@blackzombie you are indeed correct. we will be very excited to unveil our solution when it's finished. What began as our biggest obstacle, will be one of our biggest selling points. For now though, the cash in/cash out version is still a few months out, and I can reveal more about it. But for beta testers of the soft currency product, it's really not a concern.
we wouldn't have come this far without a real solution to this issue, and we have-- good for us, good for the chess world at large.
1) Ok, that may be true. Fair point.
2) Yes, I know but you said it a 1-2 hours ago and it still hasn't been fixed. It isn't that hard to do it.
3) It really isn't possible. There might be a process that your AI learns to detect called "cheat.exe", but then a non-cheater has a process called "cheat.exe" and has something to do with a game called C.H.E.A.T. or something.
4) That doesn't address the issue.
5) Why is it not on the website?
And also, if it's a multiple peoples project, can we at least get the full list of employs? Just so you can give credit to them? You can edit the initial thread.
EDIT: Also, how long has it been in development?
@NemPlayer -- thanks for you feedback.
Kontra chess has been in development for about 6 months with about 20 people working on it as developers, designers, and the business side.
The point of my post was not to defend it to criticisms -- that will come later when the product hits the market. The point was simply to invite interested individuals to have a look and potentially join our beta team. If you're too skeptical, or reluctant, or if this doesn't appeal to you, no love lost, but my hopes is that it will reach some people who will want to be a part of this.
This has all the markings of a scam project; especially since it involves money.
You claim to have come up with this super ingenious idea for detecting cheaters and yet you have not been smart enough to represent your idea/website in a more professional way so that you wouldn't need to address all these basic issues raised here? (not to mention your words are like the typical sales pitch of a conman: oh this is going to be the best thing ever, it's going to be yuuuuge, but I cannot reveal more for security reasons)
It seems your team is not that professional which means it is highly dubious you'd be capable of making a revolution in online chess.
My guess is you want to lure in a few gullible people and then pull the old trick on them by saying they've won some money but now you need their credit card info in order to transfer the money, etc, something along these lines.
@Goodgame1 Not at all the case. All you need to find out your guess is incorrect is any email and a generic password. nothing else. I'm offering a first look of the platform to the Lichess community because this is where I play chess, and I would value the opinions of this community. If you'd like to be a part of it, great, if not, no problem.
Let me tell you from first hand experience: don't get cocky about how simple cheat detection is. A very large chunk of cases are far from black and white. I'm not going to doubt that you can probably get some decent stats out of what ever machine learning program you write - that's literally what I've been doing these past few months.
You're probably going to get to ~80-85% true positive rate with what ever shiny machine learning algorithm you write (heck, maybe even better if your solution is using voodoo magic), and you're probably going to think that your 0.5% false positive rate is nothing to worry about - it is - you're always going to have false positives, and at any form of scale it's going to break your knee-caps faster than you can say Quidditch.
But you know, that's all hypothetical because that's assuming you actually have some examples of cheating to train your model on, which you don't because no one is using your service yet. The best you have is some games that you've whipped together with SF Vs. a master games database. Anyone can draw the distinction between those two sets. And having GMs advising on this is as good as asking them to do your taxes. GMs are great at playing chess, but that doesn't mean for a second that they understand the technical (ML/statistics/programming) aspects of detecting cheating.
Bringing money into the equation is just begging, *begging*, for people to game your site. You are far from the first person/group to want to bring money/stakes/betting into the game of chess with such wide-eyed confidence. But every single last one of them has fallen flat on their face because it is impossible to determine if a player is cheating - even occasionally - with a high enough degree of accuracy and reliability for your platform to be viable.
Now this isn't my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure because of that you're going to just hemorrhage money in legal fees. The legal area of what you're aiming to do is just too much of a headache to even get started on.
It would be great if you had this issue solved, it really would, the world of chess would literally bow-down in appreciation, but thus far in my years of hands on experience it's just not going to happen.
I know at this point nothing is going to sway your confidence in chasing after this dream, so have fun while you can and get out when you realise that Clarkey guy maybe had a point. :)
Yes, but you have to do that in order for us to know that it's safe. You need to confirm it somehow. I am asking these questions to clear up anything that the users might find suspicious and to get them in to doing it. So far I can't say it's safe. I am leaning more that it's not. That's why I am asking these questions.
@Clarkey no cockiness here. But when we've presented our solution to GMs and IM's, they get it -- they get why it will work, and some are helping to build it. There is a missing element to the equation, which for now I can't reveal, but when we do unveil it, I do expect it to make some waves in the chess community. But this is off topic for now, as I am only looking for beta testers of a risk free soft-currency product. Thanks for your feedback!
@NemPlayer where do you see the risk? You give no personal information at all. You can register with an email you never use, and and make you password 123456.. What about this makes you feel unsafe exactly?
I, successfully, battled the Yugoslav and Hungarian, :-) , chess mafia for a couple of decades at end of the last century. Over the board, that is. I took them down for many tens of thousands but was basically risking life and limbs doing it.
I shiver by the thought of having to do it online. This is asking for trouble. Not to mention the government watching with their anti-gamble laws...
"Wir spielen, misko? (friendly Yugoslav insult, means donkey or something, dunno spelling).
Double or nothing!
Come on, spielen wir. Easy for you, master.
2 gegen 5 minuten! No problem.
Only 5 euro. Easy money for you."
Then the 'try-to-get-your-money-after-beating-them' troubles started...
Too many to mention.