Cheating in chess

[Don]

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/836 ... ting-chess

What I don't get is why would you even let a guy bring any kind of computing device to a chess tournament when it's well known that computers are now much stronger than the best human players. I mean at least the other examples people tried to hide their stuff, this is like going to a math contest with a calculator claiming you won't use it.

[SineSwiper]

This is coming from somebody who didn't read the whole article.

But, regardless, I don't understand what's the point of these tourneys. Computers have won. Game over, man. This sort of cheating is going to get more popular and communication devices are going to get smaller and smaller. Eventually, they'll get something that you can't detect at all, embedded in the earlobe or some like that. Then what?

[Don]

This is coming from somebody who didn't read the whole article.

But, regardless, I don't understand what's the point of these tourneys. Computers have won. Game over, man. This sort of cheating is going to get more popular and communication devices are going to get smaller and smaller. Eventually, they'll get something that you can't detect at all, embedded in the earlobe or some like that. Then what?

Well just because computer can almost certainly beat us in any video game that has a significant action element too doesn't stop us from having human competition in these games too.

But in this article one guy is taking some kind of PDA and was looking at it during the middle of the match, and it took several matches before it even occurred to his opponent that he was just entering the current board position on his PDA. How stupid is that? There are other scenarios of cheating since a lot of these tournaments are boardcasted live, so you can obviously have a friend quickly put in the board position and find a way to relay that info back. In the French cheating example what they did was have the captain walk between certain seats after he receives a text message from another team member that's in front of a computer, and whoever is playing can just look at where the captain is to figure out what's his next move. That got discovered because the teammate sent the text to the wrong guy. Another one indeed had something like you said, the guy had some kind of tiny receiver thing by his ear and was fed moves. Now I'm not surprised that people cheat in these tournaments, but I thought it was funny how the first guy was blatantly cheating and no one even suspected it. It's like that guy wasn't even trying to be subtle.

[SineSwiper]

But in this article one guy is taking some kind of PDA and was looking at it during the middle of the match, and it took several matches before it even occurred to his opponent that he was just entering the current board position on his PDA. How stupid is that?

Again, coming from somebody who clearly didn't RTFA.

Moore was too focused on just avoiding checkmate to pay much mind to Smiley's off-board behavior. He ignored Smiley's frequent tap-tap-tapping away on a handheld Dell computer. Smiley had been given permission to use the device to keep a digital record of each move — but only for that purpose.

"A lot of kids use those now, and I knew those were allowed," says Moore of the scorekeeping app, called eNotate, which had only recently been sanctioned by the chess powers that be for tournament use. eNotate received the blessing of administrators after its designers convinced the USCF that the software was fail-safe for cheating. Moore, then an 18-year-old senior at TJHSST, generally regarded as one of the brainiest high schools in the country, shunned the gizmos in favor of an old-school record-keeping method: paper and pencil.