[nige1]

 cherdano, on 2015-October-21, 11:55, said:

May I make the modest proposal that any action that is, for an outside observer, indistinguishable from cheating shall be considered cheating?

I upvoted Cherdano but I'd better clarify my view. Authorities should concentrate on behaviour and ignore intent. The laws of a game should not pivot on mind-reading and assessing self-serving statements. Many alleged cheats are successful professional Poker players, sensitive to tells (perhaps subliminally as nullve suggests), but whose opponents can't read their tells.

I agree with nullve's main point. It's hard to be sure that "cheating" is deliberate. A frequent and familiar example: most players seem to use unauthorised information. That doesn't mean they're deliberate cheats. They would be horrified to be so-accused.

• A few may believe that law-makers purposely encourage "coffee-house" tactics. Many bridge-laws seem designed to reward law-breakers.
• Some players are just careless.
• For others it's an unconscious process: they're not self-aware.
• Many players are ignorant of the law and many directors don't understand the law. e.g. Players say they "always make the call they would have made without UI" -- echoing the heretical advice in the ACBL club-directors' handbook.
• Most are incapable of the mental gymnastics required to determine which logical alternatives are least likely to be successful.
• Almost all are expert at rationalisation.

[gwnn]

 nullve, on 2016-May-13, 03:14, said:

https://en.wikipedia..._signaling_game
http://philsci-archi...wisLabSynth.pdf

Is there any chance that you might explain these and how they are relevant to the cheating scandal, or do we have to read the whole literature and guess?

[barmar]

 nige1, on 2016-May-13, 05:37, said:

I upvoted Cherdano but I'd better clarify my view. Authorities should concentrate on behaviour and ignore intent.

The problem with this is that some perfectly innocent behaviors may appear similar to cheating.

So we have to choose between false positives and false negatives. And the current policy seems to follow Blackstone's formulation

Quote

All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent party suffer.

[1eyedjack]

 barmar, on 2016-May-13, 10:11, said:

The problem with this is that some perfectly innocent behaviors may appear similar to cheating.

So we have to choose between false positives and false negatives. And the current policy seems to follow Blackstone's formulation

That is certainly not the approach adopted by the inhabitants of BridgeWinners.

Furthermore, while Blackstone's formulation applied in criminal trials, civil cases were only ever decided more on a 50-50 basis.

[barmar]

 1eyedjack, on 2016-May-13, 10:34, said:

That is certainly not the approach adopted by the inhabitants of BridgeWinners.

Furthermore, while Blackstone's formulation applied in criminal trials, civil cases were only ever decided more on a 50-50 basis.

True, it's the "beyond a reasonable doubt" versus "preponderance of evidence" standard.

The impression I've always gotten is that cheating is considered analogous to a felony in the bridge community, so we expect adjudication to be more like a criminal trial.

[mikestar13]

 barmar, on 2016-May-13, 10:39, said:

True, it's the "beyond a reasonable doubt" versus "preponderance of evidence" standard.

The impression I've always gotten is that cheating is considered analogous to a felony in the bridge community, so we expect adjudication to be more like a criminal trial.

Perhaps better than either standard for this purpose is the "clear and convincing evidence" standard used in the US (and probably elsewhere) in certain civil matters where jail time is of course not possible but the consequences beyond money damages may be severe--this standard applies in some states to professional licensing, which is a good analogy. When I and others call cheating a bridge felony (or worse) we are expressing cheating's moral significance in a bridge context, not suggesting which legal rule should apply.

[nullve]

 gwnn, on 2016-May-13, 05:40, said:

Is there any chance that you might explain these and how they are relevant to the cheating scandal, or do we have to read the whole literature and guess?

An 'nxn' Lewis signalling game, to use terminology consistent with the linked paper, is a Lewis signalling game where there are n world states and n signals. So whether they cheated or not, it might look as if

* B-Z were playing a 3x3 Lewis signalling game with hand strengths in context as world states and bidding gaps as signals
* F-N were playing a 2x2 Lewis signalling game with led suit holdings as world states and led card orientations as signals
* F-S were playing a 4x4 Lewis signalling game with lead preferences as world states and board placements as signals
* W-E were playing a 4x4 Lewis signalling game with lead preferences as world states and numbers of coughs as signals.

From the paper's abstract: "In this paper we use experimental approach to show how linguistic conventions can emerge in society without explicit agreement."

[gwnn]

The subjects in the paper you cited were instructed about a sender whose signals they were supposed to figure out and they were promised rewards if they did so accurately.

The subjects at the bridge table were instructed about a "sender" whose possible signals they were supposed to ignore* and they were promised punishment if they were going to receive and interpret the signals.

Do you see a difference between the two scenarios?

*-in fact, not just ignore but to act in the opposite manner.

[nullve]

 gwnn, on 2016-May-14, 14:01, said:

The subjects in the paper you cited were instructed about a sender whose signals they were supposed to figure out and they were promised rewards if they did so accurately.

Not quite:

paper said:

The subjects engaged in the experiment were, obviously, language users. As a result they were likely predisposed towards certain assumptions about communication and information transfer. In describing the experiment to subjects, we primarily chose language that conveyed information about the game without explicitly describing the situation as one of information transfer or communication. For instance, players were informed that they would be divided into `role 1 participants' and `role 2 participants' in the experiment rather than `senders' and `receivers'. There was one exception to this rule, which was that the sender's choice was described as a `signal' to his or her partner.

 gwnn, on 2016-May-14, 14:01, said:

The subjects at the bridge table were instructed about a "sender" whose possible signals they were supposed to ignore* and they were promised punishment if they were going to receive and interpret the signals.

Thinking of the alledged codes in terms of Lewis signalling games is probably useless unless the pairs would have been able to play such games unwittingly while focusing on proper bridge. But "task-irrelevant perceptual learning" (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC2764800/) seems to be fairly well documented, and I don't see why it couldn't apply here, so maybe that's the extra idea needed to explain how a pair can inadvertently evolve an illegal signalling system. (I'm speculating wildly, of course, but perhaps a little less than when I wrote

 nullve, on 2015-October-22, 13:42, said:

If operant conditioning is going on on both sides of the screen, it might explain both how tells and Clever Hans-like effects emerge over thousands of boards.

upthread.)

Csaba, I saw your post in the "Introductions and the like" forum today, so I don't expect a reply from you anytime soon. Good luck!

¹ which I knew absolutely nothing about until yesterday

[Fluffy]

After playing for several years with my first partner: my grand father. I realiced he gave lavinthal signals on attitude positions when he played the card slowly. I probably used them for a long time before I was expert enough to realice what was actually going on.