Just a thought experiment: what if it turns out that, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to prevent cheating in chess?
I mean the sport of Tour de France cycling disappeared for a decade, replaced by an identical-looking-but-fundamentally-different sport of competing to see who can cheat (dope) the best. It was probably not even possible to get into the TdF during that time period, without doping, there were so many people doing it.
It is entirely possible, that chess (as a professional competition) is not going to survive this, because it will turn out that with modern computing and communications technology, it is not possible to prevent cheating. Whoever wins the competition, will be the one who cheated the best. Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.
> Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.
Which sort of prompts the question: Why isn't there a "World Chess Cheating Championship"?
The competitors would be given the chance to either demonstrate a type of cheating, or demonstrate a counter-measure, and then judges would be able to organise rigorous tests that paired the methods off against each other.
One sort of test that would be interesting to try is to have a GM who is able to receive a one-bit signal from an accomplice once per game (the much-discussed "this is an important move, think carefully" signal), and then statisticians should try to pick that game (or some set of such games) out of a sea of non-cheating games.
Basically I think that the chess community shouldn't take any "security measures" by event organisers at face value. Without red-teaming, any such measures are just security theatre.
This is an old citation[0] but it's pretty difficult to find much on it. It doesn't look like it's very popular but I remember reading an article years ago that discussed "advanced" or "centaur" chess (human + computer teams) and their ability to beat computers alone. This is assuming that the human is already at the forefront of human performance in chess, though.
I mean the sport of Tour de France cycling disappeared for a decade, replaced by an identical-looking-but-fundamentally-different sport of competing to see who can cheat (dope) the best. It was probably not even possible to get into the TdF during that time period, without doping, there were so many people doing it.
It is entirely possible, that chess (as a professional competition) is not going to survive this, because it will turn out that with modern computing and communications technology, it is not possible to prevent cheating. Whoever wins the competition, will be the one who cheated the best. Chess will be replaced with an acting and subterfuge competition.