5 ms·

Well clearly the new chess Masters are no longer players but programmers. That doesn't make the game uninteresting though. A few months ago, one would have tho

Well clearly the new chess Masters are no longer players but programmers. That doesn't make the game uninteresting though. A few months ago, one would have thought that we had the best algorithm and that progress would only be slowly incremental for now on... until the approach adopted to best humans at the game of go got applied to chess. Now you have these programs like LeelaChess able to best Stockfish (a program that had been improved over the last fifteen years) after a few months of training. There's definitely a lot more to discover in this game.

mikorym 7y ago
> a lot more to discover That is how I understand it as well. Blue Gene used heuristics such as rook = 5 and knight = 3 and there must be many more complex heuristics or direct approaches that you can use once your machine learning methods get enough computing power.
- _0ffh 7y ago
  Yes, still it is astounding how far you can get with relatively simple heuristics and a well pruned search tree. One interesting heuristic, which falls right out of "von Försters Imperative" is: Prefer moves that maximize the number of choices you have in the future, and minimize those of your opponent.
aflag 7y ago
I don't know if programmers are the new game masters. As far as I know, bots are not allowed in most, if not all, chess competitions. It's not like we stopped doing the 100m dash after the intention of the bicycle or the car. Those are just other racing categories.
- Torwald 7y ago
  and the "racing category" the grandparent is talking about was initiated by crobots?
- soup10 7y ago
  over the board chess can be a struggle for programmers because we are so used to letting computers do the heavy lifting on calculations that its a struggle to think through tactical situations when you know a simple program would do the trick. It's almost like doing pen and paper arithmetic in the age of calculators.
  - newen 7y ago
    Implying programmers don't think? Come on now...
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Likely more along the lines of "being good at chess is hard", regardless of whether or not you're a programmer.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mikorym 7y ago

> a lot more to discover That is how I understand it as well. Blue Gene used heuristics such as rook = 5 and knight = 3 and there must be many more complex heuristics or direct approaches that you can use once your machine learning methods get enough computing power.

_0ffh 7y ago
Yes, still it is astounding how far you can get with relatively simple heuristics and a well pruned search tree. One interesting heuristic, which falls right out of "von Försters Imperative" is: Prefer moves that maximize the number of choices you have in the future, and minimize those of your opponent.

aflag 7y ago

I don't know if programmers are the new game masters. As far as I know, bots are not allowed in most, if not all, chess competitions. It's not like we stopped doing the 100m dash after the intention of the bicycle or the car. Those are just other racing categories.

Torwald 7y ago
and the "racing category" the grandparent is talking about was initiated by crobots?
soup10 7y ago
over the board chess can be a struggle for programmers because we are so used to letting computers do the heavy lifting on calculations that its a struggle to think through tactical situations when you know a simple program would do the trick. It's almost like doing pen and paper arithmetic in the age of calculators.
- newen 7y ago
  Implying programmers don't think? Come on now...
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Likely more along the lines of "being good at chess is hard", regardless of whether or not you're a programmer.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]