Chess solved ?
Below is an extract from an article by Chris Baraniuk currently published on the BBC website:
Computers have revolutionised the way chess is played – and the best chess programs are impossible to beat. In fact, chess programs today are so strong that even the best human player in the world (currently the 24-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen) wouldn’t have a hope of winning a tournament match.
Why?
“In the last 10 years there have been massive improvements in terms of both the search and the evaluation,” says Mark Lefler, a programmer who works on the powerful Komodo chess program. The result of Lefler’s busily whirring machines is the ever-increasing prowess of Komodo.
Magnus Carlsen’s Elo is currently 2,850 while Komodo’s sits comfortably above that – at 3,350.
The computers may indeed be too strong to beat. But Shay Bushinsky, a chess programmer who developed the program Junior makes an interesting comment. Because young players today don’t even think of challenging them, the era of machines improving out of a direct response to plucky human rivalry may have come to an end. The fact we’ve become too scared to play them may be a brilliant move in itself…