Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability, even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.
The key piece missing in chess was how to know what positions were worth searching with a computer. A human had that intuition, and so a 'centaur' could be better. But that hiccup was solved by AlphaGo, using the expectation neural network.
About the only thing left for humans to do is deciding which problems to try to solve.
For games like Go, where computers are not yet capable of viewing the full depth of the possibility tree, I imagine that human+computer is still a viable strategy.
The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at Go.
Perfect solutions to games is a 40 year old approach. It's something you learn in school, so you can quickly see that brute-force searching is not feasible on even small problem.
What it's doing is using the computer's ability to randomly test various lines of inquiry many, many times faster than a human being can, and then use statistical methods to help rule out the lines that cannot produce anything of value.
That's why it's Monte Carlo Tree Search.
That said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic [0], and with modern Machine Learning techniques we are getting closer to crossing the line over to "magic" in certain fields, such as Chess.
[0] Clarke's Third Law, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
One wonders whether the inherent approach in AlphaStar (supervised learning) can only ever hope to imitate the best, but surpassing the previous best seems to still be a human domain for now, at least in SC2.
> Unfortunately for the article's point, despite a brief moment of viability, even human+computer chess teams are now far outclassed by computers alone.
and it then continued:
> The top Go player in the world retired saying that he thought he was almost perfect, but then a "superior being" showed him he wasn't even close. I doubt there is a human on the planet that can improve the strength of the best AI at Go.
I was making the point that, even though there have been AI advances since the article was written about chess, defeating its immediate point about chess, these advances have also come with their own caveats. ("Oh this technique that beats chess perfectly can't hope to beat Go". "Oh this technique that beats Go perfectly can't hope to beat StarCraft".) These caveats serve to reinforce this article's broader point - that AI has limitations, that humans can complement, and vice versa.