People that don’t understand the scientific method might not get the idea of basing predictions on what happened in the past in this respect - time. Boil water —> water gets hotter —> heat makes stuff dissolve in water. That’s easy since one’s patience needs only be in place for the seconds or minutes it takes for the water to boil. Psychological and social related issues take much longer to percolate. The satisfaction of being right about major topics is outweighed by the lag time until the population in general wakes up.
Based on what I’ve seen I find it easy to make some educated guesses about the future of internet chess and cheating. And these will take years to unfold. But here we go.
Internet culture had invaded stand alone pc games. A popular game would also contain a play by internet option, and some games were designed to be solely internet play. Buying a new game would open you up to constant emails or pop ups suggesting similar games. That stand alone pc game may play out oddly, where “smart play” is punished to slow down the competent player. Poor play was rewarded to try and keep interest in making a big comeback. When these expectations are transferred to an arena of alleged all real human players the poor player has a sense of being smarter than they are. The good player is frustrated and moves on. They are not the target audience. They are not the type to mindlessly click on every suggestion of a new game.
Long ago, scammy games figured out how to make an AI position more realistic by being at least at times deliberately incompetent. A sense of kinship by not being the dumbest knob on the block. These could just chug along modestly growing until needed, when an actual human could pop in to take control and present themselves as a real human position that had been at it for ages. Bridging the gap between full blown bots and full blown humans. Helping if needed to pump the egos of the lesser minds. Punishing if necessary to slow down people too good for the surrounding competition. All the while using whatever tricks and resources available to get an in game play option to spend real money for an upgrade. An upgrade that makes you faster, not better.
The difference with poker, there’s no illusory end that you are seeking to be faster at. There’s a definite goal of winning as many hands as possible. Definite losers among the winners. Strangely, AI does not mind losing money it does not have. And the resulting game play became way too obvious that something funny was going on. Going all in every hand was by far the most common tactic. And it absolutely does not work in real life. Just like conspiracy grifting, the goal here is to admit that it’s not going to succeed long term and focus on what can be sucked out TODAY. Stretched into weeks or maybe months. This kind of psychological warfare wormed its way into other real life/internet aided scams. Like a job placement industry that has spam emails for bogus jobs and real humans that think they’re helping people get a job, but the actual placement is more the strength of the candidate and not the job finding guru.
Now the meat of the talk about the chess itself.
Chess has the reputation of being, well, the king of games. The demonstration of intellect. The smarter person wins. There’s already something going on now with the only question being exactly how prevalent it is. The top chess computer, Stockfish, has an option for levels of play. The idea is that you’re outmatched at the higher levels, play a lower level for a chance. You can run Stockfish analysis simultaneously while playing moves and see that it KNOWS a better move than it plays. It’s programmed to be deliberately incompetent at low levels. The world champion’s app lets you play Magnus Carlsen at different ages. You just might be able to beat Magnus aged 10. Forget about it at age 21. Although you’re playing aged 10, it KNOWS it’s not playing the best moves.
A super common tactic in chess cheating is that instead of running the top computer suggestion for a full game is for the less than spectacular player to occasionally put out something else to make it less obvious. The sites know about this, and only catch it by human intervention in post game analysis. Just like YouTube not having the time or desire to deal with a gematria video including blatant death threats, this doesn’t do much good for the person that was cheated at the time. Sure, you can complain about it and the ratings will get adjusted, the cheater may get banned. But there’s no effective pre game mechanism to stop it before it happens. And the sites are struggling to keep up with the complaints. Just like Twitter pretending it cares about bots when even now you can find porn bots easily. And the banned cheater will simply create a new account and try to cheat better tue next time.
For the, “Oh, nobody is dumb enough to fall for that” crowd - here’s my vision. Creation of sites that have mostly bots and a constant stream of advertisements for shitty merchandise. Dubious value books. Maybe fancy chess sets that Amazon “forgot to deliver”. Tournaments with big prize offerings that are won by an AI position. That post game analysis shows didn’t play perfect - just good enough to keep a real human from getting any significant prize money. And yes, sales offers of a “foolproof cheating app” so you too can cheat like the pro cheaters. These are all things that go on in internet grifting now. There’s no reason to expect anything different just because it’s chess.
The accusatory atmosphere of OTB chess will get worse and worse. Fueled by misinformation on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube we will see more talk about cheating than compliments of how great any particular grandmaster is. Hundreds of years ago a talented chess player was admired for smarts. In the misinformation age the actual expert is treated like Fauci with vaccines - the subject of ridicule. We’re already seeing the interrupting conversations tactic. Out of the blue in the middle of a chess discussion somebody will throw in a racist remark. Celebrity chess players starting to weigh in on the merits of genocide and not taxing rich people or climate change being a hoax. Hell yeah. I can’t wait for Niemann’s take on mask mandates. His opinion should be taken with knowledge of his dubious past and not being an expert on vaccines. But it’s more likely he’ll be on Joe Rogan talking about this instead of world chess champion. That’s the way the internet works these days.
I’ve never had the better time to mention the end of the movie Wargames than now. After nuclear Armageddon is narrowly avoided by AI run amok,
“How about a nice game of chess?”
Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, all the other Bigs. Cheating to get ahead is just fine as long as it makes money today for those that do a better job on capitalizing on the loopholes. Internet chess is about to get punished for trying to have a soul, or rich for pretending to have a soul. Until our education system formalizes something about grifting on the internet these misinformation issues will invade not just chess but any other new, hot topic. As long as education is throwing a smartphone in front of the child and they are left on their own with no guidance, and that’s called parenting, they will find misinformation.
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