I am happy about the outcome of this investigation, but I think it's far more important to highlight the other people mentioned in this decision statement. I'm not so familiar with Navara, who I understand was also under a lot of pressure because of this, so I will speak about Daniel and his impact on me.
Daniel Naroditsky was one of the most influential figures in chess: arguably the best chess educator on the internet; one of the most talented commentators out there; and an absolute demon at speed chess, who could go toe to toe with the best to ever do it. It's hard to come across someone as passionate, knowledgeable and generous about something as Daniel was about chess. And most importantly he appeared to be such a kind soul.
I find it hard to enjoy and engage with chess after his passing. He was the main reason to keep coming back for me. I wholeheartedly recommend every video in his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM.
So Kramnik, being a chess player and not a statistician, invented various methods of "detecting" cheating which seemed convincing for for a layman but questionable mathematically.
Then he started attacking Daniel, Hikaru and some other players online. This all led to pretty tragic consequences.
Kramnik still believes that he's in the right.
The only good thing out of this is numerous funny videos by chess players trying to figure out intricacies of statistics and math.
I'm generally skeptical of causal narratives like this, but Naroditsky talked openly and at length about the ongoing physical and mental health effects of Kramnik's nonsense. So in this particular case, I'm comfortable blaming Kramnik either way.
One of my favourite of these is the Professor of Mathematical Statistics from U. Waterloo who is a reasonably strong amateur chess player and was engaged by chess.com after Kramnik’s accusations about Hikaru and did a video with the chess.com “chief chess officer” (IM Danny Rensch) explaining how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong (based on the most basic beginner errors in misunderstanding probabilities of dependent vs independent events) and long streaks were highly likely to occur especially for players like Hikaru who play very large numbers of blitz and bullet matches.
Kramnik responded with “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. OK Vlad. You know more about stats than a professor of math stats at uw. Sure…
Kramnik’s behaviour throughout has been despicable. I’m pretty sure it’s grounded in the fact that he is bitter about how chess has changed and he has got older and more stuck in his ways and the modern generation of players (I’m thinking people like Danya, Jospem[1] and Lazavik[2]) play/played a brand of chess that is entirely based on deep engine analysis and is totally alien to guys like him with an old-school Russian chess background. So they must be cheating (as far as Kramnik is concerned). The way he hounded Daniel Naroditsky in particular really disgusted me and I say that as someone who used to be a fan of Kramnik’s chess.
Naroditsky played a match against Magnus that he streamed where it ended (this a 1+0 time control; yes you can cheat in bullet but it's clear he wasn't) in a 40-40 tie, this after he lost the first game from being distracted getting his stream set up properly
He was one of the world's best bullet and blitz players, it was obvious he was never cheating. Kramnik was apparently one of his heroes. It was despicable behavior
Causes create effects and eventually exist in a field of those effects. Kramnik was rapidly informed of statistical issues with his approaches in easy-to-understand ways (and also in technical detail). His "convincing for a layman" needs to be noted as "not convincing to himself after becoming more informed". So part of the issue is why he continued to pretend, either or both to himself or to others that his method was useful.
Chief chess.com officer IM Danny Rensch, among others, explained how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong with easy to understand detail.
Kramnik: “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.
A lot of people imagine chess players to he smart, but there's a video of asking grandmasters very simple (imho) general knowledge questions that they did absolutely abysmally at. It's probably safe to assume that someone who is really good at chess is actually bad at anything that isn't chess
A big percentage of the top grandmasters skip high school and almost none of them have went to college. They are “smart” in that they have the potential intelligence to learn that stuff, as demonstrated by them having learned chess, but they have basically no knowledge of statistics, mathematics, plenty of other general knowledge topics.
From that point of view, you should really consider them to be as knowledgeable about these things as high school dropouts. It was hilarious following the whole cheating thing and seeing them try to interpret these statistical results and coming to really stupid conclusions.
You could say it’s difficult to see them this way due to the cultural and historical perspectives on chess but this is the reality of top grandmasters at this time.
This is just a Western cultural perception and baggage. That if you are good at chess, you are smart. If you can solve the Rubik's Cube quickly, you are a genius, etc.
Getting better at chess, the Rubik's Cube, etc. is a skill. The more you practice and the more passionate you are, the better you get at it. This is just like learning to play the piano or learning to swim. There is natural aptitude as well but its not as simple as being super smart and being able to strategize well using intelligence. That's just the narrative that seems to make sense. Being good at chess isn't evidence that someone is smart in general.
Please don't devolve into reactionary nonsense. I'm pretty sure that if you measure the average IQ of good (whatever your definition of good) chess players, you won't get 100.
Seems weird to dismiss stuff as "nonsense" just because you're "pretty sure". Hikaru Nakamura (who's been the world #2 in classical rating) did an IQ test on stream and ended up with 102. I've not seen any other results for top players.
>A big percentage of the top grandmasters skip high school and almost none of them have went to college. They are “smart” in that they have the potential intelligence to learn that stuff, as demonstrated by them having learned chess, but they have basically no knowledge of statistics, mathematics, plenty of other general knowledge topics.
Regarding general knowledge, it's a pretty well known phenomena within the community. Here's a video with the three players who spent the longest time at #2 in the world (see [0]) behind Magnus Carlsen answering basic trivia questions[1].
A lot of players actually do go to college, although likely a minority. I know that Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in particular has a math degree. Ding Liren has a law degree. Daniel Naroditsky himself, while not quite a top grandmaster by the typical definition, had a bachelors in history.
I would call chess players smart in the abstract sense. Playing chess requires both good "compute power", working memory, and long-term memorization.
