When it comes to cheating, chess might seem all but invulnerable. After all, the board and its pieces are out in the open for all to see. Multimedia

Get Science News From The New York Times » But an eruption of recent scandals has made it clear that cheating — fueled by powerful computer programs that play better than people do, as well as sophisticated communication technologies — is becoming a big problem for world championship chess.

Last year the French Chess Federation accused three players of colluding at the Chess Olympiad in Russia in 2010 by using coded text messages and a signaling system. The federation banned the players for five years, though the ruling is under appeal.

Of course, elite players are elite precisely because they win lots of games. When they come under suspicion, how can officials determine whether they are cheating? That is where Kenneth W. Regan comes in.

An associate professor of computer science at the University at Buffalo who is also an international master at chess, Dr. Regan has been researching the problem for five years and was an expert witness in the French case — though his principal focus is the holy-grail math problem P versus NP. (P versus NP is about whether problems that have solutions that can be verified by a computer can also be solved quickly by a computer.)

Dr. Regan, 52, became interested in the chess issue during the 2006 world championship match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia and Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria.

A screen reader is a tool to help blind people use a computer by reading out loud information that is in the display. There is a specially adapted version of WinBoard 4.5 available for use with a screen reader. This version can be controlled completely from the keyboard, as blind people cannot use a pointing device like a mouse. It is equipped with a special menu (and accelerator keys to activate the items in it) to have the screen reader recite the position of pieces on the board, the last move made by the opponent, (which is also announced spontaneously), etcetera.

Originally this accessible Chess program could only work with the JAWS screen reader marketed by Freedom Scientific, (see below), hence it was named WinBoard for JAWS. But since September 2011 it also supports the open-source N V D A screen reader, and would automatically choose between the two depending on whether it detected N V D A was running on your system or not.

WinBoard 4.5 for JAWS has all the functionality of WinBoard 4.5.2, and will enable blind people to access and analyze Chess games in P G N files, play Chess on an Internet Chess Server such as FICS, or play against a Chess engine. New compared to version 4.4 is that its menus and dialogs can now be translated into various languages other than English (available are Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Russian, although not all of these translations also cover the explicitly spoken text).

WinBoard 4.5 for JAWS can be installed from the WinBoard forum with Fruit 2.1 as optional demo Chess engine, by clicking the link below.

Install WinBoard 4.5 for JAWS (1,527,994 bytes)

Some people have experienced problems downloading the file. If your system complains that the file is incomplete or damaged, check the size of what you downloaded. If necessary, choose "Save" in stead of "Open" from the download dialog initially, so that the file is saved, and then open it later. If its size is not 1,527,994 bytes, the download must have been interrupted, and you should try again.

JAWS

JAWS is a screen reader, which is a tool to help blind people use a computer by reading out loud information that is in the display. It is marketed by Freedom Scientific, and a demo version of JAWS is available from their website.

International Computer Games Association (ICGA) has found that the dominant computer chess program and engine in the last half of the noughties, Rybka, programmed by Vasik Rajlich, has broken its rules by incorporating elements of older programs, especially Crafty and Fruit without attribution. They have stripped Rybka of World Computer Chess Championship titles earned 2007-10. Rybka has recently been supplanted as the top engine by, amongst others, Houdini. However this issue of using elements of other programs is not limited to Rybka alone. Should new programs have to reinvent the wheel or be able to build on well understood elements of the past? If so, what are these elements? I'm not clear on this. Also in an era of free engines and their heavy use by players there may be commercial implications for the future.

• You can read the most recent in a series of articles by ChessVibes on this issue.
• Also Download Text and PDF files zipped of the details of the investigation and judgement.

Source: Mark Crowther