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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Amusing post on BoingBoing



      “The only reason the computer was banned from the competition in the first place was the UNFAIR, RACIST and ILLOGICAL prejudice against non-human players. If the computer is better than a human, let it compete. And that goes for the Olympics and cycling too, drug cheats would be over if the Tour de France got with the 20th century and allowed the riders to have motorcycles. Who wants to do all that peddling up and down mountains?
      Chess is obviously over as a competition sport. It’s kind of boring anyway. At a certain point the only way to advance is to learn a bazillion openings by heart. Tedious!
      So let’s replace them with an international chess cheating championship in which cheating is allowed but you get disqualified if you are caught. So the competition would become finding the most ingenious ways to hide your computer backup.”

      Amusing. At first engine use was only a problem in correspondence, but now players are perfecting the art of cheating OTB. The question often asked is why do people use engines when they are not allowed? Some people simply want to raise their ratings. Exactly why this is so, I can’t answer because on most sites you are anonymous and Internet ratings mean absolutely nothing. In fact these days all correspondence ratings mean absolutely nothing.
      Some titled players have been caught using engines in Internet sites. I suppose it’s because in some of the tournaments there is money at stake and they feel they must because their opponents use engines. In the case of alleged cheating by a certain woman GM on one popular site I think it was because she used the site primarily to advertise her teaching services and books. To that end she played quite a few people and likely did not want to mess around actually playing low rated players so she just faked it.
      OTB cheating in one form or another has a long history. The use of computers to cheat in OTB tournaments in recent years are too numerous to mention and are pretty well known anyway and since some correspondence sites now allow engine use, I like the idea put forth by the poster on BoingBoing that engine use should be allowed in OTB events as long as you don’t get caught.

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