheating. If you were caught cheating, the other students would ostracize you.
yep, when I was an undergrad there was a physics prof who would give us six hour long unlimited resources exams, we were just on our honour not to ask other people for help
Just imagine the type of person who then pays for cheats in any number of online games. Sometimes they have to jump through hoops (or pay) just to get another account active. It's just a thing that some people do for whatever reason.
At the high level winners can take home > $100,000, but only a few of these events happen every year. If you love chess and want to make it a job you need to win a few tournaments every year (you may have to pay travel expenses to get there).
Cheating is the difference between getting a "real job" for many, so there is a reason.
Let computers compete with human beings at the helm as entertainment. Or, keep changing the rules of chess right before the match so no one wouldn’t have time to program the initial conditions.
What computer programs do people use to cheat? I do not play chess with other people, but I do play against the computer. I've thought of writing a program to make moves for me to see how it would fair against the computer. I'm interested in how the program interacts with the board? Does it take screenshots? Does it interact via an API?
Most chess sites provide a "firehose" for current games. It should be pretty easy to pipe a game's pgn file to stockfish.
Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line.
If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.
If you want to just goof around, use any chess program (such as OSX's built-in Chess.app) set at the hardest difficulty, and play the opposite color from your real game. Then copy your opponent's moves to Chess.app, and make the computer's moves in the real game.
I used to cheat on chess.com. It started as a small bit of cheating here and there, just checking every now and then if the move I was going to make was the best. Of course, the computer always had a better move and then I examine the line and told myself I probably would have thought of that! Like a drug, it escalated and I was checking moves all the time. I was never caught but I was ashamed and just stopped playing. Actually, more than ashamed, cheating took all the joy out of it as it felt like a job, switching tabs, and you don't get the dopamine hit when you think of a great line yourself. I uninstalled scid vs pc and opened a lichess account and never cheated on that. Though lichess tells me loads of opponents I've played have been banned for cheating. I never suspect a thing.
I recently quit online chess completely. The last straw was lichess sending me a warning because I pointed out to a guy he was obviously using an engine. The cheating just got tiresome. I’m going to go back to playing over the board with actual people.
Lichess will flag your account as a cheater w/o notifying you so that your opponents see the flag and avoid games. I know this because a friend of mine who is an average player got flagged that way after a stretch of games he won handily, including one against me where I checked computer analysis and noticed he made zero incorrect moves. A red flag popped up next to his screenname, I asked if he was aware of it and he said he couldn’t see it and got no notification of it.
I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
I got paired with someone rated 400 points higher than me (no idea why).
The dude was destroying me, but somewhere in the middlegame, he let his guard down and exposed himself to a mate-in-one. For once in my life, I saw the mate and I won.
The dude was FURIOUS. He immediately asked for a rematch and I said I had to go. Then the insults came ("chicken shit", etc.).
He even messaged me a few times over the course of a few months (same kind of name calling) and challenged me a few times.
Eventually, I thought, "You know what will really upset him? If I accept a rematch and win again."
So, I accepted one of his challenges and I used a computer. Obviously, he lost and he was FURIOUS again.
Not my proudest moment, but I enjoyed it while it was happening.
But yeah, regular cheating just kind of takes the joy out of the competition.
That has happened to me more than once too. I usually take the rematch because I can often win the second game too, I’ll guess 15% of the time. Almost always the better player is trying an opening trap which is dubious but will cause me to loose in the first 10 moves if I miss it. So I just make really sure to look for tactics extra carefully in the opening. If I survive I can often win. And if I loose I get to learn a new opening trap. :)
on lichess, after every game I use the analysis tool to see all the good moves I missed, and sometimes play out alternate endings. my game has improved a lot because of it, but people get furious with me because I don't accept rematches. If I rematch, I wont have the game fresh in memory and miss the opportunity to learn
I thought computers playing by themselves are equal to or better than computer+human pairs now (i.e. centaur chess is dead and humans provide no help but are only a hinderance). Is that true (this is just a half-remembered hunch)?
Also even if that's not true, computer-assisted human chess for all but the highest levels of play would still be just "human accepts computer move."
I learned the “it sucks all joy out” lesson as a child when I cheated my entire way through Goldeneye 64. I got to the end and felt so unfulfilled.
I discovered that you’re better off walking away from a game that feels so insurmountably difficult rather than cheat a bit or a lot.
“I’m not going to finish so why not cheat to see the ending?” Was always disappointing. I’d rather that mountain still exist off in the distance that I’ll never summit.
When I was a kid my dad prohibited me from using cheats in Civilization I :D And if I remember well, the cheats were readily available through a toggl in the dropdown menu
My game of choice is Go rather than Chess, but this seems similar.
When I was young I hated playing games against the AI. It always felt unreal to me and there was no satisfaction in it. Now, I immensely prefer playing the computer - it goes at my pace, I can get up and leave, I can take all the time I want for my move, and if I do something dumb I just undo back to where I feel comfortable and play better. When I get legitimately stuck I ask the computer for advice.
In this way, I basically always win against a superior player. It may not be ideal for practice, but I just play for fun and find it satisfying to win.
I don't think Play Magnus is close to indistinguishable, it's a modified version of Stockfish on the backend, having the same rating doesn't mean you have the same style
Yup. It's absolutely possible to determine whether you play versus a strength reduced/weak engine or a human. Humans make human plans and play according to human best practices, which you can find in chess literature. Engines, however, do not make long term plans and often play very inhuman (perfectly precise, unobvious tactical) moves, that often suprises even on grandmaster level.
I'm not sure if saying engines don't make long term plans is accurate, since we can set them to plan an arbitrary number of moves ahead. I think you mean that they don't have a theory of mind, and thus don't modulate their play based on their opponents.
HIARCS or Lucas Chess are engines that have been made explicitly to play like a human. You won't be able to distinguish them, with some human play in conjunction, from a very strong human player.
