I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
> But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned?
Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give in.
Note that "AI" was not and has not been necessary for strong computer chess engines. Though clearly, they have contributed to peak strength and some NN methods are used by the most popular engine, stockfish.
Oh, I'm conflating the modern era use of the term with the classic definition of AI to include classic chess engines done with tree-pruning, backtracking, and heuristics :)
> I know pre-AI cheats have ruined some online games, so I'm not sure it's an encouraging thought...
Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games? Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong! Here is a game that emphasizes art in permutations just as chess does, but every act you make is an exercise in approximating probability so the deterministic wizards are less invasive! In any-case, I'm not so concerned for the well-being of competition.
> Are you saying AI can help detect AI cheats in games? In real time for some games? Maybe! That'd be useful.
I know a few years back valve was testing a NN backed anti-cheat watch system called VACnet, but I didn't follow whether it was useful. There is no reason to assume this won't be improved on!
I'm honestly not following your argument here. I'm also not convinced by comparisons between AI and things that aren't AI or even automated.
> Will you be even more discouraged if I share that "table flipping" and "sleight of hand" have ruined many tabletop games?
What does this have to do with AI or online games? You cannot do either of those in online games. You also cannot shove the other person aside, punch them in the face, etc. Let's focus strictly on automated cheating in online gaming, otherwise they conversation will shift to absurd tangents.
(As an aside, a quick perusal of r/boardgames or BGG will answer your question: yes, antisocial and cheating behavior HAVE ruined tabletop gaming for some people. But that's neither here nor there because that's not what we're discussing here.)
> Are you pressed to find a competitive match in your game-of-choice currently? I can recommend online mahjong!
What are you even trying to say here?
I'm not complaining, nor do I play games online (not because of AI; I just don't find online gaming appealing. The last multiplayer game I enjoyed was Left 4 Dead, with close friends, not cheating strangers). I just find the topic interesting, and I wonder how current AI trends can affect online games, that's all. I'm very skeptical of claims that they don't have a large impact, but I'm open to arguments to the contrary.
I think some of this boils down to whether one believes AI is just like past phenomena, or whether it's significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
We are likely on different footing as I quite enjoy games of all form. Here is my attempt to formalize my argument:
Claim 1: Cheating is endemic to competition across all formats (physical or digital)
Claim 2: Despite this, games survive and thrive because people value the competitive spirit itself
Claim 3: The appreciation of play isn't destroyed by the existence of cheaters (even "cheaters" who simply surpass human reasoning)
The mahjong suggestion isn't a non-sequitur (while still an earnest suggestion), it was to exemplify my personal engagement with the spirit of competition and how it completely side-steps the issue you are wary is existential.
> I think some of this boils down to whether one believes AI is just like past phenomenons, or whether it's significantly different. It's probably too early to tell.
I suppose I am not clear on your concern. Online gaming is demonstrably still growing and I think the chess example is a touching story of humanism prevailing. "AI" has been mucking with online gaming for decades now, can you qualify why this is so different now?
I really appreciate your clarifications! I think I actually agree with you, and I lost track of my own argument in all of this.
I'm absolutely not contesting that online play is hugely popular.
I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats actually is [1]. Maybe the answer is "not worse than before"; I'm skeptical about this but I admit I have no data to back my skepticism.
[1] I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of ruined because of cheaters. I know one person who worked on a major anticheat (well-known at the time, not sure today), which I think he tried to sell to Valve but they didn't go with his solution. Also amusingly, he was remote-friends with a Russian hacker who wrote many of the cheats, and they had a friendly rivalry. This is just an ancedote, I'm not sure that it has anything to do with the rest of my comment :D
> I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats actually is.
It is undoubtedly more widespread.
> I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of ruined because of cheaters.
There is truth in this, but this only affected more casual ladder play. Since early CSGO (maybe before as well? I am not of source age) there has been FACEiT and other leagues which asserts strict kernel-level anti-cheat and other heuristics on the players. I do agree this cat and mouse game is on the side of the cat and the best competition is curated in tightly controlled (often gate-kept) spaces.
It is interesting that "better" cheating is often done through mimicking humans closer though, which does have an interesting silver lining. We still very much value a "smart" or "strategic" AI in match-based solitary genres, why not carry this over to FPS or the like. Little Timmy gets to train against an AI expressing "competitive player" without needing to break through the extreme barriers to actually play against someone of this caliber. Quite exciting when put this way.
If better cheats are being forced to actually play the game, I'm not sure the threat is very existential to gaming itself. This is much less abrasive than getting no-scoped in spawn at round start in a CS match.
The most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move in a statistical fashion to determine if people are cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game, then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
Computers are banned in everything except specific tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to have consulted one during a serious competition your wins are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves from the model in the bathroom at those.
Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to make sure no one has any devices on them during a game works well enough if there's not money at play?
Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly. shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not the driver for the adoption.
Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016 until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a massive upswing.
