HOW TO CHEAT AT CHESS
Dominic Lawson investigates
an attempt to fool a computer and confound the very devil
IT IS not easy to cheat at chess. Faust, still more ambitiously, attempted to cheat the devil. But last month in Yugoslavia a certain Mr Heinz-Dieter Langer tried to combine both feats simultaneously and, for a while at least, succeeded.
Mr Langer chose for his unique scam the Micro-computer Chess World Cham- pionship, held this year in the Yugoslav resort of Portoroz. This annual event is a kind of computer equivalent of Formula One Grand Prix racing: a very expensive 'state-of-the-art' competition but with lucrative mass-market spin-offs for the victor. There has for many years been a thriving market in chess-playing micro- computers. The winner of the micro- computer world championship can license his program for upwards of a million pounds to manufacturers who then sell it to the public with an 'official world champion' tag. For the past five years the winning program at the championships has been successive versions of the West German `Mephisto' program. The latest prototype is now close to master strength. Mephisto does not license its programs but manufac- tures its own machines — advertised as `devilishly successful' — supplying almost half the annual profits of its parent com- pany, Hegener and Glaser.
But this year the unbeaten Mephisto had a terrible shock. After four rounds a completely unknown new 'developmental computer' named Quickstep, escorted by Mr H-D Langer, burst into the lead with four wins out of four games. Mephisto's own latest prototype— named Mephisto X — had won only three games, though it had met stronger opposition. The other chess computer company representatives present were agog. Theirs is a very inti- mate group, like most scientific communi- ties. Yet none of them had ever heard of the mysterious Mr Langer who claimed to have been working in the field for ten years, but who refused to say which chess grand masters had helped him.
Mephisto's chief programmer, Mr Richard Lang, a brilliant Englishman with some responsibility for our high technology trade deficit with West Germany, was distraught. But Richard Lang was not just distraught. Richard Lang was also suspi- cious. For the style, games and repertoire of Quickstep bore an uncanny resemblance to those of the previous year's computer chess world champion, the Mephisto Almeria program.
If Quickstep's opponents had been able to see the monitor screen of Mr Langer's computer, then it would have been easy to see if the processes of Quickstep were in fact identical to those of the Mephisto Almeria. But Mr Langer covered up the monitor screen with a lid while Quickstep was playing — to the further consternation of his rivals. However the cover broke so to speak — during the keenly awaited game between Quickstep and Mephisto X, while Quickstep was cogitating on its 16th move. Up to that point all of Quickstep's moves had followed a game the Mephisto Almeria had already played. It was then that Mephisto's programmers managed to sneak a look at Quickstep's screen. This is what they saw: (05/13 g2g4 = 26/54 0,30 f3e5 d8b6). Mr Langer (returning from the loo?) explained to the snooping Mephisto- ites that (in their account) '05/13 means 5 ply brute force and up to 13 ply selective search and g2g4 = 26/54 means there are 54 possible lines and g2 g4 is the 26th in the move list'. Off went Mephisto's Mr Lang and fed the same position into a passing Mephisto Almeria. This is what he saw on the screen: '05/13 g2g4 = 26/54 0,21 f3e5 d8b6.' Hal Said Mr Lang, 'Surprisingly' — (irony, a rare event in the world of computer chess) — 'surprisingly, we have not only the same 'That's the problem with Commonwealth conferences — once you've issued one statement, half an hour later you want to issue another.' relation between brute force and selective search as Quickstep but also the same principal line, and even more interesting is the fact that g2g4 is again the 26th move in the move list.' Ha! again.
For those unfamiliar with the language of the computer chess buffs Mephisto's programmer made the following more readily comprehensible points: the liquid crystal display of the Quickstep monitor was identical to that of the Mephisto Almeria right down to 'the same semi- colons, colons and slashes.' Faccuse,' cried Mr Lang, whose emotions could only have been those of a father who sees “nother man steal his baby and then insist in open court that he is the true father.
Mr Langer was summoned to a midnight interrogation by the two tournament arbi- ters, Mr Jonathan Schaffer of Canada and Mr Jaap van den Herik of Holland. It is believed that Mr Schaffer played the role of the nasty guy and Mr van den Herick offered the cigarettes. But by four in the morning Mr Langer had still not cracked and continued to deny all allegations that he had stolen Mr Lang's Almeria program. The interrogators then told Langer that Richard Lang had revealed to them that there was a special code which he had implanted into every Mephisto Almeria. If Lang pressed a certain key sequence known only to him, then the Mephisto copyright sign would appear on the screen. Would Mr Langer let Mr Lang perform this test on Quickstep? If Mr Lang failed to produce the copyright sign, Mr Langer would be deemed innocent. Langer re- fused, while still protesting his innocence.
At this point, Mr No Jovan of Mephisto told me, `Mr Langer was disqualificated from the tournament.' You mean he was disqualified?"Ja, ja, disqualificated.' Next day Mr Langer left Portoroz and has not been heard of since. But he did not leave alone. This is the sad bit. He was on his honeymoon. And, according to Mr Jovan, `The biggest surprise was for his wife. She was very angry with him. She had been so happy he was winning and he didn't say nothing about this cheat to her.' But Mr Langer at least had a sense of history in his subterfuge. For the Mephisto machine was named by Hegener and Glas- er after the Mephisto chess machine which was first exhibited in Leicester Square in 1878, and which was a sensation of the chess world for several years thereafter. It consisted of a small cabinet which whirred and shook. On top was an inlaid chess set. On top of that was a strange Mephistophe- lian figure whose apparently mechanical arm would move the pieces with exception- al virtuosity. Only it wasn't a machine at all. Hidden inside and operating the device was the tiny Hungarian chess player Isidor Gunsberg, who in 1890 contested a match for the human world chess championship. I think old Izzy Gunsberg would rather have approved of Mr Langer. He certainly wouldn't have disqualificated him.
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