A cheating controversy involving two grandmasters shows what the game has become. Erik Carter / The Atlantic It was as if a bottom seed had knocked out the top team in March Madness: At the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament in St. Louis earlier this month, an upstart American teenager named Hans Niemann snapped the 53-game unbeaten streak of world champion Magnus Carlsen, perhaps the game’s best player of all time. But the real uproar came the following day, when Carlsen posted a cryptic tweet announcing his withdrawal that included a meme video stating, “If I speak I am in big trouble.” The king appeared to have leveled an unspoken accusation of cheating—and the chess world, in turn, exploded .
Some of the biggest names in chess launched attacks on Niemann in the subsequent days, while others rushed to defend him. Niemann, by his own recent admission, has cheated at online chess at least twice before, when he was 12 and 16 years old. These past offenses, combined with what some believed was lackluster chess analysis in his postgame interviews, have heightened suspicions of foul play. On Twitch and Twitter, players and fans theorized that Niemann might have been receiving secret messages encoded in the vibrations of electronic shoe inserts or remote-controlled anal beads . No concrete evidence of cheating has emerged, and the 19-year-old grandmaster vehemently denied accusations of misconduct in St. Louis, vowing to an interviewer that he has never cheated in an over-the-board game and has learned from prior mistakes.
Whatever really happened here, everyone agrees that for Niemann, or anyone else, to cheat at chess in 2022 would be conceptually simple. In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice. That’s not the only way that computers have recently reshaped the landscape of a 1,500-year-old sport. Human players, whether novices or grandmasters, now find inspiration in the outputs of […]
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