Puzzle 5: The Disqualified Chess Prodigy
A boy wins a chess tournament but is disqualified after shaking his opponent’s hand. Why?
Scenario:
A 12-year-old boy defeats a world-renowned chess grandmaster in a televised tournament. As they shake hands, judges abruptly disqualify him. The crowd erupts in confusion—the boy hadn’t cheated. Security footage shows him whispering, “Checkmate, sleeping beauty,” to his opponent. What went wrong?
Answer:
The grandmaster had died of a heart attack 20 minutes into the match. Panicked staff kept the game going to avoid chaos. The boy, believing it was a VR simulation test, kept moving both players’ pieces. When he shook the corpse’s stiffening hand, rigor mortis caused the fingers to snap audibly. Forensic timestamps proved all his “winning moves” occurred post-mortem. The tournament was later revealed to be an AI training experiment—the boy thought he was battling a robot.
