How has chess managed to remain a competitive sport despite engine dominance?

Question

As much as people fear losing their jobs to machines that can do them better, Chess has seen the exact opposite take shape. There have been extremely strong chess bots since Kasparov's time, and more recently, the supremacy of chess engines has only been reinforced by neural network engines like AlphaZero.

Yet, people seem to have just accepted the fact that the skill gap between engines and human players is insurmountably vast, and chess has, in the face of human obsolescence, continued to grow even more popular. More people play the game, and more importantly, people continue to compete. Moreover, prize pools have only gone up as chess becomes an attractive eSport with some matches easily attracting tens of thousands of viewers.

My question is: how? How has human competition endured when even the best players perform at a level that's barely child's play for any run-of-the-mill engine? Now that we have "accepted" that we are worse, why do we still want to see who's better?

Chess isn't the only example of this happening either - spelling bees, certain eSports, and even weightlifting competitions are all fields where machines can do the task better, faster, and more reliably. What does this pattern tells us about how human society as a whole will adapt to increasingly powerful machines as they arrive?

Answer 1

For the same reason the Tour de France is still a thing even if you could perform much better on a motorbike. Most chess enthusiasts didn't stop playing chess after noticing there's some other person whose rating is 1000 points higher than theirs, and won't stop because there's a machine 1000 stronger than that person.

A good amount of chess players don't care at all about computer chess and will only use engines as an assistence to analysis.

Answer 2

An analogy often used here is to compare people to cars. Sure, cars can travel far faster than people like Usain Bolt, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining to watch. When people watch players like Carlsen play chess, they're still watching the best humans in the world compete. Sure, being the best human no longer means much since there are stronger beings out there (engines), but this could already be the case for many things. There are probably aliens out there who are far superior to us in every way. Does that negate everything we do as pointless? Everyone has their role to play in this game of life.

Answer 3

As much as people fear losing their jobs to machines that can do them better, Chess has seen the exact opposite take shape.

That's because chess is a game. People enjoy playing it, and they enjoy watching other people play it. You can't really compare it to something like tilling the fields on a farm, where most people only care about the result and not the process, and so are perfectly happy to let machines do it instead of people (except the people who lost their jobs when machines replaced them; but even they don't generally enjoy it enough to do it for free).

My question is: how? How has human competition endured when even the best players perform at a level that's barely child's play for any run-of-the-mill engine?

Because the humans don't need to compete with computers. This is because people care about who is the best chess player, but not about who is the best farmworker. Part of the reason they care is because many people who aren't professionals play chess for fun.

What does this pattern tells us about how human society as a whole will adapt to increasingly powerful machines as they arrive?

Not much, since you can't compare chess to most jobs. Maybe you could extrapolate that things people enjoy doing, or enjoy when other people do, will remain.

Answer 4

Arguably, chess is more exciting today because of computers rather than despite computers.

Chess engines have had the side effect of eliminating adjournment from tournament play and generally led to faster time controls. Rapid (or even faster) games tend to be fairly exciting games, which has increased interest in the game.

Also, the same rise in computer technology which has led to unbeatable chess engines has also created a truly international playing field. One can go online and play chess against players from all over the world. This is in strong contrast to when I was learning to play in the 1980s. I would go to my school's chess club and play the same people week after week. For people outside of major cities with strong chess clubs, chess-playing tended to be somewhat parochial and thus somewhat boring. Nowadays you have strong players from all over the world. In the past, many of these people would have been too isolated to develop their chess-playing skills to their true potential.

Answer 5

Now that we have "accepted" that we are worse, why do we still want to see who's better?

Computers aren't human beings. They can't compete with us for any of the important things of life as outlined in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Only other living beings can do that and, as we've ably demonstrated our dominance against other species, our main competitors are other human beings.

Jordan Peterson has famously described the importance of the dominance hierarchy dating all the way back to lobsters.

In the chess world, no less a figure than Bobby Fischer when asked what his greatest pleasure is in chess replied:

When you break his ego. This is where it is at.

A computer doesn't have an ego to break. It is not alive. How good they are at implementing a set of algorithms to play chess is completely irrelevant.

Answer 6

Sport is about human excellence, humans competing against one another and fun.

The fact that a computer can do something much better than a human might take a bit away from human achievement, but ultimately:

• It's still impressive to see someone else doing something you can't do, or few others can do.

• Getting better still gives a sense of achievement (which is true for the top player in the world as much as it is for any random person in the middle).

• It's still as competitive as ever between humans (if not more so due to between-game assistance computers provide, which is, to a reasonable degree, available to anyone and can provide insights that may otherwise only have been available to very few players).

  It could be competitive even between amateurs that are much worse than the best players out there, which is at least somewhat comparable to competition between the best players in the world that are much worse than the best computers out there. Although it does add a little something to be the best human at some activity.

• It's still fun to play and watch.

Answer 7

Man is a competitive person by nature. The computer is a machine that is manufactured to perform one or more specific activities, but the number of tasks it can perform is limited. But who made them was man, there is a mind beyond that makes algorithms, and sequences so that it can do its assigned tasks in specific environments. The man can self-develop the tools to combat any type of task, in any circumstance, environment or environments. As a result, there is still so much activity in chess and in so many other areas in which man has a machine as a competence because that is the way in which he realizes that there are people or machines better than them, and that something extraordinary must be done. work daily to improve yourself. Something that characterizes outstanding humans is the growth mindset.Man is a competitive person by nature. The computer is a machine that is manufactured to perform one or more specific activities, but the number of tasks it can perform is limited. But who made them was man, there is a mind beyond that makes algorithms, and sequences so that it can do its assigned tasks in specific environments. The man can self-develop the tools to combat any type of task, in any circumstance, environment or environments. As a result, there is still so much activity in chess and in so many other areas in which man has a machine as a competence because that is the way in which he realizes that there are people or machines better than them, and that something extraordinary must be done. work daily to improve yourself. Something that characterizes outstanding humans is the growth mindset.

Answer 8

We now have human chess and computer chess. Anybody who wishes for the strongest chess playing possible, head to the TCEC chess championship. Human chess is headed by Carlsen. There are two champions playing very different chess under very different playing conditions.

Answer 9

An additional reason to what is already mentioned, from the eyes of a spectator/enjoyer of the game, is that computers play chess in a way that is either hard to understand for humans or very dry and boring. Computers tend to slowly grind for a slight advantage, preferring to not take "risks". A risk in chess is in essence not having calculated all possible replies to your move (and higher order replies). Seeing that computers check most moves, they will often find counterplay to a move that might seem like a terrifying attack to a human. If the computers would be given free reign, we would probably see mostly the same game being played all the time (computers are usually given a certain opening to start from to create some variation in their play).

Humans, however, make interesting choices based on chess principles, typical ideas, strategies, mistakes by their human opponent, and so on, and thus have more personal styles of play. There's also a psychological factor that is lacking with computers, which makes the game interesting to play and watch.