Fide fights cheating

Would it be a solution to make a rule that players cannot wear metals in tournaments and use handheld metal scanners to avoid any electronic devices?

Here is the article: http://www.fide.com/component/content/article/1-fide-news/7229-fide-is-preparing-to-fight-against-cheating.html

NO.  Many people have medical implants such as pacemakers (electronic scanning can be dangerous to some of these devices) or artifical knees (big hunks of metal) and other such things.   

At an airport, for example, if you claim the above they do a pat-down by hand instead --- which is unlikely to find a small device and less as time goes on & items get smaller.   I would bet you could build a watch to play chess with today's tech.

And all you need is a very tiny, low power, short range, simple communications device.  It could even just do an on/off relay.   Click it to give the coorinates, an  average of 16 pulses per move (B2-D4 for example is blip blip, pause, blip blip, pause, blip blip blip blip pause, blip blip blip blip pause...   ). 

It would be nearly impossible to find something with such low capability as it could be embedded in *anything* and be extremely tiny. 

What kind of "other such things" can be non-medical and still dangerous to remove ? They can just require a medical certificate. Of course there would still be possibilities to bribe a doctor etc. but it would still seriously limit the options.

other medical things I mean.  I dunno.  there is an insulin pump that squirts it in small doses rather than the after eating shot approach for diabetics.  There are other metal impants for bone work, back braces and skull plates and all.  Dang I am not a doctor --- but when I said other things, I meant similar medical stuff.

Personally I am always armed so theres that too.  It don't help my chess any, I promise.

Ultimately it will come down to move matchup analysis. That is the one thing they can't hide, no how good an illusionist they may be.

Could you explain that Big Dog?

Basically he is saying that if the winner's moves match the computer analysis (that is computers can't find any variation or better moves for the champ at all during analysis) then cheating is pretty darn likely.  I dunno how I feel about this --- it is strong proof yet not positive proof.  Its subjective to humans guessing the truth, in the end.  But over a tournament, across 10+ games, it is proof too strong to ignore....

Good for you!  Me too!

For maybe $200 or more, you could have a tiny, in-the-ear receiver gadget that looks like a hearing aid insert and only an expert could tell the difference (& would need speciality equipment to do so, I believe).  That way you could readily hear tips from someone shadowing your game who is accessing software. 

sftac

It's not guessing. You leave out certain moves, like book opening moves and certain obviously forced moves like recaptures. Then you control against the games of great players before computers were readily available. They generally find that even the best players can't do better than about a 70% matchup with the engine's first choice. (And there's another metric for matchup with the first three engine choices).

You also make sure and collect a large enough sample size against the strongest opponents they play. If all these controls are in place, and the player's matchups are still too high, then it is strong proof of cheating.

Agreed 100% BUT, while it is strong evidence, it is still not absolute.  Without the device or catching the person assisting the player (if any) or something concrete, it remains a guess/judgement call ruling.   I feel it is sufficient to make the claim.  But I worry that someone who had an astoundingly good game may be hurt by this type of ruling.   Odds of it happening?  Extremely slim --- but possible.

Then again : everyone who does not want to be screened has to provide a medical certificate for that or be banned, if not of the tournament, at least of the prizes.

It is very possible to fake a certificate, or have a genuine one but fiddle with the apparatus, but it will make it harder. Yes, that means that maybe FIDE at some point will have to even refuse medical reasons for top tournaments / attributing titles /etc. when the army of wheelchair cheaters will come, but we're not here yet.

Well, everyone's crying 'medical excuse' to get away from metal detectors and it's costly and impractical and bad for the game's image to make them play in a grounded metal box. And you have guys like Ivanov that are quite skilled at hiding things. So what else are we going to do?

Everyone is bribing doctors to get a certificate ?

Statistical analysis of matchup rates can catch the most obvious of cheaters like Ivanov, but an occasional cheat could elude detection.

Maybe not indefinitely (if he cheats too rarely, the effect is negligible, and otherwise he will get caugth at some point - even a marginally higher percentage becomes significant if the sample size is huge). But certainly long enough to make damage.

A marginally higher percentage (enough to be beneficial over non cheating players) may be suspicious but not necessarily conclusive even over the larger sample set.

I don't honestly think there is anything that can be done to stop a determined and clever cheat.   That sounds pessimistic, but that is how I see it.  Kinda like hackers, the defense team is always at the mercy of some new gimmick they have never seen before, trying to detect it with little to go on.  

Yeah, that's a near perfect analogy.  It's prohibitively expensive to try to imagine and pre-emptively counteract every possible way that someone might cheat, but easy to look at the existing measures and try to find a chink in the armor to exploit as a cheater.

It raises the question of whether there are currently other highly successful cheaters out there with more sense than Ivanov (at least enough sense to make even the smallest of efforts to disguise their cheating).