Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:10:50 05/02/01
Go up one level in this thread
On May 01, 2001 at 04:09:05, Alois Ganter wrote: > > >For cheating in computer tournaments with human operators one should not play >advanced chess. Its sufficient that the human "sense of danger" is superior to >nowadays programs and can avoid many losses without the need for the human to >calculate a single line. Telling the program when to consolidate rather than to >take further risks makes a huge difference. > >1. Say you have an area on your screen which means "Do not take any more >material. Consolidate! Defend your King! Retreat! Repair your pawn structure". > >2. Another screen area could be "Watch out for passed pawns!". > >3. Against humans: "Do not block the pawn chain!". > >If you smell danger, you put your mouse arrow into that area after entering the >opponent move. Maybe your judgement is wrong. No problem. The only risk is that >the program plays passively. > >But it would also lose much less games. > >Taking the vanities and the ruthlessness of some of the chess companies here >into account judging by the ugly way they fight in public, it looks like they >are prepared to do anything to win important tournaments. > >That should not be allowed. So I personally prefer results from automatic >matches. As an alternative the rules for human operators should be much more >strict than they are now. > > That is worthy of a challenge. "Have you _actually_ looked at the rules governing computer chess events, either computer vs computer as in the ICCA tournaments, or computer vs human as in the USCF rated events we all play in?" I would assume not. Because human intervention is _expressly_ forbidden. The human is only allowed to enter moves after the game is started, unless the program asks a question about time remaining on the chess clock, in which case the operator is allowed to answer. Having the programmer there is more important _between_ rounds when opening preparation is needed, or some programming concept needs adjustment. >> >> >>>On the other hand every program can trivially defend against abusing input from >>>an autoplayer interface. No human interference, no cheating. >> >>I suspect that it is not so simple. >>I remember that Ed had a lot of problems with it and I also remember strange >>things with the autoplayer. >> >>Uri > >Ed had problems because of a faulty DOS driver not written by himself. Under >Windows it should be different. I work in Internet server development and see it >as a firewall analogy. > >Autoplaying by serial interface means that you can completely control the input >to your program. If you do not like the input, you behave like a brave little >firewall: log it for your admin and ignore it. Suppose I simply send you as many ICMP ECHO REQUEST packets as you can absorb and respond to? What is that going to do to (a) your machine's cpu cycles; (b) your ability to receive packets from the opponent's machine? I can think of several ways to cause you a bit of grief without your knowing unless you watched everything carefully. IE I send my move once character at a time buried in a 1518 byte packet. Maybe with 20 big (but empty) packets between each valid one. It is doubtful that would get logged by anything unless you really had a firewall looking at the packets carefully. I don't think you can design a non-abusable interface...
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.