Let me see if I understand you correctly:

1. You deliberately played badly and ended up losing to IdiotBot[1]
2. You then kibitzed with that 30k account[2]
3. You are surprised that admins took notice?

Stronger players making dumb kibitz..... now that is a different problem.

[1] Remember that deliberately losing rated games is against the Terms of Service. It doesn't matter how or why you did it, it's the loss we see. We can't read minds, but we do see such losses often (IdiotBot is useful as a sandbagger-detector). And yes, humans do play inconsistently and yes, it is not unknown for a human to accidentally lose to a weaker player (which can make it difficult to detect sandbagging when the loss is to a slightly weaker player)... but I hope you are not saying that could happpen to a dan-player against a 30k?
[2] OK, you get some points for originality there---it's usually a fake dan account.

No, you continue to misunderstand. I expect admins to notice a 30k making dan-level kibitz, but I don't see why being noticed should mean I get deranked. Is there an unwritten KGS rule I fell foul of that one must kibitz at a level close to your displayed rank? I do not wish to be a surreptitious 30k, I just wish to be treated fairly and on the quality of my moves, rather than the fact that the human brain behind those moves has the capacity to play better moves if he so chooses (but consistently does not).

For the record, I did not have "a couple of deliberate losses" to IdiotBot, I had one win and one loss. The 'damage' that my behaviour has on IdiotBot's 30k rank (in fact it was 29k when I played it) is miniscule compared to dan-ranked players who play it and resign or escape and then forfeit from boredom. Do you really track down and derank all of those? And as I explained before if my play is weaker than IdiotBot's because I don't extend from atari but it does then it is not damage but correct for me to lose to it and nudge its rank up a tiny bit. (I think there is/was an even weaker bot called somthing like WeakBot50k that doesn't even know what atari is).

Also what is your view of my 3d blitz account (used to be 2d but I improved at blitz) where I play bad moves (overplays and silly fights) on purpose? Should that be deranked too?

Hi,
I agree that players can get help as long as they play consistently, but in my opinion, this is only because AI has not yet beaten the best human players.

When go AI beat any human, using the help of a software will be considered as cheating as well as in other games, like chess or Othello.

But a 15kyu today can use AI to play like a 5 kyu or a 3 dan, so I don't see why the inability of a 5d to use an AI to play like a 9d means that isn't cheating now but would be in the future once Go AIs get stronger.

P.S. As one example, on OGS a few years back there was a cyborg player (totally open about it) with the human about 5 kyu using the Fuego engine, combined rank was low dan. He/it was interesting to play against (I won all the games, but harder than the vanilla Fuego), and the Alan Turing tournament was created partly to allow such cyborgs and bots to play tournaments there.

Please let us know what rank you reach before you get de-ranked .

The arguments that Uberdude's weak account should not have been deranked make sense to me.

But, as Nyanjilla said, admins cannot read minds. In my experience, when admins encounter deliberate poor play in ranked games, it has always been connected with sandbagging. The association with sandbagging is so common, that when we find deliberate poor play, deranking is pretty much automatic. There is a good chance that the admin or admins who deranked that account connected it to Uberdude before deciding to derank.

I am not offering this to justify the deranking of that account, but to explain that deranking was likely. Had I been involved, not knowing the intent, I would have deranked.

May I suggest, that if someone wants to try a similar experiment, they discuss it with the admins in advance?

However, I can predict some admins will be absolutely against this, perceiving a clear TOS violation:

Quote:

In addition to this general guideline, there are certain behaviors that are absolutely not tolerated at KGS:

• Dishonest play during rated games. Rated games are meant to be serious games where player's strengths are tracked; if you want to just fool around and play, this is fine, but please make sure the game is "free" so that it won't affect the rating system. To be more specific, these are not allowed:
  • Intentionally losing rated games
  • Setting up rated games against yourself to boost an account's rank
  • Having other people play rated games for you

people who use assistance or have fake ranks never get far anyways, so let them do whatever they want

if you play "perfect joseki" it doesn't mean you'll play perfect middle game, or you'll know what to do if someone goes off book

if you have a fake dan rank, it is probably one loss away from becoming super weak and you'll probably be unable to boost it back up to the dan rank you want

The chess world has sailed past this, to the extent that cyborg matches involving GM human+machine exist: http://www.chess.com/groups/view/cyborg-matches

Whether assistance is cheating or not depends on whether everyone involved agrees on a specific set of rules. A venue (such as a server) may try to stipulate such rules, but they are hard to enforce.

KGS tends to treat their rating system as if it's this precious snowflake that's a tragedy to disturb, but really it's disturbed enough by regular games. Still, they have a right to set terms of service.