Sure, but forcing cheaters to rate-limit their improvements to within reasonable limits would already be a huge win for the detecting side, so I'm not sure I'd call it a losing battle. It'd severely limit the utility of cheating, while at the same time forcing a long history of slow improvement which can be scrutinised.
Taken by itself, I'd tend to agree with you. In practice though, I think this can easily swing the balance in favour of the detecting side. Another angle to analyse chess games would be to see the degree to which a player's moves correlate with known chess engines. Over a long term (say, a few dozen tournaments worth of games), this type of evidence would be particularly damning; the types of chess engines which play relatively human-like, yet still are top-tier simply don't exist. Given the difficulty in creating them, and the relative rewards, I wonder if it will ever be practical to cheat.
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Sure, but forcing cheaters to rate-limit their improvements to within reasonable limits would already be a huge win for the detecting side, so I'm not sure I'd call it a losing battle. It'd severely limit the utility of cheating, while at the same time forcing a long history of slow improvement which can be scrutinised.
Taken by itself, I'd tend to agree with you. In practice though, I think this can easily swing the balance in favour of the detecting side. Another angle to analyse chess games would be to see the degree to which a player's moves correlate with known chess engines. Over a long term (say, a few dozen tournaments worth of games), this type of evidence would be particularly damning; the types of chess engines which play relatively human-like, yet still are top-tier simply don't exist. Given the difficulty in creating them, and the relative rewards, I wonder if it will ever be practical to cheat.