Biometric Face Recognition and AI-Powered Anti-Cheat — Timur Turlov's Plans on Protecting Fair Play

Timur Turlov

President of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation

“I think, with the development of artificial intelligence and models — when we have a lot of mathematical problems, and even century-old mathematical problems, being solved by AI models — we definitely should dedicate resources to make sure that we will help to build one of the most efficient anti-cheat engines. Maybe with collaboration with other digital players.

But I think for FIDE it is extremely important to keep fair play and to keep integrity of ratings to make sure that the real strengths of chess players will be calculated correctly. We could be able to also identify chess players, especially professional chess players.

I think with current very cheap biometric identification we can prove that a single person will have a single account if they want to play competitive chess. And in this case the cost of online cheating will be equivalent to the cost of cheating in offline professional chess, where any attempts to cheat could be punished in a track record and a professional career of a chess player.

And I think this integrity with FIDE biometric ID, which could be a cheap and very fast solution for the international chess federation, together with some efforts to develop an anti-cheating solution, will definitely help.

And I will be happy to contribute, on a nonprofit basis, resources of ChessBase to make sure that we will develop a strong anti-cheating solution for the international chess federation. It will be publicly available for any member federation to ensure integrity of games.

And of course, we will be happy to have any other members and any other chess professionals in a discussion for developing the best possible anti-cheating solution. Because as with any security feature, it will require improvement all the time, so it will never be 100% efficient.

[Question: What exactly does biometric identification mean?]

It’s face recognition. It’s the simplest solution and it’s banking-quality identification. In Kazakhstan we open bank accounts just by taking a picture from a phone camera. And then it verifies this picture with the picture in the government passport database.

I think in chess we just need to authenticate, not necessarily even verify the player. If the player is a professional and we have a picture, we can make sure that that’s exactly this person playing. If the person is not a professional, we can just verify that they can’t have a double account.”