Late last month, a major fraud scandal rocked the chess world. Five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen has accused rival Hans Niemann of cheating at the Sincofield Cup in the United States. Allegations of fraud are as old in the chess world as the game itself, but the lengthy statement Carlsen, 31, posted on Twitter, directing allegations against his 19-year-old opponent, was so shocking that it prompted hundreds of players. “Grand Masters” of the game and tricks detection experts to analyze the finer details of the match that led to Carlsen’s withdrawal from the tournament. Analysts have looked at the numerous tricks Neiman may have used, particularly with the past history of cheating, but ultimately his finger is generally pointed at a key culprit: artificial intelligence. Kasparov “Defender of Humanity” This incident brought to mind the long history of artificial intelligence in chess, which saw important events that marked the extent of the development of the field, to the extent that chess was once considered a means of measuring the level of intelligence enjoyed by machines. Perhaps the first of these historical moments was the British computer scientist Alan Turing, who wrote a program for playing chess even before there was a computer to run it.
