Encouraging Fair Play in Chess and Beyond

Detecting Cheaters

We can try to guess if a person is a cheater, but it's hard. Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't.

Chess organizers try to use statistics and AI to try to detect cheaters. I spent about a year, working on a research paper, published in an international conference on games: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.11506
The overall method was to learn patterns from games through the moves players played, and the amount of time they spent on each move to estimate their rating. With an estimate of rating per move, we can match this to the player's actual rating. When the rating estimate is much larger than their actual rating, we may suspect something is off. My approach is able to estimate ratings within 182 rating points on average.

Detecting cheaters using this method has its limits though when the cheater is good at cheating. Without definitive physical evidence, it's worth thinking about what is a better solution to the problem.

Encouraging Fair Play

Ultimately, the solution to dealing with cheaters needs not just detection and penalties but something more. Imagine that detection is 100% accurate, there will still be cheaters. On the other hand, imagine, detection is 0% accurate, but no one wants to cheat, then detection is not even needed.

Society as a whole, needs to instill a mindset of fair play not just in chess, but schools, etc. Cheating in chess is not that different from cheating on an exam in school. Teachers in school should instill the right mind set to discourage this and the same goes for the chess community. The first question is why people cheat. One answer is that there is an overemphasis on results/winning/rating and this is detrimental to most people because results/winning/rating is not something we can easily control. I've noticed over dozens of year playing chess, that many people like to brag about their rating or tournament results. People like when others tell them how "amazing" they are. But think about the "losers" who did not do well, how does that make them feel. And, this attitude encourages cheating, when winning is prioritized above other considerations.

When people want to win at all costs, it's because of two things, they need a sense of control in their lives, and they think that outweighs the cons of cheating.

So really it boils down to learning to let go of things we can't control and accepting that some things our beyond control, and that is OK. Second, is people should understand why cheating is bad. Cheating is bad because there are penalties, but that's not enough to deter people when the chance of getting caught is low. It's bad because it ruins the game. Imagine if everyone were just using Stockfish. There would be no point, all games would just end in a draw most of the time.

Winning and losing is just one binary dimension of chess. There are many other beautiful aspects of the game that, we as a community, should put our energy into. That includes the community that chess connects us with people worldwide, for example I have made so many friends worldwide through chess. Others enjoy the personal learning and improvement and this does not have to correlate to results/winning/rating as we know after reading a book and not winning more games. There is the aspect of problem-solving and creativity which is enjoyable and a way to stave off diseases such as dementia. And of course, there is creating and improving a platform to play chess on, free for people, such as Lichess (huge thanks). There are many other benefits and reasons to be involved in chess and focusing on these can help encourage fair play and discourage cheating not just in chess, but also help give us a more resilient and clear outlook in life in general.