Twenty players were disqualified from the Fide World University Online Championships, out of almost 900. Does that call for moral despair, righteous jubilation, or just a weary shrug? It is no revelation that policing the game has become a major challenge, made all the more urgent by the shift toward playing online.
The first obstacle is a technical one — how to identify all the bad apples without picking up false positives? Kenneth Regan is a computer scientist and international master whose statistical research has shown that the raw moves are packed with clues. Using the suggested moves from a top chess engine as a benchmark, his software can quantify how precisely a player has played. If an amateur player outperforms top grandmasters on these measures, there are reasonable grounds for suspicion. Further information may come from a player’s webcam stream, or an unnatural pattern of thinking time.
But it’s the second challenge, the social one, which hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
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