But to become grandmaster you have to dedicate a lot of your life to chess. It's not that these people couldn't know general knowledge or do higher math, they are simply not exposed to it. They are not smart in the sense of a universal genius, because that would require immersing yourself in all the things - the opposite of what a chess grandmaster does
- Paul Morphy, lawyer (I think). One of... well. Greatest of all time discussions are hard (times evolve) but he murdered his competition relative to his time
Yes but ... knowing the answer to general knowledge questions isn't really an appropriate test of that. General knowledge sounds like it would be, by definition, things known to people of ordinary intelligence. So it could easily be that very intelligent people aren't up to speed about general knowledge topics because they spend their time on topics of interest to people of high intelligence. That is actually something of a trope.
The nature of the questions and why they are expected to know the answers matters a lot here.
For non-chess players - imagine if Geoffrey hinton used AI detectors (GPT zero, pangram etc) to accuse and punish people of using AI in their writing and bad mouth them publicly. That's what kramnik (former world chess champion) did to Danya and other players. I miss Danya.
To my knowledge, Pangram has a very low false positive rate approaching zero. (False negative is another matter.) I’m not sure that’s what you want to use as the analogy here? (I don’t know much about this Kramnik situation.)
Pangram’s market claims are very different from independent validations of the platform. The 99.98% rate is on a toy dataset not resembling reality.
Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
the text in above is all ai generated. i uploaded a picture of two kittens to gemini and asked it to guess their age. then asked gemini to change the language to of someone who is born in deep Appalachia but has Japanese parents. then asked it to change the bullets to paragraphs written by someone who is talking fro life experience rather than grounded in published science. pangram gave it 100% human generated. go ahead, try it. it boggles me how people believe these ai detectors.
if it makes you feel good the original response from gemini gets 100% AI detection and for that I think pangram should get the credit but in practical terms the empty pots in my yard are more useful than pangram at this point.
You are talking about false negatives, but this thread started with a discussion around the potential for false positives causing writers anxiety
> Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
False positives and false negatives are different problems that have different impacts.
Does your single example prove that Pangram doesn't work, or that it doesn't work on short snippets of text? Try to get a detection error on a longer run of text. I'd be curious to see the results, particularly if you can get a false positive.
Well, false positives must anyway be zero for a product which is built around detecting AI. let me explain - the value proposition of this product is that we detect AI. Its not we don't call human writing AI generated. The latter is implied and must not happen ever. The value is that pangram detects AI generated content which it did not in the above example. if this explanation doesn't make sense then think of pangram as a pregnancy test where presence of AI == presence of baby. If a pregnancy test keeps saying you are not pregnant when you actually are then that's a problem, right? - you can't argue that at least its not saying you are pregnant when you are not.
But here's a bigger problem - Imagine a teacher grading 50 students - 40 of them use AI to write their answers and 10 write honestly. All 40 of them use the hack that I used and get 100% human from pangram and the other 10 also get 100 human from pangram. what is the product really adding to the workflow? Nothing, zero or zilch!!! - but then you come along and say hey at least those 10 honest students also got 100% from pangram. This whole argument of false positives being very very low works if your false negatives are tight which they are not.
>>To my knowledge, pangram has a very low false positive rate approaching zero. (False negative is another matter.) I’m not sure that’s what you want to use as the analogy here?
'To my knowledge' - okay. In my experience, they're all horrible. I have fooled them both ways - ai generated content that they say is purely human and human generated content that they say is partially AI or just AI.
He basically accused many players of cheating without any real evidence. His proofs are notoriously bad. The most notable examples are Daniel Naroditsky who was under immense psychological stress due to the allegations and died due to an accidental kratom overdose (kratom is used to self-medicate anxiety). Another prominent example are his allegations against Jose Martinez (aka Jospem) which resulted in them playing a grudge match which Jospem won. Kramnik was struggling with the tech in the online portion of the game. Basically he cannot accept that younger players beat him in quick formats and flings around ridiculous stuff.
He's also feuding with Hikaru who is obviously really good at blitz.
As a side note because I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea: Kratom is an opioid and it is not an anxiety treatment. Some people with anxiety try to self-medicate with opioids because they can provide a temporary feeling of well being and euphoria, but they leave the person in worse condition when the effects wear off. This is what leads to the addiction and following dose escalation.
So without passing any judgment on anyone in this story, I would warn anyone else reading this that Kratom is decidedly a very bad way to try to cope with an anxiety condition and the false and fleeting feelings of calm that come from opioids will only bring more problems on top of a difficult mental health situation.
Many games are held online. In person, computers get smaller all the time (and there are bathroom breaks etc.). The history of trying to cheat at chess, casino games, and more with concealed computers is far too large a topic for one reply.
That didn't prevent Anna Rudolf being accused that she hid a supercomputer in her lip balm box made of tin sheet metal in 2007 and cheated with it in the bathroom.
Some parts of the chess community are very ridiculous.
This was unsubstantiated and took a similar toll on Niemann. The recent Netflix documentary interviews the key players, and it’s pretty that he didn’t cheat in that situation. Magnus’s cozy relationship with chess.com made Danny Rench jump to conclusions, giving the Magnus team the impression that cheating had happened, but a later chess.com analysis showed that was unlikely. It made for a good viral story, but wasn’t fair to Hans, no matter how unpleasant his personality is.
7-OH, then? Its much stronger, and doses aren't standardized. If I take a half tablet as suggested I'll just evacuate it within an hour. Quarter tablet is hard to cut, so doses are inconsistent. Its an awful product, the way it is sold.
He posted mathematically unsound methods that accused online players of cheating. Including Naroditsky, who is no longer with us (draw your own conclusions).
This is a case of a Kramnik being a crank whom most people did not take seriously, but he still had an impact on the victims.
I’m not a follower either, but inference from the article tells me: Krammik has come up with some sort of cheat detection method, has loudly accused some others of cheating, and FIDE are both unconvinced of the truth of the allegations and very unhappy he didn’t do this through proper channels. He also doesn’t appear to have co-operated with the investigation.
Kramnik is an asshole and this action is far too little far too late. His actions have possibly already led to the loss of a life.
