Cover Story / Ken Regan
By HOWARD GOLDOWSKY Photography LUKE COPPING
“WHAT’S GOD’S RATING?” ASKS KEN REGAN, as he leads me down the stairs to the finished basement of his house in Buffalo, New York. Outside, the cold in trudes on an overcast morning in late May 2013; but in here sunlight pierces through two windows near the ceiling, as if this point on earth enjoys a direct link to heaven. On a nearby shelf, old board game boxes of Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Life pile up, with other nostalgia from the childhoods of Regan’s two teenage chil dren. Next to the shelf sits a table that supports a lone laptop logged into the Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s Unix system at the Univer sity at Buffalo, where Regan works as a tenured associate professor. The laptop controls
four
invocations of his anti- chess-cheating software, which at this moment monitor games from the World Rapid Championships, using an open-source chess engine called Stockfish, one of the strongest chess- playing entities on the planet. Around the clock, in real-time, this laptop helps compile essential reference data for Regan’s algorithms. Regan and I are on our way to his office, where he plans to explain the details of his work. But the laptop has been acting up. First he must check its progress, and Regan taps a few keys. What he’s staring at on the screen reminds him to rephrase his question, but this time he doesn’t wait for my answer. “What’s the rating of perfect play?” he asks. “My model says it’s 3600. These engines at 3200, 3300, they’re knocking
22 June 2014 | Chess Life
at that door.” In Regan’s code, the chess engine needs to play the role of an omniscient artificial intelligence that objectively evaluates and ranks, better than any human, every legal move in a given chess position. In other words, the engine needs to play chess just about as well as God. A ubiquitous Internet combined with button-sized wireless communications devices
and chess programs that can easily wipe out the world champion make the temptation today to use hi-tech assistance in rated chess greater than ever (see sidebar). According to Regan, since 2006 there has been a dramatic increase in the number of world wide cheating cases. Today the incident rate approaches rough ly one case per month, in which usually half involve teenagers. The current anti-cheating regu lations of the world chess federation (FIDE) are too outdated to include guid ance about disciplining illegal computer assistance, so Regan himself monitors most major events in real- time, including open events, and when a tournament di rector becomes suspicious for one reason or another and wants to take action, Regan is the first man to get a call. Regan is a devoted Christian. His faith
has inspired in him a moral and social responsibility to fight cheating in the chess world, a responsibility that has become his calling. As an interna-
tional master and self-described 2600-level computer science professor with a background in complexity theory—he holds two degrees in mathe matics, a bachelor’s from Princeton and a doctorate from Oxford—he also happens to be one of only a few people in the world with an ability to commit to such a calling. “Ken Regan is one of two or three people in the world who have the quantitative background, chess expertise, and comput - er skills necessary to develop anti-cheating algorithms likely to work,” says Mark Glickman, a statistics professor at Boston University and chairman of the USCF ratings committee. Every time Regan starts an instance of his anti-cheating code he does not merely run a piece of soft ware—he invokes it. The dual meaning of “invoke” conveys Regan’s inspired relationship to the anti-cheating work that he does. His work began on September 29, 2006, during the Topalov-Kramnik World Cham pi -
on ship match. Vladimir Kramnik had just forfeited game five in protest to the Topalov team’s accu sation that Kramnik was consult ing a chess engine during trips to his pri - vate bathroom. This was the reu ni fication match to unite the then-separate world champions, a situation created when Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short broke from FIDE in 1993. Topalov qualified for the 2006 match because he held the FIDE title. Kramnik qual ified be cause he had defeated Garry Kasparov in 2000 to claim a spot through historical lineage. Due to the schism, chess had suffered 13 years of heavy de clines in sponsorship, sta bility, and re spect. Kramnik’s forfeiture of game five not only threatened
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