The clever folks at Adafruit tested their Cheekmate chess-cheating prototype by embedding it in a slab of pork butt.
The Internet has been abuzz for weeks about a particularly juicy chess cheating controversy that erupted last month. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost in the third round to a 19-year-old upstart, Hans Niemann, in what was widely considered to be a shocking upset. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament the next day, and his cryptic comments on Twitter fueled rampant speculation that Niemann had cheated. The fact that Niemann admitted to cheating in online chess matches didn’t help his case, but he steadfastly insisted he never cheated in over-the-board games.
The fierce debate eventually produced a bizarre viral conspiracy theory that Niemann had used anal beads to receive coded messages during the match. But would that even be possible? The folks at Adafruit Industries were sufficiently intrigued to put the theory to the test—you know, just to get to the bottom of the matter. The result is a prototype device called Cheekmate—because the Adafruit team rightfully loves their punny innuendoes—complete with a step-by-step guide for those who might want to build their own prototype.
This device, Adafruit insists, is not for actual cheating: “That would be asinine… in brief, a stain on the sport, but to record for posterior whether this sort of backdoor intrusion is even plausible or just an Internet myth.” Lacking any willing human volunteers to test the prototype, they ended up embedding Cheekmate in a big, juicy slab of pork butt.
The Carlsen/Niemann dustup is being called the most serious chess cheating scandal since the 2006 World Chess Championship, dubbed “Toiletgate” because Veselin Topalov accused his opponent, Vladimir Kramnik, of going to the bathroom too often. (Topalov thought Kramnik was getting computer assistance during the match via these bathroom breaks, later insisting that network cables had been found in the bathroom ceiling.) But it’s the anal beads conspiracy theory—courtesy of a Reddit user’s since-removed humorous post on the possibility—that truly sets the current controversy apart. “The theory is too irresistible to ignore,” Ethan Gach wrote at Kotaku. “It’s bonkers, but just on the cusp of feasibility.”
Enter Adafruit, which naturally designed the Cheekmate prototype around the company’s own products, assuming a one-way communication with an accomplice for testing the core idea. (The project also requires a soldering iron.) That includes an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 with built-in Wi-Fi, capable of communicating with any mobile hotspot—like a cell phone with Wi-Fi tethering capability, presumably carried by the cheater’s accomplice.
