The post studies handicapped chess as a domain to study how player capability and starting position affect win probabilities. From the conclusion:
In the view of Miles and others, the initially gargantuan resource imbalance between the AI and humanity doesn’t matter, because the AGI is so super-duper smart, it will be able to come up with the “perfect” plan to overcome any resource imbalance, like a GM playing against a little kid that doesn’t understand the rules very well.
The problem with this argument is that you can use the exact same reasoning to imply that’s it’s “obvious” that Stockfish could reliably beat me with queen odds. But we know now that that’s not true.
Since this post came out, a chess bot (LeelaQueenOdds) that has been designed to play with fewer pieces has come out. simplegeometry’s comment introduces it well. With queen odds, LQO is way better than Stockfish, which has not been designed for it. Consequentially, the main empirical result of the post is severely undermined. (I wonder how far even LQO is from truly optimal play against humans.)
(This is in addition to—as is pointed out by many commenters—how the whole analogue is stretched at best, given the many critical ways in which chess is different from reality. The post has little argument in favor of the validity of the analogue.)
I don’t think the post has stood the test of time, and vote against including it in the 2023 Review.
The post studies handicapped chess as a domain to study how player capability and starting position affect win probabilities. From the conclusion:
Since this post came out, a chess bot (LeelaQueenOdds) that has been designed to play with fewer pieces has come out. simplegeometry’s comment introduces it well. With queen odds, LQO is way better than Stockfish, which has not been designed for it. Consequentially, the main empirical result of the post is severely undermined. (I wonder how far even LQO is from truly optimal play against humans.)
(This is in addition to—as is pointed out by many commenters—how the whole analogue is stretched at best, given the many critical ways in which chess is different from reality. The post has little argument in favor of the validity of the analogue.)
I don’t think the post has stood the test of time, and vote against including it in the 2023 Review.