That is a great title. For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it. But for me, chess is even more interesting now that we have developed (narrow) AI programs that instantiate more and more parts of what humans do when playing. (I know, humans don't play like computers, but we do things like heuristic board evaluation and heuristic game tree pruning.) So in a game, the player is not only trying to find moves, but is trying to prioritise which trees to explore, based on heuristics and some sense of value of information, and on the relative state of the clock (do you want to go for complications? it depends how much time your opponent has left); is aiming for an overall "style" of game that suits them but not the opponent; and even managing risk (despite the game being deterministic), in the sense that different incomplete game trees might have different (heuristically-estimated) variances of outcomes.
People spend time running in races against each other, despite the existence of cars.
People spend time lifting heavy weights, despite the existence of forklifts.
People spend time climbing mountains, despite the existence of helicopters.
That a machine can do something better than a human, is no reason to pretend that human to human competition is no longer worthwhile. A pleasant game of chess against a friend is as much a psychological battle as it is a tactical one.
I never played against computers, they could always beat me every single time. What would be the point? I play against humans, for the same reason I have conversations with humans and not with computers - even as they become capable of even that.
I do think that building an AI that does play like a human would be interesting, it's certainly never really been done. But it's interesting because it's an interesting problem to solve, not because playing against such a machine would be any fun.
I honestly think it's amazing the level of dedication people can have to things others think are a complete waste of time. Somewhere someone is the best in the world at building rice sculptures with chop sticks or shooting a bow and arrow with their feet or some other weird combination and I love it. The chess guy who spends his life dedicated to finding strategies which only really work against AI is awesome. There are still folks who can beat AI opponents in very time constrained games.
I think chess can be difficult to appreciate for many reasons, but computers beating humans is probably at the bottom of that list, if not on the opposite list of reasons to be encouraged to play as you already explained.
Anyway, I can only speak for my past self and a few people I've known, but it's usually simple why people don't play.
It can be socially unappealing if there's no tradition of playing chess within their circle or that the people that do play might be snobs about it.
It can be difficult to feel encouraged to play since the game itself is complex enough to require more attention than expected and the jargon is confusing. The names of openings, tactics, etc. are not necessarily literal enough, and even when expressed in notation are still vague due to the nature of the game (many variations). For many people there's also a lack of motivation and it just seems unproductive, especially when it becomes clear that winning, even against the weakest AI, isn't common when starting out. Like any game, chess can help improve analytical thinking, but it's abstract enough to not be obvious how. If it's not made a pleasant enough experience, it's just easier to do something else.
> For many people, chess is not interesting, now that computers are so good at it.
But why? I can understand that for a small number of people who has the ambition to become the best player, having an unbeatable figure looming over you is disheartening.
Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from. They are playing against the same pool of players who are on the same level, with or without the the AI advancement.
So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
- Chess was in times past seen as the ultimate game of pure intellect, where the player with the most of that uniquely human trait, intelligence, wins the game. Except that no, turns out a tiny piece of silicon the size of your fingernail can beat the best player on the planet. So why spend time and effort on chess instead of some other game where humans still reign supreme (office politics? Cheating on your spouse?)?
- And a variant of the above argument, humans are a tool-making species. We make tools to do specific things better than we can with our bare hands. So that we can use the tools to do the things that tools are better at, and then use our own hands/heads on things that humans are better at. So now that we have developed tools that are better at playing chess than a human, lets move on to another more challenging task.
- And since this is HN, a variant of the above is Larry Walls characterization of the virtues of a programmer: impatience, laziness, and hubris. We "solved" chess, time to move on.
Of course, all of the above justifications are, in a way, justifications against chess as some kind of noble pursuit that improves the condition of humanity. If you enjoy playing it as a way to spend your free time, go ahead, don't listen to all the negative sniping from the sidelines!
>Most players are never going to become even close to that, and they know it. The fact that AI has beaten the best of human players should be, theoretically, irrelevant to their interest in chess, other than having a novel teacher to learn from.
That is exactly what's happening, players learn from engines and try to understand why they play this move and not that move, and as a result, there are a lot of competing players in top level chess, except that players started memorizing lines and the opening phase of the game became a bit dull and boring, however, this was only another obstacle for players, they simply needed to adapt and they did. Magnus Carlsen is well known for winning endgames that seem to be a dead draw, he keeps pushing and pressing until his opponents make a mistake and this is why he has been the world champion since 2013 (e.g. game 6 from the 2021 World Championship [0]).
>So I’m genuinely curious, does the chess community see a large number of discouraged average players?
No, the Queen's Gambit [1] made chess very popular, online chess is at its peak, it's pretty interesting to have world champions streaming and seeing them play variations that they wouldn't play in real life since they involve too much risk, or simply lead to losing positions, but they also make for exciting and amusing games.
Yeah, computation time is a resource. Can be seen in some starcraft matches, where attention is being juggled and distributed as much as actual armies. Feels like there's some low-hanging fruit there, it hasn't been studied nearly as much as (time-independent) optimal decisions.
Examples of time asymmetry:
-recorded media (TV, movies, books) are incredibly time-asymmetric, have 100x / 1000x time spent on creation vs consumption
-legal systems built on examples + exceptions, have mapped out and tested entire decision trees that defendents traverse once
