World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things

Cheating at a PvE game like Helldivers is basically a victimless crime (I don’t do it, but I can see why people would).

Fair enough. People cheat at chess too which makes absolutely no sense to me.

Cheating with only your friends - yeah, mostly. Cheating with randos sounds like it would lead to boring gameplay.

Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?

Not just cheat but cheat using Bluetooth butt plugs at an extremely high level of play (https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/chess-champ-gets-butt-inspecte...). Some people have all the fun.

Hey, dopamine is dopamine. This ain’t stolen valor or a plagiarized thesis.

You shouldn’t state it so confidently as fact — nobody has ever produced any evidence that Hans Niemann cheated over the board (let alone with a Bluetooth butt plug, despite all the memes to that effect).

I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.

Thank you. This is the kind of speed-of-correction (~20 min or less) that is needed for social media discourse to work effectively. Indeed, no evidence has been found, this was just a silly meme from Reddit which predated the Hans drama by several years. When the Hans drama happened, of course Redditors started making silly flippant references to this joke. But some people didn’t understand that those were references, instead mistook them for actual “accusations”, bought into it, and started actually seriously perpetuating the accusation/rumor. It was repeated often enough in juuust serious enough tone that tabloid journalism eventually picked it up and ran stories with it.

But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.

So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?

Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.

But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.

With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).

So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.

Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.

> Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players.

It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.

Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.

It is a crime against oneself.

I think it's a special kind of person that gets a kick from "winning" at something that's not a challenge. You might as well write "winner" on a t-shirt in marker and wear it.

It is a pretty straightforward wave shooter game. I had fun with it, but it isn’t high art or anything. I enjoy games like Hades or Dark Souls where the fact that you keep losing is an interesting part of the narrative and builds the overall ambiance. Helldivers (2, at least) is not really that sort of game, the plot is more like fun, even sillier Starship Troopers.

I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.

Speaking of which [https://www.thepopculture.co/products/need-room-full-mirrors...]

I don’t really know that it is cheating to get a “win” label. Maybe it is just a distraction or fun flashing lights.

Do you remember being a child and just playing with action figures? It was harmless and fun. I wonder where we lose that ability to just chill and have fun without a challenge.

Actually, a lot of people seem to just spend a lot of time watching TV, which is also fun without challenge.

Solitaire is a game, and many people see games in terms of gaining or losing either social status or self-image. But for single-player games:

- maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing"

- "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter.

- for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."

To be fair, Chess.com said that they had identified 24 other GMs who they believed had cheated (who they declined to name). His cheating may have been more normal than is comfortable. It's entirely possible Carlsen was on that list; we just don't know.

Niemann seems like a jerk, but he's also just a kid. He was 19 at the time of the controversy. I've sure grown a lot since I was 19.

> But for single-player games

We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!)

> for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."

These aren't the only two options. You can also just challenge yourself for the satisfaction of overcoming challenges and not wear a t-shirt. I think when people cheat at something where the outcome is broadcast there is almost always an element of status seeking.

The comparison to TV watching or playing pretend is apt, though I don't see how cheating at multiplayer games is an improvement over those. If you cheat in something like helldivers 2 (what my comment is meant to address) that can also spoil other peoples' experience who actually want a challenge. Besides, nowadays you have the option of just watching someone else play a game to completion on twitch or youtube, which is quite popular.

I was responding to

> Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?

Yeah, that's fair and what you said is reasonable. I was changing the context back to multiplayer to make my point about that.