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Re: [computer-go] KGS Tournaments: Cheating

On 7, Mar 2005, at 11:39 AM, Bill Shubert wrote:
For cheating, it seems we could have two "kinds" of tournaments.
Tournaments can serve several purposes:
1. Determine whose program is officially "the best"
2. Give authors a chance to see their program played a lot of other
programs, including getting a rough idea of what your strong &
weak points are
3. Share ideas and have fun with other people in the computer go
community
For items 2 and 3, cheating isn't much of an issue. If one or two
programs in the tournament cheat, so what? You still get a good idea of
why other programs beat you, you still get to meet & talk with other
computer go programmers.

So maybe have fairly frequent (monthly or whatever) "casual" tournaments
would be a good idea, where people go on the honor system, then have
less frequent (annual maybe) but more-important "serious" tournaments
that make a real attempt to weed out cheaters through TP's or requests
of search results or whatever.

Does that sound like a reasonable idea?
I think that something similar is the only possible solution.

Informal computer-computer play over the internet for fun
and an easy way to play against a variety of other programs,
and formal face-to-face tournaments for anything serious.
Face-to-face would mean that people like me have no choice
and either ship hardware to the tournament site or they do
not compete. I cannot see any other way to prevent cheating.

But I realize that even this cannot really prevent cheating.
Almost every computer has a wireless connection now, and
even at a tournament a determined cheater could watch from
a slight distance and send help via the wireless. The
tournament would have to have a packet sniffer on all the
wireless and bluetooth and (?) channels to pick this up.

It is very hard to stop a determined cheater. And it causes
everybody else a great deal of grief to try and keep cheaters
out.

Oh well,
David


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