At the same time, FIDE also needs to look back at the behavior of some of the most powerful people in the sport in the whole Hans saga. What Hans was put through was ridiculous even if all the allegations were true, given how many actions were simply the result of the most powerful player in the sport throwing his weight around.
I’m not a fan of Hans but I absolutely admire how he managed to continue and grow his career despite the top 2 biggest individuals in the sport, and a whole other set of powerbrokers (for example, the wealthiest tournament in the Sinquefeld cup) teaming up to destroy his career.
Sindorov, who won the candidates, and will be playing for the world championship, has also had accounts banned on chess.com for (presumably) cheating as a teenager. Do you think it would be ok if a large part of the chess world conspired to keep him out of tournaments. Do you think it would be ok if the world made jokes that he cheated using a sex toy? Do you think it would be ok for the largest youtube chess channel (GothamChess) to publish a video titled "Chess cheating device" featuring a thumbnail showing his face next to a butt plug? And all this while he was 19?
What happened to Hans is FAR worse than anything Kramnik did. But maybe you think it's ok because you find him to be an asshole?
The only cheating Hans admitted to and the only cheating proven were two (maybe 3?) online non monetary games when he was under 15 years old.
Pretty much every player has done something like that.
But again, he was blacklisted before any of even these marginal allegations were proven. And the actual allegations Magnus accused him of and that followed him for years has absolutely no evidence other than Magnus not accepting that Hans could beat him in a highly controlled over the table game.
Also, he continued to be punished in ways that are outside the actual punishment that was given to him that are not official but are being done through winks and nods between Carlsen and Hikaru and tournament organizers who don’t want to upset them.
This isn't true. He said "And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money." That implies, to me, that when he was 12 he did in fact cheat for prize money.
And then he admitted that he cheated as a 16 year old in "random games" to boost his online rating. I can't find any instance of him providing a number of how many games he admits to cheating in, but the chess.com report alleged over 100, including when he was 17.
Kramnik ((ab)using his status as a former world champion) accused several other top level players to the point that one of them committed suicide.
Niemann allegedly cheated (In my personal opinion as a decently rated but certainly not elite chess player, he probably did cheat in this particular game, though proof was never given and probably never will) at a high level chess tournament and was ostracized by the chess community for a while. He has since rejoined and continues to play at a high level.
Hans Niemann most likely did not cheat in the famous game where he won against Magnus Carlsen in the Sinquefield cup. Or at least, there is no credible evidence for cheating, and Carlsen actually did not formally accuse him of cheating either.
Hans Niemann cheated in online matches when he was younger though
> There is no evidence of suicide, and he had multiple drugs in his system when he died.
Polyintoxication is nasty because after the fact, you can't tell if someone underestimated the effects of the drugs or knew about them and used it to guarantee death.
I have no idea why this continues to be a popular opinion among laypeople. Even at the time actual cheating experts using computer analysis determined it to be likely fair play. His accuracy was rather pedestrian, Magnus just had on off day and played terribly. There is no proposed mechanism for how he could even HAVE cheated. He has continued to perform at a similar level under much tighter security enforcement. The primary accusation seems to be that he's poor at explaining the reasoning behind his moves, but anyone who's ever watched a Hans stream can tell you that the man simply cannot speak.
Interesting. Maybe I am not getting something: it sounds like his cheating accusations cover some kind of an online chess tournament. Why does this even matter? Why would people care that much? Shouldn't they be focused on face-to-face world championships, etc...?
Online chess is taken seriously as an e-sport, especially at the top levels, and is played for cash prizes. Imagine if the best cs:go or competitive programmers were found to be cheating. They would be ostracized.
This is true, but the crushing response to this scandal is clearly disproportionate. Millions of views on videos making crude sexual jokes about a 19 year old is already an incredibly unfortunate situation, and his career got completely halted for years due to (what are now clearly) false accusations.
It should also be said Niemann has also had incredibly good results since the whole thing
So it casts doubt on what Magnus said somewhat
(Of course, on Rogan, I think, Magnus defended the allegations. And of course he's world's strongest player for a reason. Other young players have beaten himm before such as Esipenko and he never said anything like that)
I didn't watch it myself, but there was a recent Netflix documentary on the subject where Magnus claims he was misled by chess.com into believing that they had more concrete evidence than they did.
Kramnik undeniably pushed Naroditsky into developing an addiction which ultimately contributed to his death. Whether it was intentional suicide or accidental overdose(both are possible) seems to me to be completely irrelevant.
Kramnik engaged in a dedicated bullying and a smear campaign against Danya for a prolonged period, without substantive evidence, and never let up. When Danya explicitly stated in multiple interviews that Kramnik was seriously affecting his mental health, Kramnik persisted in his harassment. When Danya's mental health ultimately led to his death, Kramnik tried to put the blame on everyone but himself, including Danya, his friends and family, even the entire chess community. According to Kramnik, it seems like he is the only one who's completely blameless. It's good that he's being punished, but I think the punishment is too mild. In my opinion he should be stripped of all his titles, including his world titles.
The sad fact is that Kramnik is a pathetic narcissist, who because he's a shadow of his former strength, and a slow old man, gets easily beaten in online blitz, and then accuses people of cheating to protect his wounded ego, because he wants to pretend he hasn't declined.
Stripping him of his titles doesn't do much good to be honest. In the history books he will still simply be someone who won and became world champion, whether stripped of the title or not. What would do us good, is to realize, that even someone in that position is not necessarily a saint or even a good person. To realize that supposed contrast and keep it in mind would be better for us than stripping him of titles, that he did in fact truly earn. Also it would only give him more ammunition.
I had an emotionally abusive partner. But they didn’t force me to become depressed and anxious. They didn’t force me to have to medicate. So yeah it really was just completely my fault.
