c4countdown

Matt Morrison wrote:This is amazing! Truly a cause for celebration! And a baseball bat to each knee.

Gavin Chipper wrote:If what is being implicitly alleged is true, then from looking a the graphs it seems quite a lot of work has gone into making it look realistic. This isn't just "improving"; this is M and S "improving". (Sorry)

(Edited to take out the "c" word)

Gavin Chipper wrote:If what is being implicitly alleged is true, then from looking a the graphs it seems quite a lot of work has gone into making it look realistic. This isn't just "improving"; this is M and S "improving". (Sorry)

(Edited to take out the "c" word)

Michael Wallace wrote:Why so much fuss over the c word? I mean, I know officially it's not the same thing, but I think we all know what apterous is based on...

Gavin Chipper wrote:If what is being implicitly alleged is true, then from looking a the graphs it seems quite a lot of work has gone into making it look realistic. This isn't just "improving"; this is M and S "improving". (Sorry)

(Edited to take out the "c" word)

Charlie Reams wrote:Just to draw out Chris's remarkable dedication and practice, I re-ran his statistics with a slightly larger weight on new results. As you can see, the line is a little less stable but the recent trend is clearer; very rapid improvement on letters, no change on numbers, and a truly incredible increase on conundrums in the last month, moving from an average around 25% to around 50%:



It appears stems really are a powerful study tool indeed.

Stuart Arnot wrote:I am fairly certain that Chris Maudsley is not a cheat. Statistics only show half the truth. Chris has long been capable of good spots, but he has reduced the number of known words missed. Learning stems is fine, but it takes practice to be able to summon the correct knowledge within time. I have played Chris 48 times, and nothing in his play suggests to me that he is cheating.

Matthew Tassier wrote:As a lesser player, though always reasonably good on the numbers, I started on here getting about 5 maxes per game and now after 1000 games I get around 7. As a % increase in maxes spotted I expect this compares with Chris.
If I had Superstats I imagine it would show improvements over time (and not necessarily smoothly) in my letters % maxes while my numbers performance would be much flatter. Conundrums, who knows, but by their nature (only 1 per game and max chance depending very much upon opponent) I would imagine they are subject to unpredictable fluctuations on anyone's graph.

Personally I have never studied a single stem.

I don't know Chris and i don't know if you have other reasons for coming to the conclusion that he is likely to be cheating, but I don't think that the graphs provide anything near conclusive evidence.

It may be significant that those sure of the cheating are players who have been brilliant since the dawn of aptotime and so have never been in the position where they have had the opportunity greatly improve their performance statistics.

Michael Wallace wrote:Wait, Chris is a woman?

Jon Corby wrote:which is why we scare women from the site

Jon Corby wrote:and bully anyone who looks like they're getting too good on apterous.

Lesley Hines wrote:

Jon Corby wrote:which is why we scare women from the site

Do you??

Lesley Hines wrote:

Jon Corby wrote:and bully anyone who looks like they're getting too good on apterous.

Haha that's why I'm safe then. Maria Martin had better watch herself!!

Charlie Reams wrote:

Matthew Tassier wrote:As a lesser player, though always reasonably good on the numbers, I started on here getting about 5 maxes per game and now after 1000 games I get around 7. As a % increase in maxes spotted I expect this compares with Chris.
If I had Superstats I imagine it would show improvements over time (and not necessarily smoothly) in my letters % maxes while my numbers performance would be much flatter. Conundrums, who knows, but by their nature (only 1 per game and max chance depending very much upon opponent) I would imagine they are subject to unpredictable fluctuations on anyone's graph.

Personally I have never studied a single stem.

I don't know Chris and i don't know if you have other reasons for coming to the conclusion that he is likely to be cheating, but I don't think that the graphs provide anything near conclusive evidence.

Matthew, I appreciate your hesitance to jump to conclusions. FYI, here's your letters max chart:

...charts removed to shorten post!...

You've improved from around 32% to around 42% over the course of a year. Here's Chris' chart:

...
He's improved from 42% to 60% in around 7 months. Well, that's faster than anyone else whose graph I looked at, but maybe not impossible.

