A person is either honorable or they are not. There is no middle ground when it comes to honor. I see no difference in using a chess engine for the whole game or for part of a game. Any way you look at it it is still cheating. Win or lose on your own merits and skills. That is the honorable thing to do.
ethical question about daily chess
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May 28, 2015
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This is not a case of turning on an engine to cheat. When playing a correspondence game at a rate of a move per day, one can find the same position occurring during a slow game. If I was playing a OTB tournament game that duplicated the position of a correspondence game I would, of course, simply play on. With an engine, however, one can simply abandon the game after realizing that continuing to play might give one an unfair advantage over the human daily chess opponent. In the case that happened to me a couple days ago, I finished my game against Komodo (and got trounced of course), but the position was only similar, not close to identical.
Wilkes1949 wrote:
A person is either honorable or they are not. There is no middle ground when it comes to honor. I see no difference in using a chess engine for the whole game or for part of a game. Any way you look at it it is still cheating. Win or lose on your own merits and skills. That is the honorable thing to do.
I have a masochistic practice of playing Stockfish or Komodo at full strength. Not because I think I have a hope of winning (even a draw seems impossible), but to study openings and transitions to early middle games. If I survive 25 or 30 moves with a position than is not terribly inferior, I feel I have done well. A couple days ago I realized that the engine and I had reached a position similar to a position in one of my ongoing daily games, but with colors reversed. There were some significant differences though. My question is this: If the position had been identical or more nearly identical to my game in progress would it have been ethical to continue playing against Komodo? The engine would have taught me how to beat my opponent. Would honor have required that I abandon the game against the computer?