AIs overtake humans. Humans become obsolete and their contribution is negligible to negative.
I’m confused why chess is listed as an example here. This StackExchange post suggests that cyborg teams are still better than chess engines. Overall, I’m struggling to find evidence for or against this claim (that humans are obsolete in chess), even though it’s a pretty common point in discussions about AI.
Thinking about it analytically, the human+AI chess player cannot be dominated by an equivalent AI (since the human could always just play the move suggested by the engine.) In practice, people play correspondence chess for entertainment or for money, and the money is just payment for someone else’s entertainment. Therefore, chess will properly enter the AI era (post-cyborg) when correspondence chess becomes so boring and rote that players stop even bothering to play.
Reading that StackExchange post, it sounds like AI/cyborgs are approaching perfect play, as indicated by the frequency of draws. Perfect play, in chess! That’s absolutely mind blowing to me.
I’m not really convinced by the linked post— the chart is from a someone selling financial advice and illustrated elo ratings of chess programs differ from e.g. wikipedia (“Stockfish estimated Elo rating is over 3500”) (maybe it’s just old?) - linked interview in the “yes” answer is from 2016 - elo ratings are relative to other players; it is not trivial to directly compare cyborgs and AI: engine ratings are usually computed in tournaments where programs run with same hardware limits
In summary, in my view in something like “correspondence chess” the limit clearly is “AIs ~ human+AI teams” / “human contribution is negligible” …. the human can just do what the engine says.
My guess is the current state is: you could be able to compensate what the human contributes to the team by just more hardware. (i.e. instead of the top human part of the cyborg, spending $1M on compute would get you better results). I’d classify this as being in the AI period, for most practical purposes
Also… as noted by Lone Pine, it seems the game itself becomes somewhat boring with increased power of the players, mostly ending in draws.
That makes sense. My main question is: where is the clear evidence of human negligibility in chess? People seem to be misleadingly confident about this proposition (in general; I’m not targeting your post).
When a friend showed me the linked post, I thought “oh wow that really exposes some flaws in my thinking surrounding humans in chess.” I believe some of these flaws came from hearing assertive statements from other people on this topic. As an example, here’s Sam Harris during his interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (transcript, audio):
Obviously we’ll be getting better and better at building narrow AI. Go is now, along with Chess, ceded to the machines. Although I guess probably cyborgs—human-computer teams—may still be better for the next fifteen days or so against the best machines. But eventually, I would expect that humans of any ability will just be adding noise to the system, and it’ll be true to say that the machines are better at chess than any human-computer team.
(In retrospect, this is a very weird assertion. Fifteen days? I thought he was talking about Go, but the last sentence makes it sound like he’s talking about chess.)
I’m confused why chess is listed as an example here. This StackExchange post suggests that cyborg teams are still better than chess engines. Overall, I’m struggling to find evidence for or against this claim (that humans are obsolete in chess), even though it’s a pretty common point in discussions about AI.
Thinking about it analytically, the human+AI chess player cannot be dominated by an equivalent AI (since the human could always just play the move suggested by the engine.) In practice, people play correspondence chess for entertainment or for money, and the money is just payment for someone else’s entertainment. Therefore, chess will properly enter the AI era (post-cyborg) when correspondence chess becomes so boring and rote that players stop even bothering to play.
Reading that StackExchange post, it sounds like AI/cyborgs are approaching perfect play, as indicated by the frequency of draws. Perfect play, in chess! That’s absolutely mind blowing to me.
I’m not really convinced by the linked post—
the chart is from a someone selling financial advice and illustrated elo ratings of chess programs differ from e.g. wikipedia (“Stockfish estimated Elo rating is over 3500”) (maybe it’s just old?)
- linked interview in the “yes” answer is from 2016
- elo ratings are relative to other players; it is not trivial to directly compare cyborgs and AI: engine ratings are usually computed in tournaments where programs run with same hardware limits
In summary, in my view in something like “correspondence chess” the limit clearly is “AIs ~ human+AI teams” / “human contribution is negligible” …. the human can just do what the engine says.
My guess is the current state is: you could be able to compensate what the human contributes to the team by just more hardware. (i.e. instead of the top human part of the cyborg, spending $1M on compute would get you better results). I’d classify this as being in the AI period, for most practical purposes
Also… as noted by Lone Pine, it seems the game itself becomes somewhat boring with increased power of the players, mostly ending in draws.
That makes sense. My main question is: where is the clear evidence of human negligibility in chess? People seem to be misleadingly confident about this proposition (in general; I’m not targeting your post).
When a friend showed me the linked post, I thought “oh wow that really exposes some flaws in my thinking surrounding humans in chess.” I believe some of these flaws came from hearing assertive statements from other people on this topic. As an example, here’s Sam Harris during his interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (transcript, audio):
(In retrospect, this is a very weird assertion. Fifteen days? I thought he was talking about Go, but the last sentence makes it sound like he’s talking about chess.)