Cover Story / Ken Regan
historical game results, which provide information about relative performance only within eras. Only players alive during the same period can play each other. But since Regan’s method compares moves to a common standard (the engine), rather than the results of games, he can objec - tively relate player abilities across eras. What he found was that rating inflation does not exist. Between 1976 and 2009, there has been no significant change in IPR for players at all FIDE ratings. Figure 5 shows, for example, how the IPR for players rated between 2585 and 2615 has remained relatively constant over time. Today’s thousands of grandmasters and dozens of players rated over 2700 indicate a legiti mate proliferation of skill. Thus one may conclude that Hikaru Nakamura’s peak FIDE rating of 2789 beats Bobby Fischer’s peak of 2785 for best American chess player of all time, and Magnus Carlsen’s peak rating of 2881 places him as the best human chess player of all time. (See Figure 6)
WHY DO WE FAIL TO UNDERSTAND those who cheat? In the journal The New Atlantis, Jeremy Ruzansky writes, “Perfor - mance-enhancing drugs are a type of cheating that does not merely alter wins and losses or individual records, but transforms the very character of the athlete. … If our entire goal were to break
pitching records in baseball, we could build pitching machines to pitch perfect games. It is worth asking why we would never do this, why we would never substitute our sportsmen with machines, even though machines could easily achieve superior performance.” Ruzansky’s answer is that we value sta tistics only as the result of superior human
performance. Countless athletes and chess players, including Bobby Fischer, have compared sports to life. “Chess is life,” the former American world champion said. Sports provide society with a meta phor for the competition inherent in life, and this metaphor works only when a living person competes—or, in chess, when a living mind contemplates the complex ities of the moves. Yet cheaters look upon their act as its own kind of sport. In The Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, re search ers found that cheaters enjoy the high of getting away with their wrongdoing, even if they know others are aware of it. Boris Ivanov, for example, continued to cheat after he was caught but before he was suspended. Behavior like Ivanov’s poses a great threat to tournament chess, because it doesn’t take much risk to reap reward. Faced with a complex calculation, a player could sneak their smartphone into the bathroom for one move and cheat for only a single critical position. Former World Champion Viswanathan Anand said that one bit per game, one yes-no answer about whether a sacrifice is sound, could be worth 150 rating points. “I think this is a reliable estimate,” says Regan. “An isolated move is almost un -
catch able using my regular methods.” But selective-move cheaters would be doing it on critical moves, and Regan has untested tricks for these cases. “If you’re given even just a few moves, where each time there are, say, four equal choices, then the probabilities of matching these moves become statistically significant. Another way is for an arbiter to give me a game and tell me how many suspect moves, and then I’ll try to tell him which moves, like a police lineup. We have to know which moves to look at, however, and, importantly— this is the vital part— there has to be a criterion for identifying these moves independent of the fact they match.” Although none of these selective-move techniques have yet to be discussed with
TIM JUST, NATIONAL TOURNAMENT DIRECTOR
the ACP-FIDE anti-cheating committee, Regan has confidence they’ll work. But he keeps his optimism restrained. He doesn’t look forward to the leapfrogging effect bound to happen between cheaters and the people who catch them, a phe nomenon that has invariably plagued other sports. Other challenges remain, too. A new “depth” parameter to model the num ber of plies a player evaluates is being researched to join ‘s’ and ‘c’; the standard engine is being converted from Rybka 3 to Houdini; and the ever-present but minimal anti-human bias in engine scores must be cancelled. In 2012, Regan lost an exhibition match
The perception of an opportunity to cheat far outweighs the actual act of cheating. Honest players want those opportunity doors closed. The challenge is how to do that without invoking the “law of unintended consequences.” And do it without raising the costs of running chess tournaments. In the “bathroom scenario” totally locking the restroom door solves the problem, but there are all sorts of unintended consequences to that anti-cheating method. Or do we inspect every player wanting to use the bathroom? How about forcing players to hand over their electronic gizmos before they can use the bathroom? Again, unintended consequences will rear their ugly heads. The challenge is eliminating as many opportunities for cheating as possible while still respecting the rights of all players at a reasonable cost. What individual rights are players willing to give up to close the cheating opportunity door? How much money are players willing to pay to close the opportunities door? What conveniences are wood pushers willing to let go of to limit cheating opportunities? For someone convicted of cheating the penalty should be banishment from the USCF.
GM ROBERT HESS
In general, what the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis does is straightforward and good. They wand people before they enter the playing area and you are not allowed to bring your phone upstairs. It seems pretty simple. Also, I think cheating is typically less of an issue in elite events, so at the tournaments where cheating is to occur, generally there is less security.
FRANK BERRY, INTERNATIONAL ARBITER
In an Open event there is nothing you can do. In invitational events—according to IM Jack Peters—you have to be aware enough to invite only players with ethical reputations.
30 June 2014 | Chess Life
to a Lego-built robot running the Houdini engine, equipped with an arm that moved the pieces on a real board and a camera that could interpret the position. The experience made an awesome impression on him. “Is technology going to be so ubiquitous that we’ll not be able to police it anymore?” he asks while he, his wife, and I eat dinner at a local Thai restaurant. Regan slumps over his food, looking de - pressed about the need to even ask the question. “Houdini won using only six sec - onds per move,” he says. The exhibition reminds Regan that his calling has carved valuable time from his research and family. “He’s obsessed,” says his wife, who sits across the table. Then she adds, “But you’ve got to be obsessed to be good.” Regan ignores the flattery, his attention held by an emerging thought. Finally he springs forward in his chair, smiling. “By the way,” he says. “This project was run by a person whose mother and my mother share a best friend back in New Jersey.”
See Dr. Regan’s website
www.cse.buffalo.edu/ ~regan/chess/ for more of his work.
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