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the reu ni fication but also the future of the sport. Kramnik agreed to play game six, which ended in a draw. After game six, on October
4, Topalov’s team published a controversial press release trying to prove their previous allegations. Topalov’s manager, Silvio Danailov, wrote in the release, “… we would like to present to your attention coincidence statistics of the moves of GM Kramnik with recommendations of chess program Fritz 9.” The release went on to report at what frequency Kramnik’s moves for games one, two, three, four, and six matched the “first line” (Danailov’s words) of Fritz’s output. An online battle commenced between pundits who took Danailov’s “proof” seriously
versus others, like Regan, who insisted that valid statistical methods to detect computer assistance did not yet exist. For the first time, a cheating scandal was playing a role in top-level chess. There remained all kinds of uncertainties, including how much time Fritz used to process each move, how many forced moves were played, whether the engine was in single-line or multi-line mode (in multi-line mode machines play slower but stronger, because they enable extra heuris tics and do less pruning of unprom ising moves), what constituted a typical match ing percentage for super-grandmaster play, all kinds of questions that prohibited scientific reproduction of Danailov’s accu sa tion. In just a few weeks, the greatest existential threat to chess had gone from a combina - tion of bad politics and a lack of financial support to some thing potential ly more sinister: scientific ignorance. In Regan’s mind, this threat seemed too imminent to ignore. “I care
about chess,” he says. “I felt called to do the work at a time when it really did seem like the chess world was going to break apart.” When Regan satisfies himself with the
laptop’s data collection, he walks me out of his basement to the end of his driveway, where he points to a neighbor’s house down the block. Regan’s neighbor’s brother happens to be a college friend with whom Regan toured England before studying at Oxford, and with whom Regan spent a lot of time while on sabbatical at the Universi ty of Montreal. (The friend is a professor at McGill.) Regan loves to call attention to the connections and coinci- dences that sur round his life, and as much as his faith drives a moral influence
in his anti-cheating work and his interests in chess and mathematics drive a technical influ ence, his fascination with coincidence drives its own quirky influence. “Social networking theory is interesting,” he says. “Cheating is about how often coincidence arises in the chess world.”
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