1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?
2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.
Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.
Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.
The tech is there, but the risk is insanely high, and it isn't easy.
It is extremely easy to cheat online. You just open an engine on your computer.
For OTB, you'd have to be really sophisticated, and most likely have a partner assist you. And you still have to be really, really good at chess - Hans, even if he's cheating, is still a 2600 rated player.
It is several orders of magnitude harder, so way less opportunity, and the risk is much, much higher. Hans would have to have nerves of steel, for sure, to pull it off. Not saying it is impossible.
The cheating technique could be ingenious in itself. I remember what students were coming up in high-school, back in the day, without modern technology.
Now I'm imagining a Slugworth scenario where someone developed a cheating tool and offered it to Carlsen and he refused it, but suspects that Slugworth also offered it to Hans ...
Why do local compute when you can have a massive Kubernetes cluster in AWS running stockfish and every other engine in the world through an API call on a tiny ESP32 with ESP-NOW protocol to a nearby friend/spy? I/O is a few bytes and ESP32 has a ad-hoc network range of 50 feet or so. I joke about the Kubernetes part :-)
1. How would Niemann have cheated? The shoe computer theory is a bit far fetched - are devices that small capable enough? Is he suspected of having an accomplice?
2. Why didn't Magnus just say something right away? He could have easily made his accusations at the moment to event organizers - quietly - and they could have had Niemann remove his shoes or something. Instead he threw a tantrum. Obviously this isn't just about Hans.
Personally, I think Niemann is just a 19yo kid who has made mistakes and Carlsen is a 31yo professional who is absolutely hammering this kid to make a larger point. He may be frustrated, but taking it out on Hans is a bit much. The imbalance of power here is just off the charts.
Even if Hans somehow cheated in that OTB game - of which there isn't a shred of real evidence - Magnus is the leader of the chess world and needs to accept that responsibility and react in a mature way. He should have taken the high road, simply said "I don't know what happened, but it was highly unusual. Let's guarantee that this doesn't happen in the future," and directed his frustrations totally at the event organizers rather than encouraging the entire world to attack this one kid.