Can Chess Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Chess is today more popular than ever, with online playing platforms like chess.com or lichess.org, where you can find an opponent in seconds and easily analyze the game afterwards.

The short time formats like Rapid 15 minutes with 10 seconds increment per move is my favorite, but the most popular format is Blitz, which is say 5 minutes with 5 seconds increment.

You can play even bullet of 2 minutes with 1 second increment, or even no increment formats. You can play chess anywhere, at the bus stop, in the dentist office, take video lessons, do practical drills, puzzles.

Via the rating system, you are always matched to an opponent of near-equivalent strength. The rating system is build so that a 200 point difference means that the higher-rated player will on average win 3 out of 4.

Most opponents are less than 100 points apart, so it's typically a 50/50 chance that you will win a given game.

Chess only looks dull for those who don't play it, it can be super exciting. But the classical format, with a physical board, and 5 hour games? I think that will become less and less of a thing.

A great example at how computers affect chess commentary is the currently ongoing tournament in St. Louis. On youtube, the game is broadcast by people using an engine to evaluate the position they're looking at, and on twitch, two grandmasters are providing commentary without an engine. The youtube stream can be easier to follow, but it takes some of the drama out when the story appears to be "look at this guy, missing the best move when he's #4 in the world, how could this happen?" for every game. On the other hand, the grandmasters' commentary might be closer to what the players are actually thinking (what would be deemed "human moves"), but sometimes even they aren't sure what exactly is going on.

https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub https://www.twitch.tv/stlchessclub

The 'AI beats worldchampion in ...' is a story that has diminishing newsvalue as time progresses as people will just come to expect this to be the case.

Competitive games survive AI not because humans are a good match to the AI, but because people like playing other people, or watch humans playing each other. A Dota 2 championship does not wane in interest because there exists an AI model that can beat most human teams. Cycling races did survive the advent of the motorcycle just fine.

What does change is the scrutiny that needs to be deployed for catching fraudsters using automation assistance in human competitions. But is looking out for a hidden computer or communications device in a chess tournament different from looking for hidden motors in a cycling race?

Yes, but its in a new form.

Hardcore "no rules bared" chess is correspondence chess, where you have 24-hours between moves and can use whatever means necessary to make the best move.

If you think just buying a supercomputer and running Stockfish (or LeelaZero) will win, then you don't know anything about opening databases. All the good correspondance chess players have already run Stockfish / LeelaZero across many different openings, and have collected statistics on which openings will lead to situations where Stockfish (or LeelaZero, or Komodo, etc. etc) will inevitably fail.

These computer AI chess programs have weaknesses. A "Cyborg" team, composed of a human guiding Stockfish (or LeelaZero) through opening books can get further than any computer alone, and likely push the opponent into a subtly failing position.

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The article talks about it a bit in Centaur Chess section. That's probably where the biggest challenge lies in the future. Centaurs have access to the 8-man database, you keep opening-books secret, and you spend time studying how Stockfish, Leela Zero, or Komodo (or other engines) makes mistakes.

Or, you write your own engine, and try to use that as an edge.

> The impact of computer chess on the game — as still played by humans — has been twofold. First, computers have helped to flatten chess, increasing pure understanding of the game at the expense of creativity, mystery, and dynamism. Second, they have become intertwined with every aspect of chess, from play at the highest level to amateur study and the spectator’s experience.

This speaks more about the players than computers. It is still very possible to play ‘human’ chess at an extremely high level. Look at the number of London systems at the top level, the way Carlsen decides to play a Czech Benoni against a lesser grandmaster. He won that game out of human skill, not computer mastery.

The human element of chess is alive and well. The computerisation of chess started to sky rocket when computers and humans were at similarish playing strengths. As computers have far overtaken humans at chess now, I think chess will start to humanise itself once more.

Will the 100 m dash survive the car?

I imagine there will come a point where algorithmic chess (I wouldn't call it AI) results in perfect play, where every match ends as a draw. Much like the scene in War Games where the computer plays tic-tac-toe against itself and every game ends in a draw. Given sufficient resources, and the fact that there is no chance at all in chess (save choosing who moves first), it seems to me it's only a matter of time before every move is the perfect move. That would mean one of two things: either every game ends in a draw, or every game ends with white winning.

The end result of this is that every game will be the same. Given two effectively infinitely-skilled computer players, there's no more game to play. There's always a best move, and the best one could hope for is the draw (or, again, white would always win; I'm not sure if it's been proven that first move guarantees a win with perfect play--but it's one case or the other).

Human vs. human will remain a compelling game, both for players and observers, but computer-vs-computer will cease to be interesting at all. As will human-vs-computer, except maybe as a way to see who can survive the longest before losing or drawing; no human can win against the best computers even today, and never will again.

