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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

It didn't destroy chess but it did make it a little irritating in some ways. More mechanical. Some chess players have bemoaned the level to which grandmasters and other highly-ranked players just endlessly study opening-book theory and I think computers made that worse. Bobby Fischer also agreed and that's why he invented Fischer random chess.

I do think it also took some of the magic away from chess, and Lee Sedol has said something similar about go.

So did it destroy it? No. And maybe you could make the argument that it got more exciting in some ways, but I think it sort of degenerated into a spectacle and it's just not as interesting as it used to be, and I think computers have played a role in that.

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At the same time though, Magnus is Magnus because he’ll crush you in any endgame.

I’d posit that more people are playing more and learning chess than ever before, thanks to networking and AI assistance. And computers have only beaten us at computer chess. Human chess is always an experience for learning about the other person, or flipping the board and walking off in a huff.

I don’t know so much about Go and it’s not surprising that Lee Sedol became pretty demoralised, but the generation coming after him alongside computers are going to see new possibilities that had gone unnoticed in purely-human Go, extending the game for everyone.

I don't think more people playing is necessarily a good thing for the enjoyment of the game in the long run, just like more people with phones is not necessarily a good thing for enjoying photography if it means photography is primarily used as fuel for social media algorithms.

Of course Magnus would crush be, but the existence of the best player in the world doesn't have any impact on the health of the game community as a whole. Magnus would crush me even if he had never used a computer, but in the latter case I think his games against other players would be more interesting as well.

I’m not really sure what kind of world you’re looking for where chess is played with the maximum of purity and artistry by only the right kind of people.

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