Follow-up on Korean Chess Player AI Cheating: The Crime Is Serious and the Sentence Is One Year

A South Korean Go player was reported for using an artificial intelligence program to cheat in a dan ranking competition this year. The Seoul District Court recently sentenced the cheater to one year in prison.

According to the Korean Go website Cyberoro, at a Go qualifying tournament in South Korea at the beginning of the year, a player was revealed to have used artificial intelligence to cheat in the game.

On July 15, the Seoul District Court issued a verdict on the cheating incident, sentencing the player to one year in prison.This is the first legal case in the history of Go involving cheating using artificial intelligence.

Cheating three-piece set: camera, headphones, AI

Let’s go back to a Go ranking competition 6 months ago.

In mid-January, the Korea Chess Association held the 145th General Dan Championship.In the preliminary stage, 39 players were selected from 159 Go players to form the top 64 together with 25 seeded players.

January 14,In the second round of the finals, these 64 players will have to go through several rounds of elimination matches, and finally five will be selected to be rated as new first dan.

During the second round of the finals, a 22-year-old chess player named Jin (real name not disclosed) was found to have abnormal behavior by his opponent during the game. After being reported, the referee Zhao Juanyou (transliteration) pointed out that Jin had cheated.

Zhao Juanyou said: "After the staff examined him,Electronic items such as miniature cameras, wireless headphones, spare batteries, etc. were found on his ears and coat buttons.”

The chess player Jin confessed to his cheating during the investigation.

According to his statement, he received help from outsiders through online chats. They never met, and the chats were conducted using Telegram, which can permanently delete chat records without leaving any traces.

The cheating process is as follows: the miniature camera on the button of Jin's coat records the chess game situation and transmits it to the assistant outside the field.

The assistants watched the real-time chess games secretly filmed in an Internet cafe near the competition site.With the help of the Go AI tool Leela Zero to analyze the game and give advice, Kim received answers through wireless headphones.Therefore, in order to hide the earphones, Jin put a bandage on his ear and pretended that his ear was injured. 

According to Jin's confession, he received more than 30 tips in this round of competition. Because he found out in time, he has not won the game yet.

One year in prison for obstructing public service

After the cheating was exposed, Kim was immediately disqualified from the competition and banned from participating in all Go competitions administered by the Korea Go Association.

The tournament was also interrupted on January 15. The Korea Chess Association said that this incident was of great importance and that it might entrust the police to investigate as needed. The tournament did not resume until the morning of the 16th.

In subsequent competitions, the Korean Chess Institute also upgraded its security measures.The players were body searched using metal detectors.

Then,The Korea Chess Association filed a criminal lawsuit against Kim for obstructing official duties.

This was the first case in the history of Go where AI was used to cheat. The trial took a long time, lasting a full six months.

On July 15, the Seoul Eastern District Court issued a ruling on the matter:Jin was sentenced to one year in prison. His accomplice was sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for two years, and sentenced to 120 hours of community service.

The verdict stated that Jin had conspired with others to commit the crime in advance with the purpose of becoming a professional chess player.The modus operandi was planned and intelligent, which undermined the fairness of the Korean Dan Ranking Conference and affected the normal progress of the competition. The nature of the crime was extremely serious.

Although the player defended himself by saying that he only used AI cheating in the knockout round of 64 and did not use related means in the preliminary round, he was not forgiven for this.

Judge Park Jeong-gil said: "The player used artificial intelligence to cheat, which damaged the fairness of the game and disrupted the normal progress of the game. His behavior is extremely shameful."

Technology is not born for cheating

The tools used by Jin to cheat Leela Zero,is a free, open-source computer Go program developed by Belgian programmer Gian-Carlo Pascutto.

Leela Zero's algorithm is based on DeepMind's 2017 paper on AlphaGo Zero. Like AlphaGo Zero,It uses Monte Carlo tree search and deep residual neural network algorithms, and is a Go AI trained without relying on any human chess records.

Anyone with a computer with sufficient configuration can use Leela Zero as a free sparring partner, so it is currently very popular among ordinary chess fans.

But originally, people developed such programs to help people improve their own level. If they are used as cheating tools, it will undoubtedly go against the original intention of the developers.

We have previously beenTeaching AI to play cards and games is not just about defeating humansIn this article, the original intention of humans to develop AI game programs is discussed.

On the one hand, games are a perfect testing ground for artificial intelligence algorithms. Algorithms verified through games will be transferred to real-world applications. On the other hand, game AI can help humans improve their skills and help humans gain more ideas and inspiration.

In these studies,What developers care most about is not who wins or loses, but the advancement of technology.

Therefore, if humans ultimately use technology to cheat just to pursue winning or losing, then the original meaning of technology will be lost.

References:

https://www.cyberoro.com/news/news_view.oro?num=526824&div_no=11

http://news.jtbc.joins.com/article/article.aspx?news_id=NB11930062

https://m.cyberoro.com/news/news_view.oro?num=526354&div_no=11

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