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Subject: Re: "World" Championship in North America ... Semi-Formal Announcement.

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 02:08:57 07/16/02

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On July 16, 2002 at 04:56:35, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>On July 16, 2002 at 04:55:03, Russell Reagan wrote:
>
>>What are the major problems you see with online?
>
>Cheating.

I think there are quite a few good ways to deter cheating in an online event.
You could require that the engine have been made public for 6 months prior (or
some amount of time), and check it against Crafty or other strong open source
engines. Surely working together we could devise a nearly automated system for
such a thing. Maybe comparing binary strands in the executable, comparing move
selection, and so on. I'm sure there are people who would be able to offer lots
more methods who have done this kind of thing in the past.

As for someone firing up Fritz and competing, I think it wouldn't be
unreasonable for the organization running the event to have copies of all of the
decent commercial engines, and compare outputs.

I think that if someone is dedicated and talented enough to create a modified
engine and work on it enough so that there are no similarities between it and
it's original engine that they either modified it enough to call their own, or
they are talented enough at code hacking that they are going to be able to cheat
in person as well as online. I'm sure there is some talented person out there
who could hack Fritz and use it at an event in person.

Do you think that if the organizing group had some method of detecting clones
that there would be any more room for cheating in an online event rather than in
an "in person" event? If some dark horse comes out of nowhere to win, don't you
think people will start to wonder and look into it? Regardless of all of that,
they would still have to compete int he semi-final match and finals match to win
anything. There could be more rigorous testing done in person, and if a cheater
is caught in person, then the next highest finisher gets bumped up and takes his
or her rightful spot. Perhaps you could simply throw out all of those games and
reseed. Some acceptable method could be developed for handling this. I just
think that if someone is talented enough to either modify the source enough or
the executable enough to make it not detectable from a binary comparison for
similar binary patterns, and to alter it enough to make it play unique moves,
then that person won't be caught online or at WCCC or anywhere else.

Russell



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