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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

When you said "at age 16" it made me feel the guy was 40 or so and it was long ago.

Not that the cheating took place only two year before the game against Carlsen, which is close enough to keep the same behaviors..

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It wouldn’t be the same behavior, though. No one is able to really come up with a good explanation of how Niemann cheated in a game where he was being watched by a crowd of people. Hence the sex toy theory; one has to come up with some outlandish guesses to make it work. Cheating on an online chess game is a completely different beast.

It would be like if a team was losing to the Patriots, and they walked away and claimed that all the Patriots were on steroids, and their only evidence was that they deflated the footballs against an opposing team some years before. Is that evidence of unsavory behavior? Sure. Is it a carte blanche to throw any accusation at them and walk away when they win claiming they cheated? That seems insane.

If an archeologist gets caught trying to pass off an orangutan jaw as an ancient human bone, concedes that he's done so, then two years later announces that he found another ancient human skull, do you really care to waste your time figuring out what kind of monkey he used this time? He's a known liar, so throw his paper in the trash and forget about it.

It shouldn't matter how Niemann cheated this time, or even if he did at all. He already admitted to cheating in the past so ban him and forget about him.

I find it odd that Magnus didn't have a problem competing against Niemann up until the point he lost.

Conversely, Magnus loses against other people regularly, so why single out Niemann?

No it would be like making the same exact accusation, as if the Patriots got caught using steroids two years before and now two years later you suspect they are still using them.

It's literally impossible for him to cheat in the exact same way. An online cheater tabs out to an engine to see the move and act accordingly. You simply can't do that in an in person match with a crowd of people watching. Hence why there’s talk about sex toys - people are trying to come up with some way that some sort of signal could be sent to Niemann while he was being watched by a crowd of people, without a single person noticing. It’s an entirely different level from tabbing in your browser to an engine while sitting at your computer at home.

It doesn't need to be a sex toy, obviously. $5 worth of parts from Ali Baba could be assembled into a signaling tool:

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Type-C-Bluetooth-5-0-...

There's even prebuilt solutions for things like poker:

https://www.cardslenses.com/remote-contorl-poker-game-vibrat...

https://elie.net/blog/security/royal-flush-an-in-depth-look-...

You don't need much of a signal.

At that level, a simple signal that "Your opponent made a mistake and there is a line greater than +3 right now! Look for it." would be a huge advantage.

> only two year before

He's 20 today, and the convroversy was last year.

It seems more like three years, in a period of one's life where a person probably does the most changing.

(FWIW, I don't play chess or have side, it's just an interesting issue.)

Did he get caught then and suffer actual consequences? Because if not it's not as if character development happens automatically, especially if there are significant gains to be had from cheating.

I don't pretend to know what causes people to change, so I can't answer your question where it seems like you're implying that he would only change if that was the case.

All I know is that he admited to it, so if that's "getting caught", I imagine he has receicved consequences from his admission.

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