Chess and its embrace of AI

I took a day off from work to take my children to participate in their first age-group chess tournament. It was the day before India's 77th Independence Day. I shared my excitement with a friend about my love for chess, and how I played the game when I was young, but that was more than 25 years go. His response was stunning:

Oh. So you played the game when in an age when it still mattered to humans!

It shook me a bit. But it was a deep reflecting moment. On one hand it was a proud moment for India that 4 out of 8 in the Quarter Finals of the Fide World Chess Championship were Indians. On the other hand, there is merit in the thinking of my friend, that computers trumped humans for the first time in 1997 - in what was dubbed as the game of Humanity vs Computers - when Kasparov lost to IBM's DeepBlue. I remember reading about this as a kid in "The Hindu" which then had a section that published the games played in prominent tournaments between grand masters. And I can vividly recall how my aspirations shifted from being the next Kasparov to beating this machine! I was a child imagining of a world with possibilities.

Otherwise, with a rational mind, considering Moore's law, I should have given up playing chess - because it was probably the end of the game's relevance for humans. Computers cracked it and were only going to get better at it. Today, there are advanced engines such as Stockfish and Alpha Zero which play games that are incomprehensible sometimes even to the top grandmasters of the game.

But a quarter century since then, the game has evolved. There are more players. And players start early, sometimes as early as at the age of four. And players grow fast becoming grandmasters and playing at the highest level before they turn 18. The evolution is not only among players, but the game itself - there are now more formats, more audience, the varied presentations of the game, and even the money and people involved. All of which is an outcome of how computers today augment the players in their preparation, commentators in presenting the analysis, and the engagement of audience in comparing how humans are doing in comparison with what the computers recommend.

And everytime when a player gets it accurate like a machine, it is a reason to celebrate. Think of the image of Magnus "Stockfish" Carlsen. And everytime the player goes away from machine recommendation and tries something inaccurate, it is a reason to celebrate the human element of the game. Think of the streamer Hikaru steamrolling his opponents in bullet and blitz games creatively. And everytime a player grows from league to league, it is a reason to celebrate the machine. Think of how the emerging talents train against machines - not just for the game, but for resilience.

The modern game of chess is presented via a lens of analytics in addition to the well-established theories and principles of the game. The analytics layer is the layer of wonder - a benchmark for humans to chase, a territory that still offers scope for exploration, the core that keeps the community together simultaneously as it establishes a ladder for growth.

Chess is a perfect example of how humans embraced machines!

The fear that the game will be taken over by the machines is now replaced by an acceptance that machines might always do better, but we can use them to our advantage.

The stuff that I was writing so far is not new. It is the stuff of legends and anyone who was remotely connected to the world of chess should be aware of these developments. Rafael Laffarga wrote about these in greater detail in three different articles you can find here.

For some insights into the world of chess analytics, you could either get an account on Chess.com, readup an article like this, or look up for creative posts like this. Or dive into the matter of how a case of cheating was potentially resolved via a detailed analytical report demonstrating unusual patterns. I wonder how cases of cheating would have been resolved in a pre-machine world of chess.

PS: I noticed by the end of the article that I used machines wherever I intended to use AI. But that is more an inclination towards the slang of the chess world.