Post: AI Comes Full Circle on the Chessboard

Many YouTube videos involve humans demonstrating the limitations of AI, usually by asking it silly questions. These videos are beloved, especially by teenagers , but my own teenage son recently showed me a fascinating example of the genre involving chess. It caught my attention because the history of modern AI is closely associated with the ancient board game.

Computer scientists have been building chess-playing robots—now called chess engines—since the late 1950s. Limitations in computing power needed to deal with the astronomical number of possible moves meant that these early systems performed poorly. But by the 1970s, they had improved to the point where they could beat skilled amateurs. As a kid, I recall my older brother, an avid player, struggling against a computer chess system built right into a plastic chess board with a simple LED display.

In 1997, the Deep Blue system, developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and IBM, beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov. Today, a sense of inferiority to computers in certain realms is commonplace, but Kasparov’s defeat was a watershed moment. People began to realize the potentially boundless power of AI systems.

Deep Blue is considered to be a "supercomputer expert system" rather than artificial intelligence , since it could only play chess. There is only one set of rules in chess, and they never change. The rules were hard-coded into Deep Blue, and it was explicitly trained on 700,000 historical games played by grandmasters.

Modern chess engines work in essentially the same way. Stockfish , a free, open-source system that can beat any human player with ease, also has the rules of the game built in, and was trained on past matches. At any given point in the game, it "simply" evaluates a huge range of possible moves and counter-moves several steps into the future, then chooses the move most likely to bring victory. This is hardly a simple process: the number of possible chess games that could be played is a one followed by 120 zeros—a number much more than a google (one followed by one hundred zeros). But modern chess engines have solved […]

AI Comes Full Circle on the Chessboard