For anyone new, Kramnik has been accusing players left and right of cheating without any proof. His accusations have done huge harm to the chess community as a whole. Daniel Naroditsky was harrassed so much, that he eventually went into depression and committed suicide. And he had proven ability as one of the best chess players out there, and probably the best chess teacher on YouTube. These are facts.
Now onto my probably crazy conspiracy theory: Russian players like Danil, Nepo and Kramnik have accused American and Indian players baselessly of cheating multiple times over the past few years. They have went to podcasts and implied that their opponents have cheated. Idk if it's some lost national pride in chess or something but accusing others does more harm than good. We've seen how it hurt Hans when he was accused by Magnus of cheating without any evidence. Multiple top level tournaments stopped calling him due to magnus throwing a tantrum cuz he lost.
You are correct, there is no strong indication of active suicide.
However, it certainly put him into a state of mind of neglect, not caring anymore and not taking care of himself and most importantly, no way out. The words "I cannot play chess anymore without doubt of being accused of cheating, no matter what I do" are haunting to me. At that point he had multiple cameras targeting all screens he had and everything he could see, and it wasn't enough to Kramnik.
If you want to be detailed about it, https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1qjafcd/medical_exam... talks about the whole report; that sarcoidosis was the actual cause is speculative, and the "substance use as a contributing factor" part is widely believed to be in part due to the extreme stress he was under... but it is hard to say anything about causality definitively.
This is a big part of the problem... Kramnik had been bullying people for years about cheating, including aggressively bullying Daniel Naroditsky, and for the most part the chess community did nothing about it. It would be very hard for people to condemn Kramnik for his cheating accusations all the while chess' top star Carlsen was on a bullying spree of his own against Niemann.
> It would be very hard for people to condemn Kramnik for his cheating accusations all the while chess' top star Carlsen was on a bullying spree of his own against Niemann.
Doesn’t seem that hard from seeing all the comments here. I make an effort to keep away from chess forums online because of this stuff; most of these people are literally children, like under 14, but you can’t tell online lol.
Is there a summary of what he actually did? Since I didn’t follow the initial news item I feel like we are seeing the result before understanding the problem.
Kramnik has a habit of accusing people of cheating without evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Kramnik#Anti-cheating..., he has also done this to many many individuals without evidence (and cheating is taken very seriously), this is in connection to that - he's being penalized for accusing people (repeatedly) without evidence.
Just to be clear – this is an event where he has been doing so repeatedly, accusing people of cheating without evidence in-and-of itself isn't forbidden - since cheating in chess is difficult to verify, it's the manner and fashion to which Kramnik has done this that has led to his suspension
He basically pushed a player going through a crisis to suicide with his baseless accusations. Proceeded to make public derogatory remarks right after they passed while the family barely started grieving. This is a slap on the wrist.
Kramnik was accused of pushing Naroditsky to suicide and defended himself by saying that it was far more likely that Naroditsky died due to a drug overdose.
Toxicology reports later showed that Naroditsky did die due to the combination of an abnormal heartbeat, sarcoidosis and drugs, specifically methamphetamines and kratom.
Now if you want to speculate that he took those drugs due to the harassment that's a possibility, but claiming he died due to suicide is entirely unsubstatiated and uncalled for.
His final stream is illuminating if you can still find it. He speaks directly about Kramnik who he grew up idolizing right before his friend had to pull him away for erratic behavior. His comments during that stream strongly point to a suicide.
It is called for and is substantiated. Should the guy get prosecuted over it? Probably not although a precedent is moving towards pushing and or telling someone to kill them selves constitutes some kind of criminal liability at least in the states.
Drug overdoses are so often a method of suicide it is almost laughable to use that as an argument to defend assholery. Some people are psychopaths and Kramnit screams like one. Zero empathy remorse or event the slightest drop of compassion.
I am happy about the outcome of this investigation, but I think it's far more important to highlight the other people mentioned in this decision statement. I'm not so familiar with Navara, who I understand was also under a lot of pressure because of this, so I will speak about Daniel and his impact on me.
Daniel Naroditsky was one of the most influential figures in chess: arguably the best chess educator on the internet; one of the most talented commentators out there; and an absolute demon at speed chess, who could go toe to toe with the best to ever do it. It's hard to come across someone as passionate, knowledgeable and generous about something as Daniel was about chess. And most importantly he appeared to be such a kind soul.
I find it hard to enjoy and engage with chess after his passing. He was the main reason to keep coming back for me. I wholeheartedly recommend every video in his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielNaroditskyGM.
Rest in peace Daniel Naroditsky.
So Kramnik, being a chess player and not a statistician, invented various methods of "detecting" cheating which seemed convincing for for a layman but questionable mathematically.
Then he started attacking Daniel, Hikaru and some other players online. This all led to pretty tragic consequences.
Kramnik still believes that he's in the right.
The only good thing out of this is numerous funny videos by chess players trying to figure out intricacies of statistics and math.
Not as a defense of Kramnik's behavior, but Naroditsky's death was determined not likely to be suicide:
probable cardiac arrhythmia tied to systemic sarcoidosis, with methamphetamine/kratom as contributing factors.
I'm generally skeptical of causal narratives like this, but Naroditsky talked openly and at length about the ongoing physical and mental health effects of Kramnik's nonsense. So in this particular case, I'm comfortable blaming Kramnik either way.
One of my favourite of these is the Professor of Mathematical Statistics from U. Waterloo who is a reasonably strong amateur chess player and was engaged by chess.com after Kramnik’s accusations about Hikaru and did a video with the chess.com “chief chess officer” (IM Danny Rensch) explaining how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong (based on the most basic beginner errors in misunderstanding probabilities of dependent vs independent events) and long streaks were highly likely to occur especially for players like Hikaru who play very large numbers of blitz and bullet matches.