Thanks, those do look like they are attempting to play like humans, but neither says how that claim was tested. How would you test the their ability to imitate humans?
That doesn't help you prove they're indisputable from humans, even if you admitted to using them to cheat. You said some engines are indisputable from humans, can you give me some evidence of this?
AlphaZero / LeelaChess - neural net / genetic learning based ones; although they're not really commercially available, technically anyone can download the code to LeelaChess and train it if given enough CPU power. They learn chess by repeatedly playing chess against itself and in such a way simulate the organic development that has occurred in human play as well.
That's the next generation of chess engines - AlphaZero trounced Stockfish in a match of 100 games with 28 wins and 72 draws and not a single loss. And if you decrease the power a little bit (take an earlier generation), it makes significantly more human-like moves than Stockfish.
Exactly. At the moment there is no way to determine if a strong player used an engine for a single move or not (without proctoring). And one perfect move in a critical position can make all the difference. Also more subtle cheaters would never boost their performance to carlsen levels, but instead increase their performance slightly (e.g. from 2550 to 2650 a +100 elo boost).
It's much simpler than that. Every chess move has an accuracy score where 100% means that it is optimal play according to the top chess engine(which can easily beat any human). Anyone with an abnormally high accuracy is a cheater. Anyone with a high accuracy simply needs to verify who they are a la twitter style.
This comment has strong "why does <your field> need a journal" vibes...
Online chess areas like lichess and chess.com absolutely have automated cheat detection which they consider along with with reports in automated banning of accounts. They consider not just whether the player is playing the excellent moves (something common at any level and very common at high levels), but also how a deep search is needed to evaluate that move, whether other obvious moves were available, how long was taken to play the move, if the position is common, etc. When these serial cheaters are banned, the sites even refund rating points to everyone who lost to them.
However, the issue of isolated cheating incidents is still a big deal, even if the serial obvious cheaters can be detected.
Thanks. I didn't ddg hard enough. r/chess tells me part of lichess' cheat detection is similar to my hunch.
So maybe my only novel suggestion is running lichess (or equiv) live in parallel. Something livestream viewers could also help with.
And I hope someone's replaying historical games.
"how a deep search is needed to evaluate"
Of course. Obvious now that you mention it.
I assumed different programs would make different suggestions. So overseers would want to run a few programs to see if any matched the player's gameplay, style, etc.
Probably the last time I played chess was on an IBM PC XT. The quality of misc game engines varied widely. Of course there's probably been a convergence since.
In professional cycling they do two blood draws for any competition. The first one they test now for any known substances, practices (transfusions are illegal, without a medical reason). The second one they save to re-test when new drugs come to light. A few notable professionals have had titles stripped for violations that were detected years after the event.
Re-running the games (especially to check for new techniques that aren't public at the time of the event) would be in the same spirit.
Err, yes. In the case of chess, all computer assistance is always banned, but some algorithms may not match current patterns of behavior.
In the case of blood tests, there is a cat and mouse game of changing how the drugs are administered or other chemicals in the blood that reduce the effectiveness of the tests. Later on the presence of those other substances may be used as motivation for re-testing a group of people.
I noticed that poker was mentioned as well. Does anyone have more information on this? I know heads up limit is essentially solves and no-limit is “almost” solved but are poker bots really good enough to handle full ring NLHE at a high level?
I had no idea lichess was FOSS and that it was written mostly in Scala [0]. I've been playing in chess.com just because it was the first platform I saw. Thank you, I'm definitely making the switch.
The crisis is really that humans are desperately trying to "compete" at a game that computers have soundly defeated human players at. The answer, endorsed by leaders like Kasparov, is abandon competitive human chess. Embrace the computers for competition, and use ELO for entertainment matchups. I don't care if I'm playing a "cheater", as long as the cheater is playing at my level.
But people still enjoy foot races despite the existence of wheeled and powered vehicles. I don't play chess often but would still enjoy a sit-down game with a similarly occasional player, without thinking about how much better of a game the Omnicron Neutron Wrangler can play.
It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.
We built and released an open source crossword board game app (1) (think Scrabble/Words With Friends) inspired heavily by Lichess. We are currently exploring options for cheat detection, as cheating is also endemic in our sport, sadly.
283 comments
[ 219 ms ] story [ 1449 ms ] threadSomeone else would have to be watching the game and doing the computer doping on tlyour behalf though
I remember a few people getting caught. What's funny about this is that the top players were still better than the AI running on a laptop (back then) and the cheaters occasionally got knocked out early on.
It would be neat to see the elo of the engines over time.
EDIT: Heh, deep blue’s famous match happened in 1997. I guess this really is possible. It’s weird growing up with the idea that “every chess engine can beat humans every time”; I wonder when that became true.
That decade gap is where we often mispredict the future. Once a point is proven, we expect instant impact. Reality takes time.
It took 15-20 years after superhuman chess engines were invented before they really impacted chess. Cheating is one impact, but novelty is another one. "Computer moves" are learned by GMs and played in world class tournaments. Contributing novelties is a mark of influence in chess. Even computer strategies are starting to appear in human tournaments.
His rematch against Deep Junior (the 2003 computer) ended in a 3-3 tie, so humans were actually able to hold off computer for quite a bit longer than 1997...
One of the main reasons that Petrosian "got caught" was other GMs (see Hikaru's YouTube video on this) pointing out how unnatural some of his moves felt to them and considering the speed at which he supposedly calculated them.
I've played an early version of one of those (its playing strength is roughly proportional to the amount of training it has done) and it was quite human-like in its behavior, even dropping pieces and making very human-like mistakes.
Look up AlphaZero and the open source port LeelaChess :) Once those become commercially available, it's going to be very hard to detect engine usage.
