Anal beads and toilet computers: the chequered history of chess cheating

When 19-year-old chess grandmaster Hans Niemann beat world champion Magnus Carlsen in a match at the Sinquefield Cup on September 4, Niemann said it was “by some ridiculous miracle” that he had guessed what his opponent’s unusual opening would be and prepared for it.

Carlsen, for his part, tweeted the famous footage of former Chelsea coach José Mourinho refusing to comment on a game because “if I speak I am in big trouble“. That reticence apparently dissipated as the month wore on. The pair played again, a digital match on September 19, and Carlsen resigned after one move and shut off his webcam. Carlsen then later explicitly stated that he thought Niemann had cheated. Niemann has admitted to cheating in the past but is adamant he is now “clean”.

Following this came a report from Chess.com, alleging it was “likely” Niemann had cheated in “more than 100 games”.

Sex toys and dirty tactics

The headline item has been the meme theory, promoted by Elon Musk in a since-deleted tweet, that Niemann had relied on a third party transmitting signals on what moves to play via vibrating anal beads. There is no evidence to back this up, and indeed “an utterly baseless theory promoted by Elon Musk” might qualify as a tautology at this stage. Niemann for his part has offered to play naked if that would put people’s minds at ease.

Is the sex toy theory plausible?

Sort of. “If you have the cooperation of a third party, who’s contactable perhaps within the venue, accessing a computer, monitoring the game as it’s being played and is somehow able to convey a signal to the player during the game, it can be done,” Australian Chess Federation president Gary Wastell told SBS. A Dutch software engineer is attempting to test the theory by developing the kind of software that could communicate chess moves via morse code with a compatible sex toy. Niemann wouldn’t necessarily need constant directions via such a device — receiving AI assistance just once could turn a whole game.

But it’s important to note that the cheating alleged by Chess.com occurred exclusively in online games — the report did not find any concrete evidence of Niemann cheating in “over the board”, in-person games, such as his initial upset against Carlsen. However, the report did conclude: “we believe certain aspects of the September 4 game were suspicious, and Hans’ explanation of his win post-event added to our suspicion”.

AI and chess

The ability of a computer to learn chess and outplay even the world’s best human player has been clear ever since Garry Kasparov buried his head in his hands after the deciding game of a six-match series against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. The use of machine learning to instantly predict all the moves a human might make has only gotten stronger since, and chess engines directing players is the most common form of cheating.

Indeed, Chess.com uses similar programs to model the styles of different players, as well as to detect cheating. As Oxford’s Michael K Cohen writes in The Conversation, you cannot detect cheating based on any one move, however unlikely it is that human might have thought it up. The report into Niemann’s swift and unlikely jump in rankings states:

Though legal and practical considerations prevent Chess.com from revealing the full set of data, metrics and tracking used to evaluate games in our fair-play tool, we can say that at the core of Chess.com’s system is a statistical model that evaluates the probability of a human player matching an engine’s top choices, and surpassing the confirmed clean play of some of the greatest chess players in history.

There is an ironic symmetry in this. An early chess hoax was a device known as “The Mechanical Turk”, which purported to be a chess-playing robot, able to beat strong players and solve puzzles like the “knight’s tour” — it was later revealed that it was simply operated via levers by some of the great chess players of the day.

A history of cheating

Prior to the explosion of machine learning, cheating at chess relied on a player being skilled at using sleight of hand to perform illegal moves or manipulate the board. Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in the number of accusations of using technology for an unfair advantage. Our favourite example comes from a German tournament in 2002, where the arbiter noticed that one player, named as “W.S.” in his report, often:

… left the board for protracted periods of time to go to the toilet, even when (especially when) it was his turn to play… [I] noticed that he played a number of moves very rapidly and then disappeared in the toilet. I followed him and could hear no sound coming from the stall. I looked under the door and saw that his feet were pointing sideways, so that he could not have been using the toilet. So I entered the neighbouring stall, stood on the toilet bowl and looked over the dividing wall. I saw W.S. standing there with a handheld PC which displayed a running chess program … When confronted he claimed that he was only checking his emails, so I asked him to show me the computer, which he refused to do. There are witnesses for my investigation in the toilet.

For his part, yesterday Niemann played and beat 15-year-old grandmaster Christopher Yoo, but not before being subject to a slightly more rigorous security screening than other competitors.