Kramnik responded with “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. OK Vlad. You know more about stats than a professor of math stats at uw. Sure…
Kramnik’s behaviour throughout has been despicable. I’m pretty sure it’s grounded in the fact that he is bitter about how chess has changed and he has got older and more stuck in his ways and the modern generation of players (I’m thinking people like Danya, Jospem[1] and Lazavik[2]) play/played a brand of chess that is entirely based on deep engine analysis and is totally alien to guys like him with an old-school Russian chess background. So they must be cheating (as far as Kramnik is concerned). The way he hounded Daniel Naroditsky in particular really disgusted me and I say that as someone who used to be a fan of Kramnik’s chess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mart%C3%ADnez_Alc%C3...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Lazavik
Naroditsky played a match against Magnus that he streamed where it ended (this a 1+0 time control; yes you can cheat in bullet but it's clear he wasn't) in a 40-40 tie, this after he lost the first game from being distracted getting his stream set up properly
He was one of the world's best bullet and blitz players, it was obvious he was never cheating. Kramnik was apparently one of his heroes. It was despicable behavior
Causes create effects and eventually exist in a field of those effects. Kramnik was rapidly informed of statistical issues with his approaches in easy-to-understand ways (and also in technical detail). His "convincing for a layman" needs to be noted as "not convincing to himself after becoming more informed". So part of the issue is why he continued to pretend, either or both to himself or to others that his method was useful.
Chief chess.com officer IM Danny Rensch, among others, explained how Kramnik’s theories about how unlikely various streak lengths were were completely wrong with easy to understand detail.
Kramnik: “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.
A lot of people imagine chess players to he smart, but there's a video of asking grandmasters very simple (imho) general knowledge questions that they did absolutely abysmally at. It's probably safe to assume that someone who is really good at chess is actually bad at anything that isn't chess
A big percentage of the top grandmasters skip high school and almost none of them have went to college. They are “smart” in that they have the potential intelligence to learn that stuff, as demonstrated by them having learned chess, but they have basically no knowledge of statistics, mathematics, plenty of other general knowledge topics.
From that point of view, you should really consider them to be as knowledgeable about these things as high school dropouts. It was hilarious following the whole cheating thing and seeing them try to interpret these statistical results and coming to really stupid conclusions.
You could say it’s difficult to see them this way due to the cultural and historical perspectives on chess but this is the reality of top grandmasters at this time.
This is just a Western cultural perception and baggage. That if you are good at chess, you are smart. If you can solve the Rubik's Cube quickly, you are a genius, etc.
Getting better at chess, the Rubik's Cube, etc. is a skill. The more you practice and the more passionate you are, the better you get at it. This is just like learning to play the piano or learning to swim. There is natural aptitude as well but its not as simple as being super smart and being able to strategize well using intelligence. That's just the narrative that seems to make sense. Being good at chess isn't evidence that someone is smart in general.
A lot of people try to get good at chess. If someone manages to become world class he is likely very intelligent.
If someone manages to become a world class chess player, they are likely very good at chess
Please don't devolve into reactionary nonsense. I'm pretty sure that if you measure the average IQ of good (whatever your definition of good) chess players, you won't get 100.
Seems weird to dismiss stuff as "nonsense" just because you're "pretty sure". Hikaru Nakamura (who's been the world #2 in classical rating) did an IQ test on stream and ended up with 102. I've not seen any other results for top players.
The first study of it I found (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...) notes that, while there is some correlation, "Full-scale IQ explained < 1% of the variance in chess skill."
>A big percentage of the top grandmasters skip high school and almost none of them have went to college. They are “smart” in that they have the potential intelligence to learn that stuff, as demonstrated by them having learned chess, but they have basically no knowledge of statistics, mathematics, plenty of other general knowledge topics.
Source?
Regarding general knowledge, it's a pretty well known phenomena within the community. Here's a video with the three players who spent the longest time at #2 in the world (see [0]) behind Magnus Carlsen answering basic trivia questions[1].
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1uk3wa3/world_no_2s_...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXyLJaaLEpE
They mostly did very well, other than Levon Aronian not knowing some basic chemical formulas and Hikaru’s brain freezing on the cube side question.
A lot of players actually do go to college, although likely a minority. I know that Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in particular has a math degree. Ding Liren has a law degree. Daniel Naroditsky himself, while not quite a top grandmaster by the typical definition, had a bachelors in history.
I would call chess players smart in the abstract sense. Playing chess requires both good "compute power", working memory, and long-term memorization.
But to become grandmaster you have to dedicate a lot of your life to chess. It's not that these people couldn't know general knowledge or do higher math, they are simply not exposed to it. They are not smart in the sense of a universal genius, because that would require immersing yourself in all the things - the opposite of what a chess grandmaster does
Kasparov seems to show that there is room for more than moves in a great chess mind.
> The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman.
> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.
- Paul Morphy, lawyer (I think). One of... well. Greatest of all time discussions are hard (times evolve) but he murdered his competition relative to his time
Morphy was certainly a freak of nature, sort of like Elizabeth in Queen's Gambit. Sadly, he lost his mind and died in his 40s.
(The quote is apocryphal and long after, so I'm pretty sure it's bunk.)
Yes but ... knowing the answer to general knowledge questions isn't really an appropriate test of that. General knowledge sounds like it would be, by definition, things known to people of ordinary intelligence. So it could easily be that very intelligent people aren't up to speed about general knowledge topics because they spend their time on topics of interest to people of high intelligence. That is actually something of a trope.
The nature of the questions and why they are expected to know the answers matters a lot here.
For non-chess players - imagine if Geoffrey hinton used AI detectors (GPT zero, pangram etc) to accuse and punish people of using AI in their writing and bad mouth them publicly. That's what kramnik (former world chess champion) did to Danya and other players. I miss Danya.
How did he punish them?
To my knowledge, Pangram has a very low false positive rate approaching zero. (False negative is another matter.) I’m not sure that’s what you want to use as the analogy here? (I don’t know much about this Kramnik situation.)