I personally think this is an extremely exciting time in chess, especially when you take into account the surprising amount of doom and gloom that occurred around the World Championship. We've recently moved from long, boring theoretical battles in the Berlin or Petrov to revive various lines in the Sicilian, and Magnus Carlsen's classical revival since retaining his title seems to be based on very interesting positional sacrifices, instead of just grinding out wins from mostly-equal positions as he may have done in the past. It's hard not to want to acknowledge the invisible hand of AlphaZero (and indeed Leela) in these changes. I'd like to think that opening theory is going to go through something of a renaissance as more top players get access to these new engines with a better long term strategic sense of the game. It's hard to believe we're going to run out of new, interesting positions in our lifetimes.

Between those changes at the board, and the wider changes of people pushing chess as an esport, and growing prize pools from St Louis and the Grand Prix circuit, there's never been a better time to be a player or fan at any level of the game.

The answer to the question is yes, most chess players have accepted computers play the game better and don't care. High level chess will eventually just change the rules if forced drawing lines make it too dull.

My personal theory as to why chess isn't that popular in the US - and why the US produces relatively few world-class players given its very large talent pool - is that chess at a high level involves a large number of draws. The last championship was entirely bloodless in the main games and had to go to tiebreaks (rapid + blitz games). At IM+ level more than half of games end with draws. And this goes contrary to the US mentality where everyone is either a 'winner' or a 'loser' and competition is seen as a highest ideal. A game where most of the time it is impossible to tell the better player must feel frustrating to amateurs. And indeed, many many many times some laymen will complain that there are 'too many draws' and 'the rules must be changed' so spectators see some blood.

Another common complaint related to draws is the number of 'grandmaster draws', or 'comfort draws', whereby two players, usually at a high level, agree to leave it at that after a low number of moves (Chess is one of the few games featuring 'draw by agreement', meaning both players may agree to a draw at any point in the game without justification). Almost every grandmaster is guilty of that, and players who do that often get derided by their coaches, the media and amateurs: how dare you, you are a disgrace to the sport, I didn't pay to watch this, etc. I daresay the complainers are either hypocritical or have never been involved in high-level long-form tournaments (7+ days of 4+ hour games each plus rapid/blitz side events etc.). Sometimes both players feel tired and don't want to play it out (usually due to having played it out 6+ hours the game before) and objecting to that is just unrealistic. Chess isn't a gladiatoral arena. Then there are the famous accusations of collusion from Fischer against his Soviet counterparts but Fischer has always been slightly mad his whole life so I wouldn't take anything he said seriously.

It's a bit like asking if athletics will survive the cars, because no one can outrun a car. Well, as long as you play chess against other humans AI is irrelevant, isn't it?

This article misses the actual problem. It suggests that computers are gradually yielding a perfection of play which is implied to lead to a draw. But that's not really what's happening. In fact computer chess now already has fewer draws than top level human chess. The issue is that chess is unimaginably vast. The article talks about people having the first 15 moves prepared. That's true, and false. In each position there are somewhere around 30 legal moves on average and 3-4 decent moves. That means after just the first 15 moves there are 3.5^30 reasonable moves to explore. That's 20 quadrillion reasonable options. And obviously the entire search space, 30^30 is rather larger.

No human has explored more than a minuscule fraction of that domain, and today computers are already much stronger than the strongest humans. In times past this was not such a big deal. You play what looks good or promising, and even once you get outside of your preparation it'll still be human against human or, at worst, human against team of humans. But this is where computers now come in. Now if you enter into a complex position that your opponent has analyzed with a computer and you haven't, you stand a very real chance of losing without your opponent ever having to think for himself or you having any real chance.

As a result of this players are increasingly preferring lines which tend to be very "solid" with much less room for your opponent to find 'surprise moves' or novelties. And even if they happen to find such a move you stand a good chance of being able to somewhat safely navigate the waters since the position is, again, "solid." The problem should be obvious. This sort of chess is extremely prone to draws.

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You can even see this in chess events when a player loses. Modern world championship matches are very short (usually 12 games). So a single loss is huge because you just don't have much time to catch up. As a result once a player loses the calculus of the match significantly changes and now even if you do get caught out - well you were going to lose anyway. And so the players will put aside computer fears and return to more 'traditional' views of chess. And as a result you often see a decisive game end up being followed by another decisive game. At worst one decisive game is often followed by much more interesting games.

This is one of the reasons there have been suggestions like returning to draw odds in favor of the champion (as used to be the case in some matches). Now a days instead to resolve draws in the slow chess we go to increasingly rapid time controls and even, at the extreme end, a times-odd game where black gets draw odds. As variance ostensibly becomes larger in those sort of games, the challenger is often happy to just draw the probably stronger champion in slow chess and hope to get lucky in the fast tie-breaks. Other ideas have been to play the tie-breaks before the real match starts, or to have a tie-break for every single game so they're always decisive. Again, it's always the same goal - to remove drawing as an acceptable outcome for at least one of the players.

You can also see this exact affect even in tournament events. When there is no leader all the games tend to be draw heavy because the calculus is directed towards the value of 'not losing' over winning. But once a player starts to pull ahead of the pack, the calculus starts to change more towards winning. And so one player winning ends up triggering a cascade of decisive games or, again, at worst much more interesting games.

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The problem isn't computers - it's fear of computers and somehow removing the value of draws in chess. But nobody's found any really great way to solve these problems.