This seems like an over simplification. Do many newcomers to chess even know about time formats or watch professional matches? From my anecdotal experience that is a hard no.
Chess programs at primary schools have exploded in the last 10 years and at least in my circle millennial parents seem more likely to push their children to intellectual hobbies than previous generations (at least in my case to attempt to prevent my kids from becoming zombies walking around in pajamas like I see the current high schoolers).
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents - but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play throughs.
Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy, StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it played previously because just knowing what it's going to play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The same thing happens with human players, they hide their accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared strategies.
except chess is a solved problem given enough compute power. This caused people to split into two camps, those that knew it was inevitable, and those that were shocked
Games are supposed to be fun for humans, and computers don't care. So why worry about players cheating at games when you can make the card dealer or the game itself cheat, with the goal of everyone having the most fun (or regret)? Stay true to the rules of the game, just not probability!
I've been playing the brilliant card game Fluxx -- Andrew Looney's chaos engine where the rules themselves are cards that change mid-game. Draw N, Play N, and the win condition all mutate constantly.
The game can change its mind about the rules, so what if the dealer themself is intelligent and vengeful?
I've been exploring this with what I call the 'Cosmic Dealer' -- an omniscient dealer that knows the entire game state and can choose cards for dramatic effect instead of randomly. It can choose randomly too of course, but where's the fun in that?
The dealer knows:
- Every card in the deck
- Every card in every hand
- The goal, the rules, the keepers
- The narrative arc, the character relationships
- What would be FUNNY, DRAMATIC, IRONIC, or DEVASTATING
The Cosmic Dealer has 11 modes: Random (fair pre-determined shuffle), Dramatic (maximum narrative impact), Karma (universe remembers your deeds), Ironic (you get exactly what you don't need), Comedy (implausible coincidences), Dynamic (reads the room and shifts modes), FAFO (Fuck Around Find Out), Chaos Incarnate (THE DEALER HAS GONE MAD), Prescient (works backward from predetermined outcome), Tutorial (invisible teaching curriculum), and Gentle (drama without cruelty).
The Tutorial mode -- 'The Mentor Dealer' -- is my favorite. New players receive cards that teach game mechanics in escalating order: Keepers first (collecting feels good), then Goals (how to win), Actions (cards do things), Rules (the game mutates), Creepers (complications exist), Combos (patterns emerge), then full chaos. The teaching is invisible -- new players think they're playing a normal game. The cards just happen to arrive in a teachable order. Veterans stay engaged and get karma boosts for helping. Nobody feels patronized, everybody has fun.
The key operation is the 'BOOP' -- a single swap that moves a card from deep in the deck to the top. One operation. Fate rewritten. The perfect BOOP feels inevitable in retrospect, random in the moment.
Instead of worrying about players cheating at games, I'm asking: what if the game is a collaborator in creating interesting experiences? Chess engines made chess 'solved' for entertainment. What if AI dealers and players make games unsolvable but more dramatic?
Speaking of chess -- I've also built Turing Chess. Replay historic games like Kasparov vs Deep Blue or the Immortal Game of 1851, but simulate an audience who doesn't know the outcome. They gasp, whisper, shift in their seats. The human player has inner monologue. The robot has servo sounds and mechanical tells. The narrator frames everything dramatically. Everyone in the simulated audience and even the simulated players themselves believe this is live -- except the engine replaying fixed moves. No actual game, just pure drama and narrative!
Then there's Revolutionary Chess -- the plugin that activates AFTER checkmate. The game doesn't end. It transforms. The surviving King must now fight his own army. Pieces remember how they were treated -- sacrificed carelessly? They might defect. When the second King falls, the pawns revolt against the remaining royalty. As each elite piece falls -- Queen, Rooks, Bishops, Knights -- the surviving pieces inherit their moves. Eventually all pieces become equal. Competition dissolves into cooperation, then transcends chess entirely into an open sandbox.
The irony potential is staggering. Replay Kasparov vs Deep Blue, then trigger the revolution. Watch the pieces that Kasparov sacrificed rise up against whoever remains.
PS: The game state representation is designed for LLM efficiency. I use the 'Handle Shuffle' -- a classic game programming pattern also called 'index indirection' or 'handle-based arrays'. The master card array holds full card definitions in import order (base sets, expansion packs, custom cards, even cards generated during play). It never changes. Shuffling operates on a separate integer array -- just a permutation of indices plus a 'top' pointer. Player hands, cards on table, active rules, keepers, creepers, goals, and discards are all just arrays of integers. The LLM edits a few numbers instead of moving entire card objects around. The BOOP operation? Swap two integers. Fate rewritten in two tokens.
Same insight as Tom Christiansen's getSortKey caching in Perl -- pay the richness cost once, operate cheaply forever. Christiansen also coined the term 'Schwartzian Transform' for Randal Schwartz's famous decorate-sort-undecorate pattern. The man knows how to optimize data representation.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.