Pangram’s market claims are very different from independent validations of the platform. The 99.98% rate is on a toy dataset not resembling reality.
Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
Someone also input lots of pre-GPT texts to Pangram and they were all clear. The point is Kramnik’s claims are much weaker and not comparable.
> Pangram’s market claims are very different from independent validations of the platform.
Do you have a link to independent validations? The ones I found, like an upcoming nber paper confirm the companies claims.
https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/ai_detector_fails/blob/main/...
the text in above is all ai generated. i uploaded a picture of two kittens to gemini and asked it to guess their age. then asked gemini to change the language to of someone who is born in deep Appalachia but has Japanese parents. then asked it to change the bullets to paragraphs written by someone who is talking fro life experience rather than grounded in published science. pangram gave it 100% human generated. go ahead, try it. it boggles me how people believe these ai detectors.
if it makes you feel good the original response from gemini gets 100% AI detection and for that I think pangram should get the credit but in practical terms the empty pots in my yard are more useful than pangram at this point.
You are talking about false negatives, but this thread started with a discussion around the potential for false positives causing writers anxiety
> Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.
False positives and false negatives are different problems that have different impacts.
Does your single example prove that Pangram doesn't work, or that it doesn't work on short snippets of text? Try to get a detection error on a longer run of text. I'd be curious to see the results, particularly if you can get a false positive.
Well, false positives must anyway be zero for a product which is built around detecting AI. let me explain - the value proposition of this product is that we detect AI. Its not we don't call human writing AI generated. The latter is implied and must not happen ever. The value is that pangram detects AI generated content which it did not in the above example. if this explanation doesn't make sense then think of pangram as a pregnancy test where presence of AI == presence of baby. If a pregnancy test keeps saying you are not pregnant when you actually are then that's a problem, right? - you can't argue that at least its not saying you are pregnant when you are not.
But here's a bigger problem - Imagine a teacher grading 50 students - 40 of them use AI to write their answers and 10 write honestly. All 40 of them use the hack that I used and get 100% human from pangram and the other 10 also get 100 human from pangram. what is the product really adding to the workflow? Nothing, zero or zilch!!! - but then you come along and say hey at least those 10 honest students also got 100% from pangram. This whole argument of false positives being very very low works if your false negatives are tight which they are not.
>>To my knowledge, pangram has a very low false positive rate approaching zero. (False negative is another matter.) I’m not sure that’s what you want to use as the analogy here?
'To my knowledge' - okay. In my experience, they're all horrible. I have fooled them both ways - ai generated content that they say is purely human and human generated content that they say is partially AI or just AI.
For those who don't follow chess, what were the allegations? This article is intentionally vague on all the details.
He basically accused many players of cheating without any real evidence. His proofs are notoriously bad. The most notable examples are Daniel Naroditsky who was under immense psychological stress due to the allegations and died due to an accidental kratom overdose (kratom is used to self-medicate anxiety). Another prominent example are his allegations against Jose Martinez (aka Jospem) which resulted in them playing a grudge match which Jospem won. Kramnik was struggling with the tech in the online portion of the game. Basically he cannot accept that younger players beat him in quick formats and flings around ridiculous stuff. He's also feuding with Hikaru who is obviously really good at blitz.
> (kratom is used to self-medicate anxiety)
As a side note because I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea: Kratom is an opioid and it is not an anxiety treatment. Some people with anxiety try to self-medicate with opioids because they can provide a temporary feeling of well being and euphoria, but they leave the person in worse condition when the effects wear off. This is what leads to the addiction and following dose escalation.
So without passing any judgment on anyone in this story, I would warn anyone else reading this that Kratom is decidedly a very bad way to try to cope with an anxiety condition and the false and fleeting feelings of calm that come from opioids will only bring more problems on top of a difficult mental health situation.
How can one cheat in chess?
By using computers.
Aren't tournaments either held in person or with at least some judge/referree witnessing both parties?
Many games are held online. In person, computers get smaller all the time (and there are bathroom breaks etc.). The history of trying to cheat at chess, casino games, and more with concealed computers is far too large a topic for one reply.
That didn't prevent Anna Rudolf being accused that she hid a supercomputer in her lip balm box made of tin sheet metal in 2007 and cheated with it in the bathroom.
Some parts of the chess community are very ridiculous.
We had that story[0] a couple of years back, about the guy who supposedly cheated by using vibrating anal beads.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37657925
This was unsubstantiated and took a similar toll on Niemann. The recent Netflix documentary interviews the key players, and it’s pretty that he didn’t cheat in that situation. Magnus’s cozy relationship with chess.com made Danny Rench jump to conclusions, giving the Magnus team the impression that cheating had happened, but a later chess.com analysis showed that was unlikely. It made for a good viral story, but wasn’t fair to Hans, no matter how unpleasant his personality is.
> accidental kratom overdose
You cannot overdose on plain leaf kratom
7-OH, then? Its much stronger, and doses aren't standardized. If I take a half tablet as suggested I'll just evacuate it within an hour. Quarter tablet is hard to cut, so doses are inconsistent. Its an awful product, the way it is sold.
Oh, I didn't hear that he died from kratom, maybe chess should be sanctioning Joe Rogan instead.
He posted mathematically unsound methods that accused online players of cheating. Including Naroditsky, who is no longer with us (draw your own conclusions).
This is a case of a Kramnik being a crank whom most people did not take seriously, but he still had an impact on the victims.
Fro Kramnik this is a mild penalty.
I’m not a follower either, but inference from the article tells me: Krammik has come up with some sort of cheat detection method, has loudly accused some others of cheating, and FIDE are both unconvinced of the truth of the allegations and very unhappy he didn’t do this through proper channels. He also doesn’t appear to have co-operated with the investigation.
His "cheat detection method" mostly consisted of playing someone online and then reporting them for cheating if he lost.