There is an interesting section in Hofstaeder's Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 where he speculates that, despite the rapid progress of technology, computers might never be able to play chess at a human level!
To be sure, shield it from any form of radiation (neutrons, gamma rays, etc.), too. Even getting a single bit “there’s a mate in less than 7 moves” to a player could be (possibly rarely) useful, as it would direct a player’s search for a move and/or have them commit more time looking for a move.
Trivial with the Stockfish open source chess engine
https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/the-2020-online-cheat...
https://bridgewinners.com/article/view/confession-of-a-self-...
Still, being able to self-kibitz opens an extra avenue of cheating compared to collusion: you can cheat even if your partner is honest.
The downside is that people can kibitz their own table (if kibitzing is allowed) using an alt account. Yes, it's a risk, but there are lots of ways to cheat online. It's trivial to cheat using out of band communication with your partner, as a sibling comment points out, or use a computer program to calculate odds if cheating without the knowledge of your partner.
So the whole thing is built on an honor system.
Edit: Links.
1. https://lichess.org/source
2. https://github.com/ornicar/lila
> Lichess is written in Scala 2.13, and relies on the Play 2.8 framework. scalatags is used for templating. Pure chess logic is contained in the scalachess submodule. The server is fully asynchronous, making heavy use of Scala Futures and Akka streams. WebSocket connections are handled by a separate server that communicates using redis. Lichess talks to Stockfish deployed in an AI cluster of donated servers. It uses MongoDB to store more than 1.7 billion games, which are indexed by elasticsearch. HTTP requests and WebSocket connections can be proxied by nginx. The web client is written in TypeScript and snabbdom, using Sass to generate CSS. The blog uses a free open content plan from prismic.io. All rated games are published in a free PGN database. Browser testing done with Browserstack. Proxy detection done with IP2Proxy database. Please help us translate Lichess with Crowdin.
Athletic sports aside, does anyone know the motivation between gender-segregated leagues in games like chess?
Because with few exceptions (the Polgar sisters) they didn't manage to compete on the same level as men. Judit Polgar was the highest-ranking women ever (no. 8, in 2005), but 15 years have passed already and there's no woman-challenger in sight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
I was about to comment that Yifan Hou might be close, but turns out she's only ranked in the mid 80s. And she is by all accounts the most dominant currently active woman.
In situations where you are expected to perform worse due to a stereotype one tends to perform worse.
[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/team-battles-femme-batale-no...
Then there are commercial and opportunity reasons. The winner of a women-only tournament is always a women and sponsors can show a winning woman to their customers. Furthermore it could help to recruit new female players. I'd like to hear from a woman about that because maybe knowing that they'll win only in a protected area, or the very existence of protected areas, could actually discourage them to play.
BTW, the same principles apply to the game of Go (only one woman ever won a major open tournament), and even the anti cheating measures.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
is hardly an argument where it is easy to assume good faith!
They still play in non-segregated tournaments, get regular titles and such. Women's chess titles, tournaments and such an extra.
Think of it like having a local league with its own rating system and titles. Countries have this, and it exists alongside international, fide titles and ratings.
This. For every actual cheating incident, there are many paranoid suspicions. Chess demands an intense focus, and this makes players react emotionally (see chess tantrums). Paranoia is one of these reactions. This "culture of paranoia" is generally pervasive, not just in chess. Once a paranoia inducing phenomenon (like cheating) exists, the paranoia pervades.
People know fb & google are being sneaky with data harvesting for ads, but details are murky. They become convinced the mic is listening to their conversation. People know moderation and shadowbanning exist. They become convinced that they are being suppressed. More crassly, once someone gets a promotion with a bj... the assumption is that everyone did.
Once a basis for paranoia (eg cheating) exists, it'll find a self serving nexus. I didn't lose, I was cheated.
Something we should be keeping an eye on. Online institution building may become the story of the 1920s. This paranoia will play a role.
True, but if your just 0.2% better because of doping your still on the winning side.
Indeed, and one of the most common uses of doping is not make you stronger or perform better per se. but to let your body recover quicker so you can train longer and harder with shorter recovery time between training sessions.
Yes this! You have 3 doping levels from cheapest to really expansive:
3: Silver (the doping that is known and detectable)
2: Gold (known and probably detectable but often combined with additional substance to "wash it out" faster or hide it behind other stuff like "legal" painkillers etc)
1: Platinum (doping that is not detectable in the next 5 years "seal of proof by laboratories?")
--------
3: Is for your little Darling or Bodybuilders ;)
2: For your National-cup
1: For Olympics, World-cups etc..(everything where lots of money is behind)
How much money is behind those sports? Hint...NOT much. We Talk about Cycling, Athletics, Football and so on..
>I know for a fact that 3 isn't even used on national-cup event in France
No you don't.
BTW: I knew for a Fact that Lance Armstrong was the biggest Cycle Pro ever born and he would never need doping because he was just in another league then anyone else.
EDIT: Would you look at that:
http://sportscene.tv/paddlesports/2016/07/doping-problem-in-...
https://www.firstpost.com/sports/rio-2016-doping-scandal-hit...
But that's the Romanian Team...would never happen in France right?
Not the Olympic sailing...Oracle stuff yes...but do you really need doping for sailing? It's more about tactics not ultra high-end body-strength..i sailed Lasers for 4 years and it is demanding, but nothing against Street-cycling/CrossCountry
> How much money is behind those sports? Hint...NOT much. We Talk about Cycling, Athletics, Football and so on..
No, the parent talked about:
> basically every elite athlete is doping.
That's just not true. Unless you have a totally twisted understanding of what an athlete is.
MONEY BEHIND...that's something else. And the Athletes don't pay for the Stuff, AND it's not in every sport and not every sport profits from doping.
