3 ms·

This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, a

by gwd 15d ago

This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Thirty years later, chess is more popular than it ever was, and chess players are better than they ever have been. I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been. Furthermore, it turns out that a lot of chess books written before computers were just wrong about a lot of things. It turns out having an oracle for the "right" answer in chess, even without an explanation, used properly, allows humans to develop broader, more accurate insights. The argument here sounds similar. The fear, as I understand this statement to be saying, is that by being given the correct answer, in the form of a 100-page Lean proof, humans will be robbed of the chance to from insights about the structure of mathematics itself. I don't see any reason that humans can't continue to develop insights as they try to digest the 100-page Lean proof into something more manageable; but with more certainty and fewer false starts.

tossandthrow 15d ago
I like this approach. A but like whenever the first sprinter hits a new world record other runners follow along. Knowing that something is possible tends to strengthen our ability to work with it. We will potentially see the same with math.
fantasizr 15d ago
=> If chess.com was worth billions and Daniel Rensch was threatening everyone to do what he says.
senfiaj 15d ago
Well, chess is a sport where humans are supposed to compete. But math, programming, science are mostly not, and AI might affect economy, careers, etc.
- magoghm 15d ago
  That's correct. As far as I know nodody builds any kind of science or technology on top of chess, but mathematics is at the base of most science and technology. It would be horrible if we prevented AI from solving mathematics problems, just because mathematicians want to solve them by themselves the "hard way".
- NewsaHackO 15d ago
  I guess part of the problem is that being against being against anything for economic interests doesn't really rally anyone to your cause; everyone has to make a living doing something productive for society, and professions have come and gone all the time due to technological advances. In fact, when one thinks about it, the people that are losing their professions now were major contributors to others losing their form of income. Often people talk about how they can use technological/programming/IT skills to make some secretary or administrative assistant's job obsolete. So most people just don't feel a lot of sympathy when people complain that AI are going to take those people's jobs.
- sweezyjeezy 15d ago
  As a chess fan, 100% this. We have known for the last ~15 years who the best human chess player is, and that he will lose against stockfish on his phone. But chess survives because of the human characters involved, the rivalries and dramas, watching two people trying to overcome each other under insane pressure, and sometimes coming up with something astonishing. In short - it's a sport. There is no equivalent in math.
  - dsjoerg 14d ago
    Uh I was literally on math team
djierardi 15d ago
But computers have destroyed chess as a "sport". Nobody will sit to watch two chess programs compete, or analyze their tactics. Kinda like how now, anybody can construct a "game" over the weekend or a new song or a slop video. The value of each of these decreases to 0 as the slop overwhelms.
- Bourget 15d ago
  >Nobody will sit to watch two chess programs compete, or analyze their tactics. I know nothing about chess yet I dare say that I'd doubt this. Surely chess enthusiasts would be interested in analyzing how a superior chess program came out victorious, no?
  - 7373737373 15d ago
    People do: https://tcec-chess.com/ https://tcec-chess.com/
  - latent-person 15d ago
    Yes you are right, some people do watch chess engines play. TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) [1] streams them. Popular chess YouTubers goes over engine games from time to time too. [1] https://tcec-chess.com/ https://tcec-chess.com/
    - throwaway27448 15d ago
      That's not proof of interest so much as proof of commerce. It could easily be a money-laundering mechanism. Mostly nobody cares about professional chess. The number of people who are actually interested in today's game and not the drama are a tiny sliver of that. This is actually great because it means we can train and evaluate both without interference from chess players, possibly even building a stable society.
      - latent-person 14d ago
        Here [1] is a video made 3 months ago going over an engine vs an engine made by of one of the big YouTubers, which has 1.4m views. Enough proof? [1]https://youtu.be/Ov7K4W-zAk0?is=6jVBkQpn8xbaA2Tz https://youtu.be/Ov7K4W-zAk0?is=6jVBkQpn8xbaA2Tz
jaccola 15d ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been Well yeah... how would there be fewer?? But the point itself is silly. Few people are putting effort into Maths for the fun of it (and of those that are many derive fun from being the only one who can produce a solution). Chess differs in that it never had any point but the game its self.
drudolph914 14d ago
