You might be shocked at how easy and inexpensive it is to cheat at over the board chess. In this article, we will explain a rudimentary design that anyone can use to cheat at chess. This tool is hidden on your body and passes any detector test. Curious to learn more about this? Read on to find out how.
Disclaimer: Cheating in chess is bad and can get you permamently banned by FIDE, which is the governning body of chess. This article is to point out the loopholes in the anti-chess cheating system that FIDE has set up, and to suggest ways in which chess officials can up their efforts to make chess fair for everyone.
Now with that said, here are the steps in creating and utilizing this chess cheating tool:
- Take a bluetooth micro controller
- Power it with a small battery
- Buzz a buzzer (this should be concealed somewhere on your body so that only you can feel it but no one else can hear or detect it)
- Establish a protocol. For example, if the move is pawn to a4, then you buzz once and delay for the letter a. Then add 4 more buzzes in rapid successions.
Components Of The Tool
The seed studio will be the core of the design. This is a small chip that has bluetooth. You can get it on Amazon for little as $24.99.
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The output device will be a small buzzer, like the one you have in your phone. You can buy 15 of these for $12.99 on Amazon
The next thing you will need is a battery to power the whole thing. You can get a 5 pack small lithium ion batteries on Amazon for about $15.00. This will work well with the board that we will be using. You can also use watch batteries as an alternative.
The process should work smoothly as long as:
- No one can hear it
- Only you can feel it
- The signal can come wirelessly
- The device is hard to find on your body.
Wiring The Battery
Wire up the battery to the board itself. On the battery, you will see an LED light turning on and off which will indicate that the board is running some code and is receiving power.
Connect the buzzer into one of the output pins via the ground wire. (The purpose of a ground wire is to give excess electrical charges a safe place to go.)
Once you do this, the buzzer should be working, connected and buzzing.
Here is a small script of the code that controls the rate and level at which the buzzer vibrates.
This turns on D10 causing the buzzer to start buzzing. That is, if the buzzer is connected to 10 in ground at the back of the seed studio. You can make changes to the script to modify how loud or soft the buzzer is so no one can hear it. For example, in line 10 of the script time.sleep (0.5), changing the value from 0.5 to 0.1 will produce a softer and more silent buzz.
Buzzer connected to 10 in ground
Write A Script That Turns The Buzzer On And Off
The next step is to write a script that taps into the bluetooth low energy of the seed studio, so that you can start to communcate with it by turning the buzzer on and off.
Proof of concept: The gif below demonstrates how the buzzer can be controlled from your phone via bluetooth. An app, that is essentially like a video game controller, is installed on the phone. When you press the button, the buzzer vibrates as shown below.
Now you can put this tool anywhere on your body. Someone in the audience, or someone who is watching the stream could press the button to relay the information to you on what moves to make over the chess board. They can send you information, or you can send yourself the information.
Once again, you will have to establish a protocol that will correspond the moves over the chessboard to the type of buzz you feel.
With enough practice, you can master this in time and become a professional at it. No one will be able to hear as the buzz would be very faint.
Concealing The Tool (Passing The Detector Test)
The core at which we are building is done. After that, you just need someone to feed the stockfish moves into the app. You can also build the app itself so that it looks at your stream and feeds you the stockfish moves.
Now you need to find somewhere on your body to hide the tool and some band-aids to fix it to yourself.
Areas where you can conceal the tool are:
1. Your foot: Hide it between your toes using a band-aid. This is going to pass every detector test. It’s also a good idea to wear socks. No one is going to tell anyone to take their socks or shoes off anyway.
OR
2. Attatch it to the back of your knee:
3. Attach it on your stomach or belly
Other places to hide the tool are:
- In your hair if it’s long and curly.
- Behind the button on a pair of pants. Therefore, if it triggers a metal detector you can say that it is the button. This is perhaps the ideal place to hide it.
Recommended Actions FIDE should take to preserve the integrity of the sport
One way FIDE can prevent this from happening is to increase stream delays to a point where it is impossible to retrieve data from an outside accomplice or computer.
However, this can be subverted through a push button switch that will send information out. This means the computer or person in the audience will not need to rely on data from the live stream.
But instead, when the player pushes the button in certain rapid successions. Again, a protocol will need to be established for pushing the buttons that will correspond with a specific move on the chess board. This will send information back to the computer.
In this scenario, you don’t even need to have an accomplice or external computer whatsoever. The seed studio itself can be a self contained computer unit. However, you will need a more powerful chip to run a stockfish program. Nonetheless, you will be able to get moves back by pushing the button to record the game state and then listening to the vibrartions to get the move that you need to make.
Wouldn’t it be weird to have a push button on you?
Defintely yes. To reduce any suspicion, you can use other alternative censors to relay back the information to the computer unit. For example, you can put an electrode on your calf and flex it in the right pattern to transmit the moves.
How Does FIDE Protect Against Something Like This?
It’s really hard imagining how a player can be caught without invading the privacy of the chess player. Yes, you can implement airport level security detector or even pat downs. But in my opinion, you’ll never be able to completely eliminate the threat of somebody cheating. If someone is truly motivated enough to cheat, they will find a way.
The level of cheating in chess will all depend on the risk to reward ratio. Therefore, if there is not much prize money involved, a player will not feel compelled to go out of his way and risk cheating. As long as you don’t have million dollar chess tournaments, people will think it’s not worth it.
