How chess cheats are caught by technology they abuse
The grandmaster discovered in a compromising position was not the first,
Over the past six years, chess grandmaster Igors Rausis could do no wrong. Accumulating win after win, he became the oldest person, at 58, to be ranked within the world’s top 100 players, reaching a high of No40.
It should have been a feel-good story of an old dog learning new tricks as his rating by Fide, the game’s governing body, rose from 2,500 to nearly 2,700 in six years. At an age when most players are in decline, Rausis was an outlier approaching the level of super grandmaster.
That illusion was sharply shattered last week when a photo emerged of a fortunately fully clothed Rausis sitting on the lavatory, smartphone in hand, during a tournament in
France. Even before any punishment was handed down, Rausis retired.
“I simply lost my mind,” Rausis told chess. com. “I confirmed the fact of using my phone during the game by written statement. What could I say more? Yes, I was tired after the morning game and all the Facebook activity of accusers also have a known impact. At least what I committed yesterday is a good lesson, not for me – I played my last game of chess already.”
Scandals in chess are nothing new. King Canute is supposed to have murdered a Danish nobleman over an allegation of cheating, while in 1828 United States president John Quincy Adams was accused by Andrew Jackson of turning the White House into a “den of gambling” for his purchase of a chess table.
Yet cheating was a relatively rare occurrence until the oldest of games converged with the newest of technologies. In 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer programme to defeat a world champion when it beat Garry Kasparov 3.5-2.5. Today the technology which powered Deep Blue could be found inside most tablet computers. Magnus Carlsen, the current world champion and potentially the greatest player of all time, would stand little chance against a remotely competent player aided by a chess computer programme, otherwise known as an engine.
The first recorded instance of using technology to cheat came at the 1993 World Open when an unrated newcomer using the name “John von Neumann” (a computer science pioneer) drew with a grandmaster and beat another top-ranked player. He appeared to have a bulge in one of his pockets that was emitting a buzzing sound at key junctures in matches. Unable to articulate any basic chess theories, he was disqualified.
Since then the authorities’ job has become harder as devices have become smaller and more powerful. Four years previously, a Georgian grandmaster, Gaioz Nigalidze, was caught in similar circumstances to Rausis after his smartphone was found in a cubicle covered in toilet paper. Many people fear that such cheating might be endemic at lesser tournaments, where there are fewer safeguards.
Yet the best weapon against the cheaters may be in the technology itself. The authoritative chess.com hosts millions of online matches as well as tournaments with prize money, which should be a cheat’s charter. However, the website has developed an algorithm that can detect the difference between human moves and computer moves.
“We cannot overstress the difference that humans and computers play utterly different,” Roland Walker, director of research at chess.com told the BBC World Service. “Humans play by planning and recognising patterns. A computer plays in a really unusual way. It forgets everything that it knew in between each move and it doesn’t really have a plan.” Effectively, humans become too emotionally committed to a plan.
The algorithm has caught “hundreds” of ranked players and others are being set up by amateur chess detectives to root out cheats in real-life tournaments. Technology, which might have posed an existential threat to chess, may also prove to be its salvation.
‘A computer forgets in between each move and it doesn’t really have a plan’