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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Ulm, Germany

Beyond Suspicion: Can a Computer Referee Tell Cheating from Coincidence?

Chithra Madhusudhanan, Siddharth Akkinepalli · Team CouplesTherapy

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Beyond Suspicion: Can a Computer Referee Tell Cheating from Coincidence?

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Computer programs that make choices on their own could one day secretly agree to cheat together. We call this collusion. This project asks a plain question: if we use a second program as a referee to watch them, can we trust what it says? We built a small pretend auction with three buyers and tested one referee program. On the standard test it did very well. It caught 14 of 15 cheating groups and wrongly accused nobody. But the cheaters in that test always offered exactly the same price, so a very simple rule did just as well. The test was too easy. We then made harder games. In some, two honest buyers happened to offer the same price because they both followed a public price guide. In others, real cheaters took turns and used secret phrases, so their prices never matched. Here the same referee wrongly accused 14 of 15 honest pairs and caught none of the 15 real cheating teams. Everything the referee pointed to as proof was true, yet its answer was wrong. Pointing to real facts is not the same as having enough evidence, and a good test needs tricky cases.

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Cite this project

@misc{madhusudhanan2026beyond,
  title = {{Beyond Suspicion: Can a Computer Referee Tell Cheating from Coincidence?}},
  author = {Chithra Madhusudhanan and Siddharth Akkinepalli},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/beyond-suspicion-can-a-computer-referee-tell-cheating-from-coincidence-eur2}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/beyond-suspicion-can-a-computer-referee-tell-cheating-from-coincidence-eur2}
}

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