e.g. is the bit of information "move the knight" aka theres only about 4 bits of info, or is it "move the knight to E6" which is a good deal more bits, that could be lossy/error prone.
just on the surface of it, i dont see how this thing could give enough info but i suppose with a loooot of training you could improve the info transfer rate?
"I would just needed to cheat one or two times during a match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better, or here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible."
Even just 1 bit - an indication to be careful - would be enough to boost the strength of a GM. An accomplice coughing in the background to let you know there's something to watch for. For a strong player - and there's no doubt that Niemann is a strong player, the question is just how strong - that's all they need to avoid making mistakes. GMs can solve insanely hard puzzles, because they know it's a puzzle and has a specific solution. Same thing with 1 bit of info.
Of course, realistically they could simply use Morse code instead of "bits" and transmit two squares (just 4 Morse "letters").
i dont have a horse in this race i just like thinking about things in terms of information theory since this is a remarkable applied case
another way to decide this - have them play blitz (where the moves are way too fast for info transmission to happen), and see if the skill level scales accordingly?
Not a fair contest. There are plenty of top classical chess players who are weaker in blitz and vice versa. It’s a different skillset. Classical is all about preparation for the opening followed by some deep thinking in the midgame. Blitz is all about pattern recognition and the ability to simplify down to an ending where you can blitz out the exact solution from a database.
magnus completely destroyed hans in two games, as black. I think the ease with which magnus took hans apart in these beach games, presumably added to his suspicion when hans played so much better in the Sinquefield cup.
Blunders are exactly what a device like the one described would seriously help with. If the buzz means both "there is an only move here and it's not immediately obvious" and "at least one of the natural moves here is a blunder or very inaccurate" then you need to just send a buzz and you've probably cut inaccuracies significantly. That said, a very simple communication device like this is probably badly hurt by a 15 minute delay.
Perhaps a top-level player can jump to a higher level if they can stop worrying about coming up with brilliances in the macro strategy, and instead focus entirely on making their micro-level play spotless.
What does that even mean?
ELO gives you a statistical evaluation of how likely victory is for one of the player. Hans rating means he has non insignificant chance of winning against Magnus.
Hans can win without cheating as this last game proves. There is not a shred of evidence against him after all.
It's not going to make the game more fun, but it's probably necessary.
As these players are on timers there is a race against a clock. So if you know where to focus your time/effort you can easily gain an advantage.
Now imagine what people like the Super GMs are capable of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC1BAcOzHyY
They put a number of mid-game positions on the board, and Magnus was able to guess the players, tournament, game number, who won, what the next few moves were. Who was playing on the table next to him. What their moves were.
They remember all the variations they consider, and they've considered most of the variations their opponents have calculated, so the variations aren't new branches, they're just pointers to spots in the game tree both players have in their heads.
