Could people defeat chess engines?

Philosophy of Science
1

For many years already chess engines beat human beings. As the calculating power of computers is larger than the calculating power of human beings, the only possibly prospect people have at winning is by emotion.

Emotions are agency to decisions. So then potentially emotion can deal with a zillion possible chess moves in an instant, by having all the chess moves as possibilities in a decision on them. Which is an advantage over the chesscomputer calculating options sequentially.

Then also, because the chesscomputer operates in a forced way by cause and effect, it should be possible to know what move the chesscomputer makes in advance. While a decision on the other hand is inherently unpredictable because of it being spontaneous. Which is another advantage for people.

A chess-yogi would be focused on the happiness of winning, rather than on the technical event by which a match is won.

That’s all I’ve got. Please, your thoughts on developing this idea further.

2

Computers actually haven’t yet been able to beat humans yet.

Also, I think the prospect of using emotions to beat computers ridiculous. If your emotion influences your decisions, it typically blinds you to potential problems.

You mentioned emotions having a zillion possible solutions, and I don’t understand how this makes sense at all.

Do you know something ironic about what you’re saying? You’re giving logical advantages in which emotions are better than logic. Any logical difficulty could be solved using logic, e.g. the problem of cause and effect and emotions’ randomness could be solved by adding a factor of randomness to the computer’s choices, and it would be able to do it better than the emotions ever could.

Your choice being spontaneous = higher chance of blundering. To say that emotion-riddled spontaneity is better the cold, calculated, slow decisions and risks in a situation where you have the time to do so is to say that bare hands are better than spears.

3

Chess is a royal game. Goes with the role as a ruler. A human has not a snowball’s chance in hell of winning against the latest the computing world has to offer. Kasparov was dispatched without a sweat by Deep Blue in the 1980s. It’s 40 years now and I can see nothing but improvement in the game of computers.

Nevertheless …

Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caparet

4

Oh yes they have. Long since. There was a famous tournament, Gary Kasparov v Deep Blue, programmed by IBM, I think in the 1980’s (noted above). Since then, of course, the algorithms have become much stronger.

5

I think that a human can theoretically defeat a computer under certain conditions.

First, there’s the time per move. A computer has multiple computing cores, a high calculation frequency, and a large memory for storing variations.
A human player isn’t as well-equipped in this regard. Therefore, a human player should be given more time per move.

Second, there’s the competition. A computer, when in a single box, represents many computing machines simultaneously. A human player, on the other hand, is alone and can only hold one line at a time. Therefore, we need to find the right number of chess players on the human side. Not 100 or 20, but the necessary number of top specialists with a pre-agreed strategy for deciding which moves to play (people will also have to negotiate moves).

Third, although chess is a game in which the rules don’t change during the game (unlike human life), there is a premise that all variations have possible outcomes. But computers haven’t reached that level yet. When they do, the best we can hope for is a draw.

Fourth, there’s the opening base. How large a database of openings will the computer be given to process? Or should it learn on its own, like a neural network?

What you called emotions (and what everyone immediately criticizes as a mistake) I would call intuition. Human intuition is truly capable of many things and is still present in chess. But if several players are playing on the human side, the group won’t risk making a move based solely on intuition. Intuition, or the “magic” of chess, disappears in a collective decision.

In the end, we came to the conclusion that a single player lacks the power, and a group of players lacks intuition. Perhaps, if we approach this problem with these assumptions, the games will be interesting. I’ve never encountered anything like this in real life: before, they simply put a human player against a machine, now engines compete with each other. In the current reality, a single human can’t beat a neural network.

The most important thing in these arguments, in my opinion, is not to extrapolate them to everyday life. Yes, a computer may be better than a human at algorithmic tasks. But the world is algorithmic only to a certain extent (and even that is debatable).

1 Like
6

I don’t think of computers as “beating” humans, they are just more efficient at a particular function. But for the computer. the game doesn’t sit in the context of a comprehensive life experience and feelings of enjoyment, so the human has already “won” even if they “lose”.