I was apart of the "covid chess cohort" and got really into it for quite a few years. In that time, I also learned about what the chess culture was like pre-engine and post-engine, and I think you could argue that post-engine did kind of make the game more mechanical - and that kinda ruined things for people that grew up in the pre-engine era. it felt like pre-engine chess had a lot of mystique to it because knowing the best move was never truly clear. the only way to know what was best, was by: getting better yourself, socializing at chess club, learning from better players or coach. this sort of lack of clarity is what drove people to learn more about the game. like think about what it must've been like to go to a chess tournaments pre-engines: finals matches had everyone at your chess club watching the game, calculating lines with each other, and you HAD to calculate to understand the direction of game. it sounds so much more engaging and fun! now, the top games have the stockfish bar next to it, and you instantly know who's got better odds without having to really follow along. and you're not encouraged to calculate beyond a few moves ahead because you just offload the real thinking to stockfish. honestly, it's a vibe a killer when you go back and see images and read about the culture beforehand. I agree engines didn't really "kill" chess - and I think most of that is due to chess not being tied to economic value. but it did kill what I believe was a superior culture compared to today's chess era. all this to say, I think what AI did to chess culture in the 90s is happening to stem right now with LLMs
- YeGoblynQueenne 14d ago
  >> I was apart of the "covid chess cohort" and got really into it for quite a few years. In that time, I also learned about what the chess culture was like pre-engine and post-engine, and I think you could argue that post-engine did kind of make the game more mechanical - and that kinda ruined things for people that grew up in the pre-engine era. it felt like pre-engine chess had a lot of mystique to it because knowing the best move was never truly clear. the only way to know what was best, was by: getting better yourself, socializing at chess club, learning from better players or coach. I need to be very precise here, but it is not right to say that we know what the best move is in any chess board position. What we know is what move a chess engine would make that would win the game against a human, or sometimes another chess engine. We know a winning move; not the best move. Winning in chess is not the same as knowing what the best move is. Having chess engines that can beat any human in chess is not the same as knowing how every possible game will develop. The latter is known as "solving chess" and we don't yet have that. We have fully solved games like tic-tac-toe, backgammon and checkers, so that there exist databases of every possible path through those games but this is not done for chess, and there is no hint that it is even possible to do given that chess is such a combinatorially more complex game than those. More to the point, the upshot of the fact that we now have super-human chess engines that can beat any human in chess (and Go and shoggi) is that there is no longer the will to research the bigger question about solving chess. The solution of the minor problem, how to beat humans in chess, has sidelined and displaced research in the major problem, how to solve chess, and we will now never find the solution to the latter. And if that reminds you of something, well, yes, exactly.
boelboel 14d ago
Many people argue computers were bad for chess till this day and there's good arguments for it.
YeGoblynQueenne 14d ago
>> This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Genuine question: who were those people saying that? I don't know that criticism. The criticism I know is from AI researchers and it is that beating humans at chess using a computer running an algorithm unlike anything that humans do when they play chess, tells us nothing about the way that humans play chess, which is what we are trying to understand when we try to get computers to play chess. This criticism is exemplified by John McCarthy's article (the real godfather of AI; because he named it) "Ai as Sport" whence I quote: Ideas about chess algorithms as well as advances in computer hardware were involved. However, it is a measure of our limited understanding of the principles of artificial intelligence (AI) that this level of play requires many millions of times as much computing as a human chess player does. Moreover, the fixation of most computer chess work on success in tournament play has come at scientific cost. In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html A more recent criticism that can be made is that getting computers to beat humans at chess (and later Go, and Shoggi and Atari and Stratego) has turned out to only be possible with techniques that are too narrow to have real-world application. Btw, this includes Reinforcement Learning which is still much more capable in virtual environments than in any real-world environment.
MerriBan 14d ago
[flagged]
bonoboTP 14d ago
> try to digest the 100-page Lean proof into something more manageable AI will be better at digesting it into something more manageable.
Valakas_ 12d ago
We like to think we are thinking beings that happen to feel, but we're actually feelings beings that happen to think. We don't realise how our emotions shape our arguments, and the whole Terrence arguments have, behind: "I like my job and want to continue doing it. It gives me meaning." The brain then goes and fills in arguments that support these feelings.