My friend was in the finals in Beijing and in London, top-6. In London half a second from a medal. Yes doping would help immensely but those guys have too much honor to do this. No, there is no money behind. He gets sponsoring in form of a boat which is sponsored by the manufacturer. The rest of his life's expenses, all travels, housing, shipping of his equipment, bring wife and kids along sometimes, mortgage on their house, all that needs to be paid for. And it was a struggle to finance all this. Friends help, family helps, and a few local companies in his hometown chip in. He is a construction engineer and his net worth is less than half mine as a mid-30 programmer.
So yes, everybody keep downvoting me and ignore that not every "elite athlete" is some overpaid basketball or soccer pro making 8-figures a year and evading taxes.
True in Curling i never heard of doping. And trust me even your friend would not told you if he takes doping (no saying he did).
And again not every Sport profits from Doping and not everyone takes them but lots and lots of them do, and having a blind eye because of profit is the unfair thing for the honest and sportsmanship'ish peoples.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/sports/olympics/olympic-c...
Your feelings are not in congruence with facts.
> And again not every Sport profits from Doping and not everyone takes them but lots and lots of them do, and having a blind eye because of profit is the unfair thing for the honest and sportsmanship'ish peoples.
Again, evidence or it did not happen. You are casting unproven claims as facts. That gives the impression that the default is an athlete is doped, and _that's_ what's unfair.
Thanks for the laugh.
Unless an athlete shows up that does manage to bring in serious amounts of money. In that case the lid goes on for a few years.
EDIT:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6327574/
>In football players, doping has recently become an important matter
>>Androgen abuse has not only a direct effect on myocardial hypertrophy and fibrosis, but can also result in myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, hypertension and dyslipidemia
>>>Herbal supplements, anti-histamines and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/08/more-young-f...
But no probable connection to Doping...when the guardian sleeps...
There is a lot of paranoia in the running community (for example) that even local municipal marathons are being won by amateurs doping (not to mention some people running with those Nike “Vaporfly” shoes with the carbon fiber plate in them.) I have my doubts about how effective it is at the amateur level. I suspect it’s like amateurs buying expensive golf clubs and golf balls hoping it will make them better when really they just need more practice and are skill limited rather than gear limited.
https://www.britishpowerlifting.org/news/drug-test-results
With that said I think a lot of the pedantics of "but IS doping really happening in international sports" going on in this thread could be emphatically answered with "uh, yes" by simply watching _Icarus_.
Athletes and the public have a different interpretation of what doping actually is. The public thinks of doping as taking performance enhancing substances.
Athletes think of doping as crossing the specified threshold/limit.
I have heard this interpretation on TV from a well connected Dutch cycling journalist ( Mart Smeets ).
Every athlete takes performance enhancing substances.
That line is a clear one. If you take that line, then no, not every athlete takes performance enhancing substances. But if you count, say, caffeine, then yes, most athletes do. And non-athletes too, FWIW.
“Exercise-induced asthma is the most common medical problem among winter Olympic athletes, especially among cross-country skiers. Nearly 50% of these athletes suffer from the condition, closely followed by short-track speed skaters at 43%. For figure skaters it’s 21%, Nordic combined it’s 17%, and for ice hockey it’s 15%. By comparison, around 9% of the UK general population suffers from asthma.”
The situation is something like "huh, a whole lot of Vietnam draftees seem to suffer from flat feet, somehow our drafting algorithm must have pulled in more flat feet people than exist in the entire population".
None of these guys have asthma: http://www.granfondoguide.com/Contents/Index/3488/dick-pound...
My lungs are currently in the annual process of acclimating to the newly cold fall air. Every year for decades I've been running in October and there are a couple weeks when the temperature crashes from the last encore of summer at 60F/15C seemingly overnight to frosty mornings and 40F/5C runs and the leaves change. I can feel that my legs are fine but I'm breathing harder than usual, and I can literally see on my Garmin that my average pace has decreased but my heart rate is unchanged or elevated. By November my VO2 max will be up a bit and my pace will be mostly back to normal.
Does it feel like I'm breathing through a slimy straw on those first frosty mornings? Yes. Am I in danger of asphyxiating from it? No, and I think that's a critical distinction - some of my friends are, they should use an inhaler to counteract their body's over reaction to the conditions. Can I get over it without medication? Yes. Would I be faster if I had blood salbutamol levels of 800 ug/L instead of 0 and an unrestricted airway? Yes, whether I used it in training to work out at a higher level than I otherwise could, raced with it, or both.
I'd be interested in an analysis of those cross-country skiers if they compared the mucus and muscle response of the undiagnosed and diagnosed athletes with and without their inhalers. Do an EVH test and take an ultrasound of the larynx/trachea to measure smooth muscle constriction and mucus production after 15 minutes on the treadmill at 68F/20C and 50% RH, open the door and do it at 32F/0C and 5% RH, then take a hit of an inhaler and do both again (with appropriate breaks between tests). It could also be interesting to look at the responses of non-winter-sport athletes transplanted from warmer climates versus those who have been working out in those conditions for a few months.
It would be hypocritical not to admit that I occasionally take a pseudoephedrine throughout the fall because my nasal mucus membranes get more productive when raking dusty leaves or running through fields of ragweed - which is, again, pretty normal. To me, the main difference is that suffering through the snot doesn't lead to overcoming it, it's just gross and annoying.
Now all competitors will take additional hormones to reach, but not cross said level. As long as this works, they think of themselves as not doping and levelling the playing field. But they are taking hormones.
World Athletics Female Eligibility Regulations on testosterone levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Athletics_Female_Eligibi...
Case of Caster Semenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya
If you now answer that it's unfair that the person with naturally occurring higher levels can have it but those with lower levels can't "level" the playing field, well, tough luck. That's just the lottery that gives some people an advantage in certain sports. We all accept that some people are naturally tall and therefore have advantages in basketball. Or some people have naturally stronger VO2 max and thereby advantages in endurance sports.
