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Comment by tromp | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a very solid critique of Deepmind's recent paper, or how it mislead people into regarding its results as much stronger than they really are. However I think the autor goes a bit astray at

> The paper mentions that the model could not follow the "don't repeat the same board position three times in a row" rule (aka "threefold repetition").

That is not the rule. It is not illegal to repeat a position for a third time.

The rule only says that a player can claim a draw in the case of a three fold repetition [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threefold_repetition

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Fair point! Usually in online chess, it auto-draws the game. I guess there's an assumption that that's what the players want / not running out of time in blitz games.

Slight inaccuracy. I don't think it autodraws on your behalf right away, but if you repeat it even more(there may also be a setting to automatically claim a draw on 3, not sure). Not sure what the different servers do exactly, but i think based on experience that's what's happening.

There is a little known rule in tournament chess that if a position is reached 5 times, an arbiter can step in and rule the game as a draw without a claim. Usually only comes up in scholastic tournaments and very rarely in blitz tournaments.

The fivefold repetition rule says that the game is drawn in the event of a fivefold repetition, regardless of actions by the arbiter or either player. (Indeed, regardless of whether an arbiter is present.) So if it's later discovered to have occurred in a game which White apparently won by checkmate, then the win is void. The rule also places a duty on the arbiter to intervene, but a failure on the arbiter to intervene has no bearing on the outcome.

My bad, I did not know those details. I don't think I've ever heard of a case where it's happened this way in tournament play. I bet it has though.

Do you happen to know if this can be applied even several rounds later, in a swiss format? In most tournaments, even if there are score sheets, the arbiters rarely look over the game if the players agree on the result. And sometimes I don't look over my own games until a few days later if I'm disgusted enough with how I played...

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