Cheat detection

Hi everyone,

Not sure it will help, but in case...
I was playing a correspondance game, and at one point, like move 78. I was about to mat in a few moves (Q+K vs lone K).
While waiting for my opponent I entered a previous position in the analysis, like 20 moves before (position after move 57 if I remember right) to see what the computer would say about that final. Instantly the game ended saying: cheat detected and gave the victory to my opponent.

My concern is, how is it cheating to analyse a previous position in a game still running and why the cheat detector doesn't wait the suspected cheater enters the actual position to declare cheat.

Of course I had abslolutely no intention to cheat, it's pretty obvious when analysing my games that I do not cheat. I assume cheaters enter the position in another engine or use another browser.

Hope this could help to improve the cheat detection, also now I have a game saying I cheated where I didn't.

Just don't open analysis in an ongoing game. Of course there will be exceptions where you could argue that in this particular situation in this particular game, running a computer analysis gives me no advantage and should be allowed. But it's not reasonable to expect the cheating detection software to make such judgements. It is on the other hand very easy to just refrain from running analysis until after the game.

I don't recall what specifically the rules are, but it seems warranted in this case: likely the engine announced mate and provided a variation which included your current position.

I've recommended as a new feature that Lichess disable the engine in positions where enabling it might trigger this condition. But the suggestion hasn't gained any traction nor is there any urgent need to implement it.

@edvindracula well, that's not a good solution, when you have several games for days, if you can't edit/analyse a game it's a problem. Also it never happened to me before but in this case I entered the position of an ongoing game, but as I said the position was ~20 moves before and it instantly stopped the game.

@Toadofsky I have checked and indeed after 57. ka5 (the position I entered ) the engine was giving a mate in 6 for blacks, so maybe it's the problem although I still don't really understand why. But in the game played I haven't seen this sequence and I missed a lot of others because we played for like 20 more moves. (the engine says the mate was inavoidable since move 42!)

It's still unclear to me but in any case I hope this will help the developpers at some point.

Optimal were, that while a game is in progress it is impossible to open the analysis board or start a new game. That would prevent a lot of problems.

Hi! It's crazy trying to find cheaters here, because the playing zone is cheating in its nature, so many bags, suspicion players and strange things like timing

#4 @failicious Thanks, this is the best possible input we as developers can hope for, although I'm still stumped how it occurred. Again, I've recommended as a new feature that Lichess disable the engine in positions where enabling it might trigger this condition. But the suggestion hasn't gained any traction nor is there any urgent need to implement it.

#5 My previous feedback:
lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/leavers-autoresign-timeout-warning-temporary-suspension-anything?page=4#34
lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/leavers-autoresign-timeout-warning-temporary-suspension-anything?page=5#47

It's not that I'm opposed to the idea, but that's a difficult and heavy-handed solution and it won't discourage jerks (they'll just open another browser or mobile device with a different account, or play on chess.com or something).

#6 Wut.

I don't think we should disable this tbh. You should not analyze an ongoing game with the engine under any circumstances.

@failicious do you analyze previous positions in actual tournament games? No. It's the same thing as why people aren't allowed to read books during a chess game.

However I once also fell victim to this a year ago, looking at analysis during the game but not intending to cheat. It gave me a warning and I lost the game in a completely winning position. But since then I've learnt not to as should you.

@failicious , sorry to hear, I feel bad about ruined correspondence games, but detection makes sense as they said. You just took a clear danger.