AI-powered mechanisms as judges: Breaking ties in chess and beyond

Recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology use has been rising in sports. For example, to reduce staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, major tennis tournaments replaced human line judges with Hawk-Eye Live technology. AI is now ready to move beyond such mundane tasks, however. A case in point and a perfect application ground is chess. To reduce the growing incidence of draws, many elite tournaments have resorted to fast chess tiebreakers. However, these tiebreakers are vulnerable to strategic manipulation, e.g., in the last game of the 2018 World Chess Championship, Magnus Carlsen -- in a significantly advantageous position -- offered a draw to Fabiano Caruana (whom accepted the offer) to proceed to fast chess tiebreaks in which Carlsen had even better odds of winning the championship. By contrast, we prove that our AI-based method can serve as a judge to break ties without being vulnerable to such manipulation. It relies on measuring the difference between the evaluations of a player's actual move and the best move as deemed by a powerful chess engine. If there is a tie, the player with the higher quality measure wins the tiebreak. We generalize our method to all competitive sports and games in which AI's superiority is -- or can be -- established.