Here's a fun compilation of him getting cooked by 12 year olds and then immediately reporting them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5LSOoYoPs
one of the players he persistently harassed, Daniel Naroditsky, ended up dying, which surely gave an extra push
Kramnik is an asshole and this action is far too little far too late. His actions have possibly already led to the loss of a life.
At the same time, FIDE also needs to look back at the behavior of some of the most powerful people in the sport in the whole Hans saga. What Hans was put through was ridiculous even if all the allegations were true, given how many actions were simply the result of the most powerful player in the sport throwing his weight around.
I’m not a fan of Hans but I absolutely admire how he managed to continue and grow his career despite the top 2 biggest individuals in the sport, and a whole other set of powerbrokers (for example, the wealthiest tournament in the Sinquefeld cup) teaming up to destroy his career.
Hans admitted to cheating. It's no wonder his career suffered. Incidentally, he is also a complete asshole.
Sindorov, who won the candidates, and will be playing for the world championship, has also had accounts banned on chess.com for (presumably) cheating as a teenager. Do you think it would be ok if a large part of the chess world conspired to keep him out of tournaments. Do you think it would be ok if the world made jokes that he cheated using a sex toy? Do you think it would be ok for the largest youtube chess channel (GothamChess) to publish a video titled "Chess cheating device" featuring a thumbnail showing his face next to a butt plug? And all this while he was 19?
What happened to Hans is FAR worse than anything Kramnik did. But maybe you think it's ok because you find him to be an asshole?
Daniel Naroditsky is dead
Maybe they are both assholes
The only cheating Hans admitted to and the only cheating proven were two (maybe 3?) online non monetary games when he was under 15 years old.
Pretty much every player has done something like that.
But again, he was blacklisted before any of even these marginal allegations were proven. And the actual allegations Magnus accused him of and that followed him for years has absolutely no evidence other than Magnus not accepting that Hans could beat him in a highly controlled over the table game.
Also, he continued to be punished in ways that are outside the actual punishment that was given to him that are not official but are being done through winks and nods between Carlsen and Hikaru and tournament organizers who don’t want to upset them.
This isn't true. He said "And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money." That implies, to me, that when he was 12 he did in fact cheat for prize money.
And then he admitted that he cheated as a 16 year old in "random games" to boost his online rating. I can't find any instance of him providing a number of how many games he admits to cheating in, but the chess.com report alleged over 100, including when he was 17.
For those of us who have no idea who this guy is and what he said, what did he do? Did he say something unapproved?
Do you mean Kramnik or Hans Niemann?
Kramnik ((ab)using his status as a former world champion) accused several other top level players to the point that one of them committed suicide.
Niemann allegedly cheated (In my personal opinion as a decently rated but certainly not elite chess player, he probably did cheat in this particular game, though proof was never given and probably never will) at a high level chess tournament and was ostracized by the chess community for a while. He has since rejoined and continues to play at a high level.
Hans Niemann most likely did not cheat in the famous game where he won against Magnus Carlsen in the Sinquefield cup. Or at least, there is no credible evidence for cheating, and Carlsen actually did not formally accuse him of cheating either.
Hans Niemann cheated in online matches when he was younger though
> Kramnik ((ab)using his status as a former world champion) accused several other top level players to the point that one of them committed suicide.
There is no evidence of suicide, and he had multiple drugs in his system when he died.
> he probably did cheat in this particular game
This is a fringe opinion at this point in time, even though it was obvious he did not cheat on day 1.
> There is no evidence of suicide, and he had multiple drugs in his system when he died.
Polyintoxication is nasty because after the fact, you can't tell if someone underestimated the effects of the drugs or knew about them and used it to guarantee death.
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> he probably did cheat in this particular game
I have no idea why this continues to be a popular opinion among laypeople. Even at the time actual cheating experts using computer analysis determined it to be likely fair play. His accuracy was rather pedestrian, Magnus just had on off day and played terribly. There is no proposed mechanism for how he could even HAVE cheated. He has continued to perform at a similar level under much tighter security enforcement. The primary accusation seems to be that he's poor at explaining the reasoning behind his moves, but anyone who's ever watched a Hans stream can tell you that the man simply cannot speak.
Interesting. Maybe I am not getting something: it sounds like his cheating accusations cover some kind of an online chess tournament. Why does this even matter? Why would people care that much? Shouldn't they be focused on face-to-face world championships, etc...?
Online chess is taken seriously as an e-sport, especially at the top levels, and is played for cash prizes. Imagine if the best cs:go or competitive programmers were found to be cheating. They would be ostracized.
Hans did plenty to damage his own career - eg, his 2024 ban for trashing a hotel room.
This is true, but the crushing response to this scandal is clearly disproportionate. Millions of views on videos making crude sexual jokes about a 19 year old is already an incredibly unfortunate situation, and his career got completely halted for years due to (what are now clearly) false accusations.
It should also be said Niemann has also had incredibly good results since the whole thing
So it casts doubt on what Magnus said somewhat
(Of course, on Rogan, I think, Magnus defended the allegations. And of course he's world's strongest player for a reason. Other young players have beaten himm before such as Esipenko and he never said anything like that)
I didn't watch it myself, but there was a recent Netflix documentary on the subject where Magnus claims he was misled by chess.com into believing that they had more concrete evidence than they did.
Kramnik undeniably pushed Naroditsky into developing an addiction which ultimately contributed to his death. Whether it was intentional suicide or accidental overdose(both are possible) seems to me to be completely irrelevant.
Kramnik engaged in a dedicated bullying and a smear campaign against Danya for a prolonged period, without substantive evidence, and never let up. When Danya explicitly stated in multiple interviews that Kramnik was seriously affecting his mental health, Kramnik persisted in his harassment. When Danya's mental health ultimately led to his death, Kramnik tried to put the blame on everyone but himself, including Danya, his friends and family, even the entire chess community. According to Kramnik, it seems like he is the only one who's completely blameless. It's good that he's being punished, but I think the punishment is too mild. In my opinion he should be stripped of all his titles, including his world titles.
