10 Interesting Stories From The World Of Chess

4. Computers Dominate Chess

AI Chess
Warner Bros.

While Deep Blue unseating the current chess champion was a huge leap forward, the technology continued to improve in leaps and bounds.

Gradually, chess engines went from being "brute force" evaluation machines that crunched numbers and could be mainly negated by taking them out of their opening book to unstoppable forces that were incapable of making the mistakes that humans so often did.

AlphaZero is an interesting case where the AI learned purely by playing itself and achieved a level of play above all humans within a very short period. These engines are now pitted against each other in competitions which can produce new and novel ideas that even after hundreds of years of human study, no one has seen.

Most modern engines can be used for deep analysis but in order to have a chance at victory, even Grandmasters tend to need an advantage of some sort such as knight odds at the very least.

The relative strength of a few top engines is as follows:

Stockfish - 3492

Leela Chess Zero - 3462

Komodo - 3422

For reference, current chess champion Magnus Carlsen has an enormously strong rating of 2875.

Contributor
Contributor

Matthew is a Marine Engineer to trade who writes sub-standard Scottish crime fiction in his spare time that can be found here:- https://mmacleodwriting.uk/ Originally brought up in the Western Isles of Scotland, he lived in Edinburgh for 18 years but now stay in Aberdeenshire with his partner, sons and dog.