Man-Machine Chess Combos

Tactics are short-term actions whereas strategy is long-term vision. Surprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that “chess is 99 percent tactics”. Many top chess players admit that you can go a long distance by being very good at tactics alone, i.e., by knowing a lot of patterns.

 

Computers, even the non-AI variety, are “tactically flawless compared to humans”, writes David Epstein in Range. What happens when man and machine combine forces on a chess board?

 

While the machine handles tactics, the human can focus on strategy.

“It changed the pecking order instantly.”

In 1998, when he was still near his peak, Garry Kasparov drew a man-machine match 3-3 with the same opponent whom he had crushed 4-0 in man-only competition… Kasparov, like most top chess players, had been so dominant because he was vastly better at tactics. The difference between him and others when it came to strategy wasn’t much. Shocking.

 

Once you combine man and machine, it turns out a new skillset matters more in chess. A few years later, there was “freestyle chess” – teams could be made of multiple humans and computers. A pair of amateur players destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer of the time. They even crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. What was going on?

“(The pair) were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy.”

 

The name for such human/computer combos? Centaurs.