> Anand, a former world champion, became a GM at age 19

At the age of 18: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand#Early_chess_...

Also, according 2700chess.com he was #96 in the world with a rating of 2520 on January 1988. That's right after turning 18. Growing up in India (before the chess boom). Before chess engines existed. 6 months later he was #49 in the world. https://2700chess.com/players/anand

A year earlier (at 17), he had won the world junior chess championship (U-20). Not exactly a "strange meteoric rise" for Anand. The "GM at 18".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Junior_Chess_Championshi...

Meanwhile, at the same age of 18 (already during his covid boost), on July of 2021, Hans Niemann was #20 among all juniors (U-20), with a rating of 2571. Close to #300 on the global rating list: https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596/top https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2000059

Unlike Anand, no achievements of note until then (ok, he was 9th at U-16 World Youth Chess Championships in 2019). A year later he's a top 40 player, hanging out with the best and beating the (incredibly dominating) world champion with the black pieces. Make it make sense.

Also, take a look at this analysis of correlation between average (and stddev) of move accuracy vs rating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnnJ0Da4Rp0 - explained in the detail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nEFaRdwZY - analysis applied to several players

Thanks for the pointer to Milky Chess YT videos. The first one at 13.41 minutes has a clincher argument regarding a flat Centipawn loss at 2300 ELO and 2600 ELO. Don't think, another argument is needed.

This is all pointless comparisons though. Hans made his improvements during Covid times and The Queen's Gambit boom in online chess. Even if it's an extraordinary thing to happen we were in extraordinary times.

> Hans made his improvements during Covid times

None of the similarly rated players at the same age did anything similar during "Covid times and The Queens' Gambit boom".

Watch the videos I linked at the end of my comment and tell me how covid times contribute to that anomaly.

Unless they make a concrete accusation of cheating I'm not really interested. These circumstantial accusations all boil down to "something unusual happened" but the world is full of unusual things happening. Nobody, AFAICT, has come out and said "Hans cheated in X OTB event. He did so by getting Y information by Z method".

IMHO everyone needs to either put up hard evidence or shut up.

> Make it make sense.

Hans Niemann didn't win the game. The incredibly dominating world champion lost it. He bodged the game and then threw a tantrum calling the other, weaker, player a cheater to save face because he couldn't stomach his own incompetence.

The rest is what is called "circumstantial evidence" in the lay press.

Yea generally I wouldn't characterise the report as being a glimmering indication of the scientific quality of the chess.com cheat detection team.

Even the graphs look a lot like copy-paste jobs from excel, which is fine obviously, but not the sort of thing I'd expect competent scientists/data-scientists/developers to be doing, especially for a big public report where some of the formatting issues are just about readability and basic presentation quality. Like Figures F and G (page 14) ... why are they styled so differently? Same question applies to many of the graphs, which isn't to mention label font sizes either.

Beyond that, yea I'd say good amounts of the data and logic are pretty basic and wouldn't be surprising from an amateur on the internet. The main thing chess.com have seems to be their Strength Score algorithm, which IMO is probably developed and maintained by a team different from the one that prepared this report.

Good design skills have zero correlation with good data analysis skills.

Honestly wonder how much of a HN crowd viewpoint that is. I'm not sure there's too much "correlation" between the two. Instead I'd say that if your job involves communication and data, then that necessitates decent visualisations and whatever "design skills" that entails.

Honestly, you don't need "design skills" to make a decent graph ... just the wherewithal to think about what would make a graph clearer/easier to understand the same we expect of ourselves with writing.

That wherewithal is the design skill. Some people have it, some don't. Some are good with data too, some not.

Ok ... then aren't we stretching the term "design skill" too thinly then, to the point of disrespecting the actual skillset?

I suspect there'd be a tendency to presume a design process is more like solving a problem with a clear techniques for arriving at an objectively correct solution, when in reality, it can and often if just the iterative process of assessing-adjusting-repeat. Being better at these things to the point of sometimes reducing the iterative loop to 0 repeats is "design skill". But the essential base-line ingredient, IMO, is being willing to enter the iterative cycle at least to some extent.

I might even go so far as to say it’s negative correlation.

I’ve seen wonderful and factual data analysis presented in the most horrible default templates and hacked together screenshots.

IMHO unless line three of the table on page 5 is a typo it conclusively proves that their analysis is bunk. In every other line they think he cheated 100% of the games. But for line three it's only 12 out of 32. Of the 11 events in that table he had his 2nd highest rating in that event.

That obviously shouldn't be possible. If he only cheated in 1/3 of the games in the event then his performance should have been much worse than events where he cheated 100% of the time.

And I don't understand how they can say this:

>However, while Hans has had a record-setting and remarkable rise in rating and strength, in our view there is a lack of concrete statistical evidence that he cheated in his game with Magnus or in any other over-the-board (“OTB”)—i.e., in-person—games.

So what the hell? They pored over his OTB games, found no evidence of cheating, but then wrote 70 more pages? And even the circumstantial evidence is weak. They base a lot on Hans having unusually late improvements. But it's not like they're an order of magnitude better. He's slightly better than #2. And it's a simple fact that someone is going to have a late career rise that is better than anyone else. It's not evidence of cheating.

IMHO, Magnus or Chess.com need to pony up some hard evidence or STFU.

Don't forget Sam Shankland! He became a GM at the age of 20 and is now one of the top players in the world (Super GM status)

Levon Aronian (former No. 2, current No. 10, achieved the 4th highest Elo rating of all time) only became a grandmaster at age 17.