"Cheating" in Sports

Games like chess can and have been played online. Not just friends playing with each other, even tournaments have been conducted that way. That creates a problem, writes Joe Posnanski:

“Because computers are so much better than people at chess now, there’s a big, big problem with cheating. People playing online will often use a chess engine to defeat people and build up their ratings.”

This has set off a cat and mouse game:

“Chess.com has instituted ultra-sophisticated methods of tracking down cheaters and then closing their accounts.”

 

Some time back, the rising star, Hans Niemann, defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. An upset, no doubt. But Niemann didn’t get a single point in the rest of the tournament. So this guy can beat the world champion but not even a scrape a draw in his other matches? Then it happened again… soon after, Niemann beat Carlsen again. Carlsen was convinced Niemann was cheating – he didn’t say it officially – but he tweeted something that indicated it, and withdrew from the tournament.

 

Even though there was no proof Niemann had cheated, the backlash followed – Chess.com deactivated his account, and he was searched extensively during his next match (“more extensively than gangsters search each other in the movies”).

 

Here’s the weird thing though: he’d defeated Carlsen in a face-to-face match, not online. There wasn’t any proof he’d cheated. And yet…

 

Posnanski wonders if this tendency to assume the worst in sports is getting out of control. The sprinter, Devon Allen, was disqualified from the 110 meters hurdles at the World Athletics Championships for a false start. How did they conclude he had jumped the gun?

“World Athletics has determined that it is not possible for someone to push off the block within a tenth of a second of the gun without false starting. They have science that shows it is beyond human capabilities to react that fast.”

Posnanski tears into that:

“That’s nonsense, that’s pseudoscience, there’s no way that they can limit human capabilities like that.”

Wait, it gets even weirder:

“Besides, do you know what Devon Allen’s reaction time was? It was 0.09 seconds. One hundredth of a second too fast, according to World Athletics’ science. They’re THAT sure that .01 seconds — and EXACTLY .01 seconds — is the limit of human possibilities that they will disqualify an athlete who has trained his whole life for this moment because he reacted one thousandth of a second faster than they think possible?”

 

In technology we trust. Far too much, says Posnanski.