The competition is how far you can get with the _natural state_ of your body, plus training. Not how far you can get as long as everybody pumps some substances up to a previously-agreed-upon threshold. Those thresholds are just the sad plan-B solution of anti-doping agencies if they can't directly measure doping substances and need to resort to measuring the effects instead. That actually disadvantages those with naturally higher effects.
Nobody would think of restricting maximum leg length, and as long as your legs are not longer than that it's fine to surgically extend them.
In some sports you even have different weight classes. Rowing has 2, wrestling has 6 (olympic), boxing has 8-10 (olympic). The techniques there also differ slightly.
And there are other partitionings of the population too that restrict in who can participate in a competition. You have world championships, but you also have nationals. And regional competitions. And junior leagues. And school competitions.
Then there is also the paralympics.
You can find all that reasonable or ridiculous, but I'm not sure how that's related to doping.
It’s worth noting here that the first Olympic doping suspension was for drinking a beer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Olympic_Games
No. I was one and I didn't. And I knew a lot of athletes. I know how most of them were thinking. What you said is simply not true.
Do I think every professional athlete is on PEDs? Yes. Does it make what they are doing any less super human? No. It's like your typical person looking at a bodybuilder and saying, I could look like that if i did steroids. Which is total bullshit.
EditAdd: I did know people who were fascinated about EPO-like medication, and asthma medicine when used without actually having asthma. That was when they were quite young, and that's also a long time ago. I never ran into any of them actually using anything, and they were in the minority - I met just two, and sadly one of them died in a traffic accident before he got to a professional level.
It's simply physiologically impossible to accomplish what these athletes are doing without assistance.
Just like arguing "well we only lost the election cause the other side cheated."
I am sure there is plenty.
In fact, less commercialized sports are much more interesting to watch and participate because they are not just full of over-hyped over-payed over-celebritized evening-entertainment shows designed to milk the audience of most money possible.
If "athlete" ends for you at what's on pay TV and on ads at bus stops, sure. But that's a very limited view of sports. And quite sad, frankly.
The example I know best is steroids. A younger athlete, before getting into high-level competition, or during the offseason, does a "cycle" or two of steroids. The effect is to build more strength or size. When the athlete ends the steroid cycle some, but not all of the strength or size is lost, assuming they continue training.
What this means is that they have a foundation to build on that's already above what the athlete who doesn't use steroids has. A year or two down the road, there's absolutely no trace of steroids in the athlete's system, so they easily pass drug tests. However, the benefit was already gained.
So for athletes the limits are time-bounded, not dose-bounded.
You have enormous money and prestige on the line and lots of powerful entities (FIFA, IOC, NFL, countries, athletic wear companies, etc) that don't have a huge incentive to catch their golden boy athletes doping.
The dopers have basically ruined sprinting and a number of other sports for anyone who wanta to compete cleanly and does well.
It's entirely possible that Bolt is clean and is a Phelps like genetic outlier, but there will always be suspicions that can never be disproved, no matter what he does.
Genetic modification will be the next frontier in cheating.
"Of the 50 fastest men's 100m sprint times ever, only 15 have been run by an athlete NOT banned for drugs. All 15 were by Usain Bolt."
https://twitter.com/sportingintel/status/1164654855329329152...
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-urnlaJpOA
I want to make clear that Jamaica is not an outlier or "bad guy". Really they are small fry in the industrial olympic sports machine. What they really are is a window into what the big time countries do.
It of course helps that sprinting is a national obsession in Jamaica, so the best athletes do sprinting. But that's been true for a long time.
Personally, I do not think humans can run faster than 9.90 in the 100m without "aid". or under 20.00 in the 200, or under 44 in the 400m.
I do not think a human can run faster than 13:00 in the 5000m, or 27:00 in the 10,000m, or somewhere around 2:08 in the marathon.
But those are personal opinions.
There’s an assortment of performance enhancers that are legal in most competitions, and are extensively use by amateurs (think gels in running for example). This things only become doping once a competition bans them, and athletes fight for every advantage. Since competitions are slow to move, stands to reason that all athletes are doping, at least by the standards of tomorrow.
The things we are testing for are not so much clear-cut presence or absence, but volumes and concentrations based on statistical curves, and it's a constant race so somebody who was "legit & natural last year" may be "doping and illegal this year" or vice versa; everybody will have SOME naturally or legally allowed amount of tested substance; etc. Which means that I cannot get excited that ANYbody at olympic level is doing it "on their own, unassisted, natural", for whatever definition of above we take.
This is because there's not a lot of money in telling people to lift heavy stuff that's literally all around us and eat commonly available protein-rich foods. What is there to sell? In comes the gadgets and supplements.
The one that seems a bit borderline but perhaps small enough effect and also already so commonly used by the general population anyways that its not too reasonable to consider it to be "doping" which would be caffeine.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/212873/the-secret-r...
yep, it is all individual. Some people have nice biology, some will get nowhere without "stuff". A recent blood test showed some anemia (that explained why i had such low level fatigue and tiredness threshold in the recent times, and you couldn't just make through it on pure will because it is like an engine with closed air intake - no oxygen, no burning) Started to take B12 and iron - things improved remarkably, physically and mentally. If i were a competitive athlete should i be forbidden from such a "cheating" way of increasing of blood oxygen carrying capability?
My understanding they ban testosterone which also increase the blood oxygen carrying capability. Which means that you're lucky to be born with high testosterone, and you're doomed otherwise (like me - i'm on a lower side). How is that a level playing field then? No exercise can compensate if you get less oxygen.
Testosterone supplementation can induce erythrocytosis, but you can accomplish that more directly with EPO. (I don't recommend doing that.)
no, it is just a feel good fairy tale. You're missing the point - amount of oxygen defines your speed/endurance/etc that you can reach. It is basic law of physics. Put a gas mask on and narrow the pipe half or even just a quarter - no amount of training will help you overcome that. I was an amateur boxer - 4th at University 30 years ago - so i'm not just armchair talking.
