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You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00

As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw.

Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the best chess engines, but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy.

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> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy.

Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software.

In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, and me telling the computer the long term strategy.

It is. See Centaur chess[1] and correspondence chess. In correspondence chess people don't use standardized hardware (people will probably cheat anyway) but in Centaur chess this can be done.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

> Is computer assisted chess a thing?

It was called Advanced Chess [1], now it's sometimes referred to as Centaur Chess. You can find online servers to play this kind of thing but it's mostly just a sort of curiosity. Computer-human pairs are well known to be better than just computers at chess though.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

> In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating

Chess is 99% tactics/calculation. What we call "strategy" is just a set of heuristics that we use to avoid having to do endless calculations. However, a lot of those heuristics are already included in most chess playing software. So, if you're weak player as a whole, even if you have some strategy acumen, your contribution in an assisted chess setting will be negligible. The computer will be doing all the work anyway.

My rating is around 2000 and I have done some assisted chess playing and I can tell you that it's extremely hard to not just take computer's suggestion at every move. The chance that I'll come up with some brilliant move that the computer missed is very slim.

I think I misunderstood what "calculating" means in a chess setting. I thought it meant checking the current position of the pieces and making sure you are not about to be attacked.

But googling it suggests it's more about thinking of the value of each move relative to others. If that's the case I'm not actually bad at that.

> I can tell you that it's extremely hard to not just take computer's suggestion at every move.

Is that how it works? The computer just basically plays and shows you some moves it likes?

That's not what I meant, I was thinking that you tell the computer something like: I want to capture piece X using Y 10 to 20 moves from now, perhaps by going via this direction. Tell me the best series of moves to get there while avoiding traps.

Or even better give it 2 or 3 such scenarios and have it tell you how dangerous each one would be so you can pick one.

Basically really narrow down the permutations the computer has to calculate.

There is a chess app on IOS that suggests you moves and warns you against obvious situations where you would lose your piece. It's using an old but still popular engine: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chess/id522314512?mt=8

I had most fun with this chess engine. Stockfish engine was not fun at all, it was playing like an "asshole" most of the time and when the AI strength is reduced it was like playing against a stupid "asshole". When playing against human you feel like your opponent is on something but against AI you feel like you run for your life. Mind you though, I am very amateur chess player, I play only recreationally.

Computer assisted chess is becoming more popular in human-only tournaments. In that context it's usually called cheating, of course. Ken Regan has developed some interesting statistical methods to detect it, see for example his blog post on Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2013/07/27/thirteen-sigma/

What a coincidence, just yesterday The United States Chess Federation published an article about Ken Regan and his methods for detecting cheating.

Article: http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12677/763/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7831291

Funny commentary:

> That either shows a profound understanding... or a profound lack of understanding. ... ROOK B6! He has NO SHAME

Maybe it's obvious to those with a better understanding of the game but can explain that "no shame" comment at 11:44?

I'm guessing Magnus thinks it was a typical computer move: Strong but not obvious and a bit off-beat.

Guessing that it's referring to the engine being particularly greedy about material (a notorious trait of computer engines). It's giving up a ton of control on the back rank to defend a crappy doubled pawn. Happy to be proven wrong on this one, just shooting from the hip here.

Which chess engine is behind this app?

As far as I understand the app (whose avatar's age goes up to 23) actually plays better than the living world champion?

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