The sad fact is that Kramnik is a pathetic narcissist, who because he's a shadow of his former strength, and a slow old man, gets easily beaten in online blitz, and then accuses people of cheating to protect his wounded ego, because he wants to pretend he hasn't declined.
Stripping him of his titles doesn't do much good to be honest. In the history books he will still simply be someone who won and became world champion, whether stripped of the title or not. What would do us good, is to realize, that even someone in that position is not necessarily a saint or even a good person. To realize that supposed contrast and keep it in mind would be better for us than stripping him of titles, that he did in fact truly earn. Also it would only give him more ammunition.
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What an asinine comment.
I had an emotionally abusive partner. But they didn’t force me to become depressed and anxious. They didn’t force me to have to medicate. So yeah it really was just completely my fault.
/s
For anyone new, Kramnik has been accusing players left and right of cheating without any proof. His accusations have done huge harm to the chess community as a whole. Daniel Naroditsky was harrassed so much, that he eventually went into depression and committed suicide. And he had proven ability as one of the best chess players out there, and probably the best chess teacher on YouTube. These are facts.
Now onto my probably crazy conspiracy theory: Russian players like Danil, Nepo and Kramnik have accused American and Indian players baselessly of cheating multiple times over the past few years. They have went to podcasts and implied that their opponents have cheated. Idk if it's some lost national pride in chess or something but accusing others does more harm than good. We've seen how it hurt Hans when he was accused by Magnus of cheating without any evidence. Multiple top level tournaments stopped calling him due to magnus throwing a tantrum cuz he lost.
Any normal human should have stopped and thought about their actions after Daniels passing.. Daniel will be missed and Kramnik hopefully forgotten.
> Daniel Naroditsky was harrassed so much, that he eventually went into depression and committed suicide.
Not according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Naroditsky ? (Still a tragedy, though; any death is.)
You are correct, there is no strong indication of active suicide.
However, it certainly put him into a state of mind of neglect, not caring anymore and not taking care of himself and most importantly, no way out. The words "I cannot play chess anymore without doubt of being accused of cheating, no matter what I do" are haunting to me. At that point he had multiple cameras targeting all screens he had and everything he could see, and it wasn't enough to Kramnik.
At such a point, it feels like arguing semantics.
If you want to be detailed about it, https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1qjafcd/medical_exam... talks about the whole report; that sarcoidosis was the actual cause is speculative, and the "substance use as a contributing factor" part is widely believed to be in part due to the extreme stress he was under... but it is hard to say anything about causality definitively.
What about the famous case of Carlsen claiming that his opponent cheated and even forfeiting to draw attention to it?
This is a big part of the problem... Kramnik had been bullying people for years about cheating, including aggressively bullying Daniel Naroditsky, and for the most part the chess community did nothing about it. It would be very hard for people to condemn Kramnik for his cheating accusations all the while chess' top star Carlsen was on a bullying spree of his own against Niemann.
> It would be very hard for people to condemn Kramnik for his cheating accusations all the while chess' top star Carlsen was on a bullying spree of his own against Niemann.
Doesn’t seem that hard from seeing all the comments here. I make an effort to keep away from chess forums online because of this stuff; most of these people are literally children, like under 14, but you can’t tell online lol.
Are we talking about online chess cheating? Aren't players eventually need to show up and play in-person?
Is there a summary of what he actually did? Since I didn’t follow the initial news item I feel like we are seeing the result before understanding the problem.
> In addition, the Chamber imposed 12 months of unpaid service for the benefit of the chess community as a supplementary sanction.
I wonder how this is enforced.
I would imagine by withholding some privilege until the service has been fulfilled
Cold comfort I would say. We can only wonder if things would be different if this had happened a year earlier.
I find it funny that "échec" also has the meaning of "failure" in French, so FIDE could be read as the "International Failure Federation"...
That’s a lot of words to say very little. What is this about?
Kramnik has a habit of accusing people of cheating without evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Kramnik#Anti-cheating..., he has also done this to many many individuals without evidence (and cheating is taken very seriously), this is in connection to that - he's being penalized for accusing people (repeatedly) without evidence.
Just to be clear – this is an event where he has been doing so repeatedly, accusing people of cheating without evidence in-and-of itself isn't forbidden - since cheating in chess is difficult to verify, it's the manner and fashion to which Kramnik has done this that has led to his suspension
Thank you for the link. Chess is very much also a psychological game and that he resorts to such low blows is really petty.
He basically pushed a player going through a crisis to suicide with his baseless accusations. Proceeded to make public derogatory remarks right after they passed while the family barely started grieving. This is a slap on the wrist.
Kramnik was accused of pushing Naroditsky to suicide and defended himself by saying that it was far more likely that Naroditsky died due to a drug overdose.
Toxicology reports later showed that Naroditsky did die due to the combination of an abnormal heartbeat, sarcoidosis and drugs, specifically methamphetamines and kratom.
Now if you want to speculate that he took those drugs due to the harassment that's a possibility, but claiming he died due to suicide is entirely unsubstatiated and uncalled for.
His final stream is illuminating if you can still find it. He speaks directly about Kramnik who he grew up idolizing right before his friend had to pull him away for erratic behavior. His comments during that stream strongly point to a suicide.
Kramnik never let off the accelerator.
It is called for and is substantiated. Should the guy get prosecuted over it? Probably not although a precedent is moving towards pushing and or telling someone to kill them selves constitutes some kind of criminal liability at least in the states.
Drug overdoses are so often a method of suicide it is almost laughable to use that as an argument to defend assholery. Some people are psychopaths and Kramnit screams like one. Zero empathy remorse or event the slightest drop of compassion.
Just an editorial note here, it's not clear that it was a suicide. The official diagnosis was some heart thing
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