For the last decade i've been running and hiking regularly and there recently was a deep in my performance - pushing harder didn't work, it was just like hitting glass ceiling - which got corrected once i saw the anemia and corrected it with supplements. Did i instead have to accept the low level of performance, accompanied by easily setting fatigue, etc. just for sake of "naturalcy"? And if I to run some competition should I stop the supplements and try to run with anemia?
>No one realistically expects a level playing field.
exactly. So why wouldn't we try to to level it as much as possible. Wouldn't it make the competition more honest as it would allow to win the ones who train harder and play smarter than the ones who just accidentally got better DNA?
If you have a legitimate medical condition then you can apply for a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) to take banned supplements while still being allowed to compete.
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/therapeutic-use-exempt...
But at that level, everyone is operating under the same rules. That's just the nature of competition, no? People will take any edge they can while following the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
Hell, even in the context of "on their own, unassisted", some countries directly support their Olympic athletes in terms of training, coaching and facilities, while other athletes have to pay out of pocket for that sort of thing and figure it out on their own and thus are more "unassisted", but there are no rules about that...
At the end of the day, all you can hope for is that the rules are applied justly & transparently.
No they are not. In reality it means, the athlete with the better chemist behind him, meaning the one with the not yet traceble substance, will win.
If you look at a chart of when EPO became available, and all those good knowledgeable DDR sport med docs became available on the free market, there's this discontinuous drop in world records fro pretty much all endurance sports.
Notice the discontinuity around 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_metres_world_record_pro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5000_metres_world_record_progr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_1500_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France_records_and_sta...
You'll see similar changes with the introduction of synthetic testosterone in weight lifting records, and the physical appearance of the top bodybuilders.
EDIT: And this ignores "mechanical" doping in cycling- where you stick an electric motor on the bike. We've suspected it for a while at the pro ranks, and got confirmation when a small fry got nabbed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femke_Van_den_Driessche
> Van den Driessche had been taking part in the inaugural under 23 women’s event, which was won by Britain’s Evie Richards. The Belgian and European under 23 champion had gone in as a pre-race favourite but did not feature at the front. She was eventually forced off her bike on the final lap when she was struck by mechanical problems and ended up walking with her bike.
> Van den Driessche’s bike was taken for inspection along with several other bikes after the race. It quickly became apparent that something was wrong with her bike and news of the discovery quickly spread; however it is only this Sunday morning that they revealed their discovery. It gives Van den Driessche the dubious honour of being the first rider to be discovered to be using a motor. Incidentally, Van den Driessche’s brother Niels is currently suspended for doping.
https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/uci-confirms-motorised-dopi...
Her claim is the motorised bike belonged to a friend, was handed to her in error, and she rode the race on it without using the motor as she didn't know it was there.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bike-investigated-technologi...
I wonder if we're using different definitions of "win" here. To my way of thinking, if a person has cheated, they didn't win, regardless of what the official judges conclude.
(Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the point you're trying to make.)
I don't know what fraction of those athletes cheated. But I consider my definition of "win" to be reasonable regardless of how many competitors cheat.
This reminds me of a famous quote[0]:
> When Abraham Lincoln was asked by a prosecuting attorney, “How many legs does a sheep have?” He replied, “Four.” The attorney then asked, “If you called a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would he have?” Lincoln replied, “Four. Merely because you call a sheep’s tail a leg does not make it one.”
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/11/15/legs/#:~:text=When%...
"I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but I think I get to decide how many bedrooms there are, don't you? "Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has an oven in it! This bedroom's got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom's over in that guy's house! Sir, you have one of my bedrooms, are you aware? Don't decorate it!"
If you are the top of any sport, there's money, fame, groupies, etc. There's a real incentive to do it.
Moreover, the audience wants to see superhumans and world records broken. To paraphrase Futurama about women's basketball "good fundamentals, but can't dunk". The governing bodies of all pro sports look the other way.
Improvement of equipment is always a massive gray area. Cycling (aside from electric motors) has aerodynamic bikes, wind tunnel access. XC skiing has environmentally bad teflon wax. Swimming, theoretically the most naked/equipment-less sport, has sharkskin suits and buoyancy aids.
There are other advantages like expensive altitude tents.
I don’t feel qualified to remark on other sports but based on casual observation of the opinions of bodybuilding fans or even wrestling fans/people into Hollywood, it seems most regular people are very ignorant about PED usage as a phenomenon.
There are limits to the rate that you can pack on muscle mass or how much you can maintain at a low body fat percentage which are telltale signs of PED use (not that I judge it, but just to temper my own expectations). I think many people’s ignorance of these signs are fueling body dysmorphia and insecurity. It’s better if people are aware of how common PED usage is in bodybuilding, Hollywood, and “instagram bodybuilders”
Anti doping agencies are always behind in doping research and many athletes have access to the best clinics there are.
If you ever competed at a high level or spent enough time researching commonly available drugs and how testing is conducted it becomes obvious of what's really happening. This isn't even mentioning people with large budgets who have completely undetectable designer ones
There's a studying showing people who remain sedentary whilst taking test gain more muscle mass than someone who frequents the gym 3 times a week.
For endurance sports, the EPO effect is pretty well documented based on its arrival in the early-to-mid nineties. It's multiple percents to perhaps 10% of an advantage, which is basically "game over" for the natural athlete.
If there are a ton of athletes performing at levels that EPO athletes were... what other conclusion is there?
Blood passport basically exists to keep the cheating out of control (to levels where thickened blood kills people overnight with brain clots), but either the BBC or guardian had a reporter do microdosing and tested with formal testing and their blood passport numbers stayed "in bounds".
Steroids is a similar game changer for fast twitch. The current sprinting records are so far above what Ben Johnson was doing.
