You know, people talk about Ai developing the ability to have basic conversations, and to write articles bad be capable of a certain capacity of learning. Then you see chess ai bots that exceed the intellegence of any human being ever possible. It seemed kind of normal until I casually mentioned it to a non chess player and they refused to believe me.
What your opinion on thus? Is ai more developed than we realise?
What? They refused to believe that engines play better than humans?
Chess has been a target of artificial intelligence research ever since the birth of the digital computer. Turing worked on it in the 1940's. Its relative simplicity provided a sandbox for the scientists to explore their ideas, and it certainly felt to them that intelligence would be required to solve it.
One of the problems with AI is that once they figure a way for computers to do something, that thing immediately appears to not require any intelligence, after all. It would be interesting to see if your friend thinks a chess engine is AI or not.
AI has certainly not reached human level intelligence yet, at least general intelligence, but who knows what the future holds. Anyone who refuses to even consider the possibility is probably just denying it because they don't want it to be true.
Chess is a full information game.
It is a complex game, even for the fastest imaginable computer it is not possible to calculate all the variations to the end. But it is very easy to code the rules of the game. This made chess so attractive for computer scientists, finding clever heuristics to trim the unwieldy variation tree, but within a fixed set of easy rules on a defined board. Chess is a closed little world.
The kind of AI that's in the news now - large language models - are dealing with a totally different problem. There are no easily defined rules how language, conversation and knowledge " work", just statistical patterns in a very "open" world. LLMs learn to spit out patterns that humans consider correct (in the ideal case) in this fuzzy open world of language.
Apples & pears.
No games are far from human intelligence, they are very easy to solve with mathematic. Engines beat humans not by intelligence but by computational power. There are proofs even in chess that some strategies are beyond the programming language ability to communicate a pre arranged set of rules.
The King's Gambit for one is ranked low by Stockfish but has several historical games it cannot choose the correct move and is mated.