by gwd 15d ago

tossandthrow 15d ago

I like this approach. A but like whenever the first sprinter hits a new world record other runners follow along. Knowing that something is possible tends to strengthen our ability to work with it. We will potentially see the same with math.

fantasizr 15d ago

=> If chess.com was worth billions and Daniel Rensch was threatening everyone to do what he says.

senfiaj 15d ago

Well, chess is a sport where humans are supposed to compete. But math, programming, science are mostly not, and AI might affect economy, careers, etc.

magoghm 15d ago
That's correct. As far as I know nodody builds any kind of science or technology on top of chess, but mathematics is at the base of most science and technology. It would be horrible if we prevented AI from solving mathematics problems, just because mathematicians want to solve them by themselves the "hard way".
NewsaHackO 15d ago
I guess part of the problem is that being against being against anything for economic interests doesn't really rally anyone to your cause; everyone has to make a living doing something productive for society, and professions have come and gone all the time due to technological advances. In fact, when one thinks about it, the people that are losing their professions now were major contributors to others losing their form of income. Often people talk about how they can use technological/programming/IT skills to make some secretary or administrative assistant's job obsolete. So most people just don't feel a lot of sympathy when people complain that AI are going to take those people's jobs.
sweezyjeezy 15d ago
As a chess fan, 100% this. We have known for the last ~15 years who the best human chess player is, and that he will lose against stockfish on his phone. But chess survives because of the human characters involved, the rivalries and dramas, watching two people trying to overcome each other under insane pressure, and sometimes coming up with something astonishing. In short - it's a sport. There is no equivalent in math.
- dsjoerg 14d ago
  Uh I was literally on math team

djierardi 15d ago

But computers have destroyed chess as a "sport". Nobody will sit to watch two chess programs compete, or analyze their tactics. Kinda like how now, anybody can construct a "game" over the weekend or a new song or a slop video. The value of each of these decreases to 0 as the slop overwhelms.

Bourget 15d ago
>Nobody will sit to watch two chess programs compete, or analyze their tactics. I know nothing about chess yet I dare say that I'd doubt this. Surely chess enthusiasts would be interested in analyzing how a superior chess program came out victorious, no?
- 7373737373 15d ago
  People do: https://tcec-chess.com/ https://tcec-chess.com/
- latent-person 15d ago
  Yes you are right, some people do watch chess engines play. TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship) [1] streams them. Popular chess YouTubers goes over engine games from time to time too. [1] https://tcec-chess.com/ https://tcec-chess.com/
  - throwaway27448 15d ago
    That's not proof of interest so much as proof of commerce. It could easily be a money-laundering mechanism. Mostly nobody cares about professional chess. The number of people who are actually interested in today's game and not the drama are a tiny sliver of that. This is actually great because it means we can train and evaluate both without interference from chess players, possibly even building a stable society.
    - latent-person 14d ago
      Here [1] is a video made 3 months ago going over an engine vs an engine made by of one of the big YouTubers, which has 1.4m views. Enough proof? [1]https://youtu.be/Ov7K4W-zAk0?is=6jVBkQpn8xbaA2Tz https://youtu.be/Ov7K4W-zAk0?is=6jVBkQpn8xbaA2Tz

jaccola 15d ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if there are now more chess books now than there ever have been Well yeah... how would there be fewer?? But the point itself is silly. Few people are putting effort into Maths for the fun of it (and of those that are many derive fun from being the only one who can produce a solution). Chess differs in that it never had any point but the game its self.