Consider the rarity of high-level cheaters being busted in soccer, tennis, basketball, and American football, where the monetary rewards are 100-1000x more than olympic athlete success.
Consider all the hollywood action stars and the efficacy of PEDs in achieving a necessary look for a multimillion dollar role. Is there drug testing in hollywood?
And PEDs absolutely have penetrated all scholastic levels of athletics/sport with the easy availability via the internet and the sports-crazed overachievement OCD of athlete parents.
Sports are a theatric illusion.
It is possible to cheat to gain an advantage, and not get detected. People with the drive to become elite athletes in the first place, are very likely to be tempted. Once even 1 athlete in the sport is cheating, others will feel it is necessary to cheat with them to compete. This has happened over and over in every sport I know of.
For me, cycling lost its luster not only after Lance Armstrong was caught and spent years lying to the American public about it, but also after repeat stories like this one (https://www.velonews.com/news/road/cbs-news-12-riders-used-m...) involving the Tour de France and other high-profile races.
The Olympics holds up the ideal of a level playing field for wholesome young athletes from all over the world to compete, but I think everyone knows that it's not a level playing field, even if the strategies used by certain countries to win are perfectly legal such as expensive training programs and granting citizenship to people who have tenuous connections to the new countries they represent (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/02/14/switching-nationa...):
... There are several stories of athletes switching countries, including South Korean speedskater Ahn Hyun-soo who became a Russian citizen and changed his name to Viktor Ahn to join the Russian speedskating team, after falling out with the South Korean skating federation.
It's a shame, because I want to believe athletes and their coaches are honest people who strive for the highest possible standards, but it's hard not to become jaded after decades of pervasive instances of unfair advantages, corner-cutting, and outright cheating.
The Olympics is first and foremost a political event. Sports come second.
It hurts to realize but that's a fact of life. The next thing that's hurting might be to realize that many athletes are likely to be missing because of logistics/visa/costs issues.
Any sport that requires a lot of peak or near peak strength is very likely full of drugs. And that doesn't detract from all the hard work these athletes put into their sport.
Among the many books that have written on this topic, Speed Trap by the late Charlie Francis is enlightening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
Gresham's law for chess would be noncheaters leave when cheaters move in. All that's left on Facebook is conspiracy bots chattering to eachother and suchlike.
Lance Armstrong didn't just cheat, he set up a whole doping ring.[1] The full report is at [2]. Section VI of the Reasoned Decision lays out his efforts to keep a lid on the whole thing.
There are plenty of athletes who get caught up in doping due to the pressures, but Armstrong is not a good example of that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong_doping_case#US...
[2]: http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/
Armstrong has a toxic personality, but nevertheless he is the scapegoat of that generation of cycling. If you know cycling, there is a rotating cast of champions heralded for their clean competition that are then cast aside as scapegoats: Festina, Armstrong, Team Garmin, Team Sky.
Why not just legalize doping in sports, that way everyone can do it and therefore not gain an advantage by doing it? It would also remove the advantage of people who live in high altitudes.
So, yeah, the issue is someone getting an advantage, which in turn puts pressure on athletes to have to dope or take PEDs to have a career.
I'm not sure what the equilibrium outcome is if the restrictions are lifted, but the usual assumption is that it's a race to the bottom.
But WADA clearly has a perverse incentive to ban more and more drugs simply to justify its own existence.
Maybe the solution is to let athletes themselves figure out the rules, since they have to live with them.
The is the secret to successful cheating: knowing where to use the engine and where to go on your own. It is easy to run engine evaluation after the fact and see if your moves always match up with the engine. However when sometimes they do an sometimes they don't it is hard to know if you just happened to stumble on the best move. Particularly since most everyone regularly studies with an engine and so the best players sometimes will pick out the types of lines the engine will prefer without help.
Please don't take this as advice on how to cheat. Take your losses honestly.
Also there are moves that if you don't understand will look odd - computer like. That is also how suspicion can be raised.
Anecdotally i remember other cheating story.
In online FPS like Counter Strike some top level players have been caught using aim enhancer (aimbot) that move a mouse towards a target. But they had it set to only move mouse 1px. Otherwise it was too obvious, but 1px adjustment at top level is a great competitive edge.
And still people get caught. And people still cheat. Its infinite cycle.
And make easy mistakes a computer could beat, but a human couldn't. Along with randomisations.
So it can pass a Turing test.
Cheater of real rank R would set target rank R' = R+delta.
Once officially at R', set R'' = R'+delta. And so on by modest increments.
You can see this in business culture, and even in public life, where once a few compromised competitors succeed, it has a cascading effect on the incentives of the entire game. The culture polarizes, with earnest and talented people at the bottom or at the edges, with mediocre performing but skilled liars at the top. When finding these unfair advantages happens at the micro level it's called cheating, but I think when it takes hold, we call it professionalization.
Like social media, sometimes the online medium makes people do rude things they wouldn't do in real life.
Of course, it only helped you if you had gone through the material a couple times and knew (and mostly understood) exactly what was there, and you used the book to refresh minor details.
I believe people should be able to have pretty much any book (not software) at their disposal when doing university level math exams. It is stupid to fail because your overworked brain forgot some formula (did not happen to me, but easily could). And people who did not study beforehand will not be able to cheat their way through, at least not in the time limit needed.
This isn't paramedic training where you need to do the right thing in seconds.
EDIT: Now I remembered haha, our first CS class even printed out standardized cheat sheets and gave it to everyone. They basically printed ALL the slides of the class in tiny font on 3 papers and handed out to everyone with the exam. Fun times. I didn't even open the cheat sheet lol.
