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Comment by ashd157 | Hacker News Reader

So you are saying in the end of that piece that chess players came out stronger?

You know how? Because AI is forbidden in tournaments and there are plenty of idle rich sponsors in Chess (it is popular among autocrats).

So you are envisioning a future of software development where we have coding competitions sponsored by MBS where AI is forbidden?

Like your Pelican meme, which is designed to cutify AI, this is propaganda of the highest order.

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Hahaha, this is the first time I've seen the pelican thing described as "propaganda"!

One of the main reasons I do the pelican thing is that it's making fun of the industry:

1. The smartest model in the world still draws pelicans riding bicycles worse than a five year old.

2. It highlights how absurd the task of comparing these models is. Oh, so it scored 78 on Terminal Bench 2.1? It also drew a crap pelican.

> So you are saying in the end of that piece that chess players came out stronger?

That was an off-the-cuff remark on the podcast which I included in the transcript. It's not my overall thesis.

Staying out of the larger discussion, but:

> The smartest model in the world still draws pelicans riding bicycles worse than a five year old.

The bicycle is something that humans are famously bad at drawing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/18/the-h...

I'm gonna need to see some proof on that 5-year-old-draws-pelicans-better claim.

A test where a computer draws a pelican riding a bike is propaganda of the highest order?

Yes chess players are stronger thanks to AI. Which is why every high level chess player trains with AI, even if it's banned in actual tournaments

I believe that the average elo of players is increasing since powerful chess AI / Go AI.

Elo is zero sum. Each point gained by one player is lost by another. It follows that the mean elo is always exactly equal to the initial elo assigned to new players before they play any games, and can't change over time. If the highest ranked player are higher elo than before, the lower ranked players must be lower elo.

>Elo is zero sum.

In a closed, static pool only.

Right, but you have to give the new players some rating, and as long as that number remains constant it will also be the mean Elo. Therefore, "new players entering the pool" can't cause a rise in mean Elo. As for lower rated players leaving, that could indeed raise the mean (assuming you stop counting them in the average), but that changes the point from "players have gotten better because of AI" to "worse players are more likely to just give up on chess because of AI", which is a significantly less optimistic picture IMO.

What? I don't think anyone has given up on chess because of computers in my lifetime

I didn't say they did. What I said was that if the person I was replying to was correct that average Elo ratings had increased because of AI, the mechanism would have to be "AI makes lower ranked players give up" instead of "AI makes players better on average"

Was the average ELO of players approximately stable before chess engines?

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