drudolph914 14d ago

I was apart of the "covid chess cohort" and got really into it for quite a few years. In that time, I also learned about what the chess culture was like pre-engine and post-engine, and I think you could argue that post-engine did kind of make the game more mechanical - and that kinda ruined things for people that grew up in the pre-engine era. it felt like pre-engine chess had a lot of mystique to it because knowing the best move was never truly clear. the only way to know what was best, was by: getting better yourself, socializing at chess club, learning from better players or coach. this sort of lack of clarity is what drove people to learn more about the game. like think about what it must've been like to go to a chess tournaments pre-engines: finals matches had everyone at your chess club watching the game, calculating lines with each other, and you HAD to calculate to understand the direction of game. it sounds so much more engaging and fun! now, the top games have the stockfish bar next to it, and you instantly know who's got better odds without having to really follow along. and you're not encouraged to calculate beyond a few moves ahead because you just offload the real thinking to stockfish. honestly, it's a vibe a killer when you go back and see images and read about the culture beforehand. I agree engines didn't really "kill" chess - and I think most of that is due to chess not being tied to economic value. but it did kill what I believe was a superior culture compared to today's chess era. all this to say, I think what AI did to chess culture in the 90s is happening to stem right now with LLMs

YeGoblynQueenne 14d ago
>> I was apart of the "covid chess cohort" and got really into it for quite a few years. In that time, I also learned about what the chess culture was like pre-engine and post-engine, and I think you could argue that post-engine did kind of make the game more mechanical - and that kinda ruined things for people that grew up in the pre-engine era. it felt like pre-engine chess had a lot of mystique to it because knowing the best move was never truly clear. the only way to know what was best, was by: getting better yourself, socializing at chess club, learning from better players or coach. I need to be very precise here, but it is not right to say that we know what the best move is in any chess board position. What we know is what move a chess engine would make that would win the game against a human, or sometimes another chess engine. We know a winning move; not the best move. Winning in chess is not the same as knowing what the best move is. Having chess engines that can beat any human in chess is not the same as knowing how every possible game will develop. The latter is known as "solving chess" and we don't yet have that. We have fully solved games like tic-tac-toe, backgammon and checkers, so that there exist databases of every possible path through those games but this is not done for chess, and there is no hint that it is even possible to do given that chess is such a combinatorially more complex game than those. More to the point, the upshot of the fact that we now have super-human chess engines that can beat any human in chess (and Go and shoggi) is that there is no longer the will to research the bigger question about solving chess. The solution of the minor problem, how to beat humans in chess, has sidelined and displaced research in the major problem, how to solve chess, and we will now never find the solution to the latter. And if that reminds you of something, well, yes, exactly.

boelboel 14d ago

Many people argue computers were bad for chess till this day and there's good arguments for it.

YeGoblynQueenne 14d ago

>> This sounds a lot to me like people in the 90's complaining that computers were destroying chess. Genuine question: who were those people saying that? I don't know that criticism. The criticism I know is from AI researchers and it is that beating humans at chess using a computer running an algorithm unlike anything that humans do when they play chess, tells us nothing about the way that humans play chess, which is what we are trying to understand when we try to get computers to play chess. This criticism is exemplified by John McCarthy's article (the real godfather of AI; because he named it) "Ai as Sport" whence I quote: Ideas about chess algorithms as well as advances in computer hardware were involved. However, it is a measure of our limited understanding of the principles of artificial intelligence (AI) that this level of play requires many millions of times as much computing as a human chess player does. Moreover, the fixation of most computer chess work on success in tournament play has come at scientific cost. In 1965 the Russian mathematician Alexander Kronrod said, "Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence." However, computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila. We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies. https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/newborn/newborn.html A more recent criticism that can be made is that getting computers to beat humans at chess (and later Go, and Shoggi and Atari and Stratego) has turned out to only be possible with techniques that are too narrow to have real-world application. Btw, this includes Reinforcement Learning which is still much more capable in virtual environments than in any real-world environment.

MerriBan 14d ago

[flagged]

bonoboTP 14d ago

> try to digest the 100-page Lean proof into something more manageable AI will be better at digesting it into something more manageable.

Valakas_ 12d ago

We like to think we are thinking beings that happen to feel, but we're actually feelings beings that happen to think. We don't realise how our emotions shape our arguments, and the whole Terrence arguments have, behind: "I like my job and want to continue doing it. It gives me meaning." The brain then goes and fills in arguments that support these feelings.