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 no

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. --- 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. --- 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.