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Chess-Playing Computer Accused Of Cheating (Source:David Lapetina)

The world of international computer chess is known for many things, but scandals aren’t one of them. However, some fun is being poked at the fact that the world chess champion has just been stripped of its title for unfair use of performance-enhancing… programming.

This week the International Computer Games Association rescinded its world-champion title because of cheating. Overseers of the sport took the title away from the computer program Rybka, and imposed a lifetime ban on its programmer, M.I.T.-graduate Vasik Rajlich. The Czech-American programmer is accused of using coding from other software programs, reports the Washington Times.

“We are convinced that the evidence against Vasik Rajlich is both overwhelming in its volume and beyond reasonable question in its nature. Vasik Rajlich is guilty of plagiarizing the programs Crafty and Fruit,” the ICGA stated.

In competitive computer chess, using code from other programs is considered cheating. A number of computer-chess programmers have publicly accused Rajlich of stealing from the Fruit and Crafty programs, and presented their findings to the ICGA in March. For several months Rajlich, who lives outside the country, has claimed his innocence, although he has not publicly responded to the latest development.

The scandal is the most recent chapter in the man-vs.-machine debate in chess. In a highly publicized 1997 match, IBM computer Deep Blue beat world champion Gary Kasparov, whose camp believes human programmers may have assisted the supercomputer during the game. Although the defeat shook the chess world, analysts believe that with the advance in the computer chess programs, even simple programs are superior in their abilities to their human counterparts, the grandmasters.

FUN FACT: To convey the enormity of options in chess, in their 2004 book “Bobby Fischer Goes to War,” Dave Edmonds and John Eidinow referenced the work of George Steiner, who stated that there are 318,979,584,000 options in the first four moves of a chess game, and that the number of legitimate ways a chess game can be played outnumber atoms in the universe.