Business · Wired
Since such machines were banned in casinos, they had to be concealed carefully
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On arrival in Philadelphia, the Duke wired himself up, putting on a pair of headphones to secure his wig.
Key facts
- It was June 1993, before the start of the World Open chess tournament, hosted by the City of Brotherly Love
- The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957
- The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von
- Rob Reitzen packed light for the flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia
Summary
The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in chess history.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann incident” as “the earliest known case of a potential computer cheater.” This was decades before chess pros started getting expelled from tournaments for using smartphones, and a lifetime before the recent buzzing anal beads scandal. (Google it, but not at work.) It was years ahead of Garry Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves to be smarter than machines.