To Detect Cheating in Chess, a Professor Builds a Better Program

European Pressphoto Agency

TOILETGATE A dispute arose during the 2006 world championship match between Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, left, and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
NYT

When it comes to cheating, chess might seem all but invulnerable. After all, the board and its pieces are out in the open for all to see.

But an eruption of recent scandals has made it clear that cheating — fueled by powerful computer programs that play better than people do, as well as sophisticated communication technologies — is becoming a big problem for world championship chess.

Last year the French Chess Federation accused three players of colluding at the Chess Olympiad in Russia in 2010 by using coded text messages and a signaling system. The federation banned the players for five years, though the ruling is under appeal.

Of course, elite players are elite precisely because they win lots of games. When they come under suspicion, how can officials determine whether they are cheating? That is where Kenneth W. Regan comes in.

An associate professor of computer science at the University at Buffalo who is also an international master at chess, Dr. Regan has been researching the problem for five years and was an expert witness in the French case — though his principal focus is the holy-grail math problem P versus NP. (P versus NP is about whether problems that have solutions that can be verified by a computer can also be solved quickly by a computer.)

(More here.)