> I'm just trying to figure out how you even cheat on chess,
You use a chess engine to tell you the best move - you can run a chess engine on a modern phone that will easily best the world's top human chess players.
The simplest forms of this are things like: "play online, chess engine open in another window", "use your phone hiding in a bathroom cubicle" and "member of the audience follows your game with a chess engine and signals you somehow"
There are also rumoured to be very subtle ways of doing this - like playing unassisted for most of the game, but an engine providing 'flashes of genius' at one or two crucial moves of the game.
Major competitions have things like metal detectors and time-delay video feeds hoping to make cheating harder.
Since even a phone has enough processing power to make Stockfish play better than a super-GM, the Faraday cage isn't enough to prevent, say, someone tapping the position into a computer on their person and feeling for some sort of vibration[1] in response. It takes very little information to represent a position, and commentators have pointed out that the minimum amount of information required to produce a decisive advantage is 1 bit ("A winning move exists").
This makes me want to cheat just as a technical challenge. Could I hide a computer in my hair? Could I ingest a capsule computer and communicate with it using the resonance of my teeth chattering? (No, I would not insert one in an inappropriate place).
I'm sure it would be a downer that I cheated but it would do them a favor by saying: "look, you cannot stop it. Time for something new".
There is a Java script plugin for lichess that verbally tells you the best move in each position. I installed it (only for eval) and won my game (so unfair! But it was a random and not rated game). I removed the script. So it would be easy to use this or something like this to announce game changing situations.
You use a chess engine to tell you the best move - you can run a chess engine on a modern phone that will easily best the world's top human chess players.
The simplest forms of this are things like: "play online, chess engine open in another window", "use your phone hiding in a bathroom cubicle" and "member of the audience follows your game with a chess engine and signals you somehow"
There are also rumoured to be very subtle ways of doing this - like playing unassisted for most of the game, but an engine providing 'flashes of genius' at one or two crucial moves of the game.
Major competitions have things like metal detectors and time-delay video feeds hoping to make cheating harder.