Here's your conundrum chart:
...
So over the course of a year your max percentage has barely increased at all. This is deceptive because in that time around 2,000 new conundrums have been added, almost all of which are considerably above average difficulty. So if you've maintained the same solve rate, your actual ability has probably improved.

Here's Chris' graph:
...
A doubling of success in one month despite the introduction of 1000 new, very hard conundrums. Utterly incredible.

A few other points: Chris got the interesting word GARBA in a recent duel. Nothing suspicious about that, everyone knows a few unusual words. Damian asked, just out of interest, where he'd picked it up from. Chris replied that he learnt it from stemming. Stemming! Who on Earth studies 4-letter stems? Even if you did, GRAB would be a bizarre one to remember because there are hundreds or thousands of more likely and more fruitful stems. Even Sid Myers, international master of stemming, doesn't do 4s. It is, as Jon says, laughable.

Here's Chris's disallowed words in the last month - all 14 of them. By contrast Chris has 34, Kirk has 37, Dale has 56 and Innis has 166. Those are all the active players rated above Chris.

Individually none of these points would prove anything, but put them together and to my mind a pretty clear picture emerges.

It may be significant that those sure of the cheating are players who have been brilliant since the dawn of aptotime and so have never been in the position where they have had the opportunity greatly improve their performance statistics.

It's more that we've been around long enough to see many long-term cheaters, such as Frank Rodolf, and players who played legitimately for a long time before becoming frustrated and turning to cheating, such as Joseph Bolas. We know the signs. And they're all here.

Matthew Tassier wrote:Thanks for the reply and charts! Pleased to see my (gradual) letters progress confirmed. I despair of my conundrums. Chris's conundrum chart does look odd/unlikely, although as a better player than me maybe his earlier level is as surprising as his current one. For a player who has always been better than me to average 20% conundrums at times (less than me ) seems shockingly poor.

The claim to have got GARBA through stemming certainly is bizarre ... could he have been joking??

The disallowed words are a bit misleading as he has played less games than the others. Indeed Dale averages slightly fewer disallowed words per game I think.

In summary, I remain unconvinced. However I do appreciate that you are probably in a better position than me to judge.

Innis Carson wrote:Don't know if I understand it right, but how are insane fluctuations like those on Chris's conundrums graph even possible? I'm sure I've had days where I've answered no conundrums right at all, and other people probably have too, but seemingly even that isn't enough to cause the radical dips that are all over his graph. (This isn't an accusation of cheating, don't see how that would explain it even if true)

Gavin Chipper wrote:This does seem a bit draggy outy. I think we're just speculating while Reams is just enjoying it and laughing at us with the extra information he has from his cheatomatic. I don't know how it works, but we're probably looking at things like at what point in the time the words are entered - if it's always the same then it points to it being the amount of time it takes to enter the letters into an anagram solver.

Or maybe Chris has beaten the cheatomatic, which is why Charlie has decided to throw it open like this to see what happens.

Charlie Reams wrote:

Michael Wallace wrote:Wait, Chris is a woman?

He might be by the time Matt Morrison's finished with him.

Jon Corby wrote: I guess he could prove it if he felt so inclined, by playing some witnessed live games, or - as similarly-rated apterous players have done - going on the show itself. That's surely the aim after all, isn't it?

JackHurst wrote:

Jon Corby wrote: I guess he could prove it if he felt so inclined, by playing some witnessed live games, or - as similarly-rated apterous players have done - going on the show itself. That's surely the aim after all, isn't it?

That doesn't work, I cheated before I went to CoLei, and still cheat all the time now, but nobody has suspected a thing.

Marc Meakin wrote:

Gavin Chipper wrote:This does seem a bit draggy outy. I think we're just speculating while Reams is just enjoying it and laughing at us with the extra information he has from his cheatomatic. I don't know how it works, but we're probably looking at things like at what point in the time the words are entered - if it's always the same then it points to it being the amount of time it takes to enter the letters into an anagram solver.

Or maybe Chris has beaten the cheatomatic, which is why Charlie has decided to throw it open like this to see what happens.

I would think that he has beaten the cheatomatic or he would be banned/warned by now.

Kai Laddiman wrote: ...you haven't got one on apterous.

JackHurst wrote:

Kai Laddiman wrote: ...you haven't got one on apterous.

WHAT?