I remember I was taking Algebra 2, which was about Module Theory and Galois Theory. We asked prof if we can bring cheat sheet to the exam, he was like "I mean I don't care, you can even bring the textbook". So I did but, obviously didn't even open it. If you really need to remember something (e.g. definition of Noeterian Ring) professor may write it in the question anyway, or if you need to remember something basic (e.g. definition of Group) you could technically use the textbook, but at that point, you'll likely fail the exam anyway.
I.e. it was so easy to cheat there was no purpose to cheating. In many colleges, students brag to their peers about getting away with cheating. At Caltech, I never heard anyone brag about cheating. If you were caught cheating, the other students would ostracize you.
It's not even like cheating in athletics where you can plausibly claim to be doing it yourself (just using illegal enhancements).
Here it is something else doing it for you. Bizarre that anybody would take pride from doing it, especially considering the risk of being found out.
Cheating is the difference between getting a "real job" for many, so there is a reason.
https://stockfishchess.org/
Also, sites also have a "viewer" page for most games where they add a chess engine evaluation of the current position. All you really need to do to cheat is to open your game under another account and you can just copy over the move in the top line.
If you are interested in super computer evaluation of chess games, [sesse](https://analysis.sesse.net) usually has the analysis of the "game of the day". It's run by people at chess24, so they usually analyze Magnus' games.
I love the shadow flag method for cheaters because opponents can avoid games with them and the cheater may never figure out what the problem is.
Story:
I got paired with someone rated 400 points higher than me (no idea why). The dude was destroying me, but somewhere in the middlegame, he let his guard down and exposed himself to a mate-in-one. For once in my life, I saw the mate and I won.
The dude was FURIOUS. He immediately asked for a rematch and I said I had to go. Then the insults came ("chicken shit", etc.).
He even messaged me a few times over the course of a few months (same kind of name calling) and challenged me a few times.
Eventually, I thought, "You know what will really upset him? If I accept a rematch and win again."
So, I accepted one of his challenges and I used a computer. Obviously, he lost and he was FURIOUS again.
Not my proudest moment, but I enjoyed it while it was happening.
But yeah, regular cheating just kind of takes the joy out of the competition.
If you haven't played in a while, then glicko will give you a wide ratings deviation, and pair you against much stronger or much weaker opponents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system
Well, as the saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Maybe we should just move over to computer-assisted human chess and compete that way?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61213/61213-h/61213-h.htm
Also even if that's not true, computer-assisted human chess for all but the highest levels of play would still be just "human accepts computer move."
I discovered that you’re better off walking away from a game that feels so insurmountably difficult rather than cheat a bit or a lot.
“I’m not going to finish so why not cheat to see the ending?” Was always disappointing. I’d rather that mountain still exist off in the distance that I’ll never summit.
When I was young I hated playing games against the AI. It always felt unreal to me and there was no satisfaction in it. Now, I immensely prefer playing the computer - it goes at my pace, I can get up and leave, I can take all the time I want for my move, and if I do something dumb I just undo back to where I feel comfortable and play better. When I get legitimately stuck I ask the computer for advice.
In this way, I basically always win against a superior player. It may not be ideal for practice, but I just play for fun and find it satisfying to win.
The one sure way to find / detect players with cheats was... to use the same cheats. It saved my sanity but cost me the joy of playing.
I now can't play FPS's anymore but am limited to MMO's :(
https://youtu.be/5Bbw7ZNUFt8?t=1798
Create a fleet of chess programs, with typical resource constraints (CPU, RAM, time).
Have the chess programs replay recorded games.
Compare the suggested moves with the player's actual moves.
Divine some kind probability that player is cheating.
Extra credit for replaying that player's history of games thru the same fleet. Was the player consistent? Were there spikes of cheating?
Until there's a better phrase, I'll call this "parallel construction".
It'd be neat to run the fleet of chess programs during live matches.
Caveat: I know nothing about chess, so someone is probably doing "parallel construction" for cheat detection.
So you can set some engines not to pick perfect moves but to pick moves consistent with a particular rating or style...
It could be modulated based on opponent, but does not have to be.
That's the next generation of chess engines - AlphaZero trounced Stockfish in a match of 100 games with 28 wins and 72 draws and not a single loss. And if you decrease the power a little bit (take an earlier generation), it makes significantly more human-like moves than Stockfish.
Online chess areas like lichess and chess.com absolutely have automated cheat detection which they consider along with with reports in automated banning of accounts. They consider not just whether the player is playing the excellent moves (something common at any level and very common at high levels), but also how a deep search is needed to evaluate that move, whether other obvious moves were available, how long was taken to play the move, if the position is common, etc. When these serial cheaters are banned, the sites even refund rating points to everyone who lost to them.
However, the issue of isolated cheating incidents is still a big deal, even if the serial obvious cheaters can be detected.
So maybe my only novel suggestion is running lichess (or equiv) live in parallel. Something livestream viewers could also help with.
And I hope someone's replaying historical games.
"how a deep search is needed to evaluate"
Of course. Obvious now that you mention it.
I assumed different programs would make different suggestions. So overseers would want to run a few programs to see if any matched the player's gameplay, style, etc.
Probably the last time I played chess was on an IBM PC XT. The quality of misc game engines varied widely. Of course there's probably been a convergence since.
Re-running the games (especially to check for new techniques that aren't public at the time of the event) would be in the same spirit.
In the case of blood tests, there is a cat and mouse game of changing how the drugs are administered or other chemicals in the blood that reduce the effectiveness of the tests. Later on the presence of those other substances may be used as motivation for re-testing a group of people.
No one strategy is sufficient.
Anecdotally, cheating is much more common on chess.com than lichess. This may be because chess.com is bigger and more visible.
There are also other reasons to use lichess - FOSS, better, simpler interface - so I encourage everyone here to make the switch.
[0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila
It seems to me the real problem is here not some sort of existential anxiety over humanity's future, but that a lot of people competing for social rewards are willing to lie to obtain them.
[1] https://github.com/domino14/liwords