Magnus Carlsen-Hans Niemann controversy: Have computers killed chess?

Magnus Carlsen (left) and Hans Niemann in the third round of the Sinquefield Cup. (Photo: Saint Louis Chess Club)

Back in 1769, a chess playing automation by the name of The Turk was introduced by Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen. It is the first recorded machine of its kind and chess aficionados in Europe were wowed by its skills for decades. Only after it was brought to the US in 1825 by a German, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, The Turk was found to be a fraud.

Edgar Allan Poe had famously proclaimed in an essay authored in 1836 that Mälzel’s Chess Player (the new name that The Turk took on in the US) is a fraud, and within its contraptions was hidden a human chess player. Poe’s reason: Mälzel’s Chess Player would play perfectly most of the time, but would occasionally make mistakes. Therefore, it couldn’t be a machine.

This as well as many of Poe’s other hypotheses about Mälzel’s Chess Player in his 1836 essay were eventually found to be wrong, and he wasn’t the first American to detect and report that the automation had a human player hidden inside it. But Mälzel’s Chess Player was discredited, nevertheless, after a dream run for over half a century.

Almost 200 years later, history is repeating itself (though in an inverted manner) as the world’s strongest chess player Magnus Carlsen alleges that a fast-rising American youngster, Hans Moke Niemann, aged 19, is routinely cheating at chess tournaments with the help of computers.

The allegation initially came from Carlsen in a cryptic manner after he, on September 4, lost to Niemann, ranked 51st in the world, in a high-profile tournament in the US.

Coming into the controversial game, Carlsen was undefeated in 53 classical format tournament games. What is more, Carlsen had the advantage of playing with the white pieces, or making the first move, and he hadn’t lost with white for over a year. Niemann played extraordinarily fast and outplayed Carlsen in a manner that the world champion himself described as “only a handful of players” were capable of. Eventually going on to allege that his opponent had assistance from outside, Carlsen said Niemann wasn’t even “fully concentrating on the game in critical positions”.

Few weeks later, Carlsen was up against Niemann again in an online tournament, and surprisingly, he resigned after making just one move. To make a point, as it were, Carlsen still went on to win the tournament. In his allegations against Niemann, Carlsen remains guarded, but he and Niemann have said enough in the past few weeks for Chess.com, the most popular website for top chess players, to launch an investigation.

Chess.com has since published a 72-page report on the controversy stirred up by Carlsen and has deactivated Niemann’s account. On his part, Niemann has admitted to cheating in an online tournament when he was 12, and in some “random games” when he was 16, but firmly denied having cheated in any offline tournament game. In its report, however, Chess.com claims to have found evidence of many more instances of cheating.

Cheating in chess dates back centuries. Most importantly, it has evolved over time to the point where it cannot be tolerated anymore. Still, it wasn’t taken seriously until now. What the allegations against Niemann have stirred up is nothing short of an explosion by the “polite standards of chess and counts as a disintegration of the professional scene”, as The Economist newspaper puts it.

The evidence against Niemann that has so far come to light may not hold up in court — he even got a clean chit from the organisers of the Sinquefield Cup, the US tournament where he famously (or notoriously) beat Carlsen. But this, by all means, is a watershed moment: for professional chess to survive this dislocation, cheating must either be proven beyond doubt or the allegations against Niemann quashed.

In the battle of chess, humans held an edge over computers until the turn of the millennium. That’s around when the unthinkable started to happen, though it was predicted as early as in 1950 by Alan Turing, the father of computers, that someday humans will be able to train a machine to play better chess than themselves. In the summer of 1997, then world champion Gary Kasparov lost a match to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer, and within years the frontier of chess was perpetually lost by humans to the brute force of computing.

Until about two decades ago, top level players such as Kasparov could easily beat supercomputers, the key differentiator between their abilities being intuition. In his book from 2007, How Life Imitates Chess, Kasparov guardedly describes human intuition as “we know more than we understand”.

Being what it is, intuition is something that couldn’t be translated into an algorithm. Chess demands precise calculations in great depth, and though supercomputers were always better at calculations than humans (even in Turing’s time), they lacked intuition. Humans, on the other hand, would more than make up for this deficiency with intuition: stronger players are naturally more intuitive, and wouldn’t need to rely on their ability to calculate alone.

But in the post-Pentium era, computers slowly stole the march over humans with their sheer speed of calculation: as processor speed underwent a quantum jump, computers were able to accurately calculate and evaluate so many possibilities that humans couldn’t match this strength with intuition. In strategy games played on larger matrices and with many more numerical possibilities, such as the Chinese game of go played on a 16x16 board, humans may still be ahead of computers because of intuition, according to Kasparov. But, not in chess any more.

The allegation against Niemann is his games are being analysed live by computers remotely and the best moves (if not all, at least the ones at crucial junctures) are being communicated to him through some hidden devices which evade standard screening such as body scan. Earlier on, players would hide phones and other computing devices in toilets and turn to them at key moments when they could no longer rely on their own intuition and ability to calculate.

A crutch like that could make a world of difference, especially when a player is tired after a long battle or in sharp, dynamic positions where accuracy in calculation is more important than intuition. Even earlier, players would while playing a game secretly consult others — a coach or a team member — and often, a quirk of a borrowed idea or a small insight could make a defining difference to the final outcome. But under the strict rules now followed at offline tournaments, seeking help from outside is impossible — or in the light of the recent allegations, thought to be impossible.

The Economist sums up the allegations against Niemann as “running would be much easier if you could hide a rocket in your back pocket”. If there was indeed a way to hide even a crutch somewhere in a chess player’s body, it better be found, or the allegations be thoroughly probed and dismissed. For chess to retain its magic and mysticism, it must strictly remain a cerebral and physical contest between two humans — untiring, faceless computers cannot be allowed to enter the equation in any manner.