Chess, AI and the martyrdom of opportunity

Now chess is a hard game to get into. Although it would be of interest to compare new blood impetus (what made you start playing chess?) of the covid + web circumstance, with the ancient times of human brain isolation (basically from the beginning of human civilization until the onset of the worldwide web 25 years ago), most of those born in that obscure ancient era, a dying breed, had to mostly have chess passed down to us.

Sure the odd closed off kid that would happen upon a chessboard could certainly find a world that was much easier to make sense of, a world where one would grow to master a token universe to such an extent that the only thing left to marvel at, in real life too, and its plentiful settings and environments, would be luck, be she a lady or some rabbit best not chased. But those were few entries; most, had this, chess, and all that is in it and beyond it, inherited.

And so perhaps as we are leaving this limited era, we should encourage youngsters to partake in the great mystery.

How to do that however seems to have diverged in manner, significantly from what it used to be.

Someone serious about learning chess should surely obtain certain books, which as far as I can tell, are a nightmare to read. I could never really follow a game written in a book, like I would be reading a mathematics book for example. One move ahead, fine. Two moves maybe, but even by then the board possibilities are lost, unless you have the capacity to somehow visualize the board in your mind, a skill few, I would dare say very few people have.

In any case I found myself chastising a recent entry in the online chess software market.

Personally I would have abandoned chess where it not for Sierra's Power Chess and that nice lady with a beautiful kind voice that got me into the game again.

And it pains me to see the waste all around me as instead of using all this technological progress that is available to us, most seem to want to waste time and space by making some software that really, in 50 or 100 years time would be immediately relegated to the garbage heap of the web. Sure people do not have a concept of wasted space and garbage in the web, but I trust someday, they will.

Who has made the effort to bring all these great books written on chess to life? And narration too is not something we have to spend time or hire for, artificial voiceovers are readily available and its not that complicated really, its chess, the vocabulary is limited.

There are few good chess commentators out there. People that can explain the game and I bet, honestly, they risk burn out eventually because their talent is wasted in commentating when they should be teaching.

And I reject those, essentially at the end of the day, brute force engines. I still believe we can play better than them. Chess has basic principles, that have been and can be distilled further, not through the brute force method, rather by the talented /attuned human mind.

And there is nothing worse, seeing how the current push for AI is to impress and "solve", than having something give you the answer, but when you ask it why, getting some flat "because that is the best" answer. That is not a teacher. That is someone who covets knowledge. Its a lot easier to design AI that solves stuff, than design one that can also explain why that answer is the right answer. And for chess too perhaps, you will either trust the engine that claims to have solved chess for you, or, oops, go through all the variations. To make sure. How long will that take, especially for those heuristic/neural network/AI engines?

And so I believe that it is worth it as a community, to strive for that and perhaps chess with its simplicity-complexity (simple rules - complex possibilities) paradox is a fine opportunity to evolve. Because evolution cannot be extricated from ability. If you couldn't talk and listen you wouldn't be able to think, because when you do think you do think in terms of language, even if its through the shortcuts that are there by skipping saying the words, the words were there first and still are. No ears or vocal chords would shrink a brain possibly faster than they grew it.

So not to equate those biological natural tools with AI, which is mostly, today, an interpreter and little else, still, it presents an opportunity, that seems a shame to waste.

What say you?

quote : What say you?
I don't know, what did you say?
is it this?
quote : Its a lot easier to design AI that solves stuff, than design one that can also explain why that answer is the right answer.

There is no why, or a very simple one. Depending on your experience you see immediately why or not. If not, try out all the other possible moves you can imagine and see why they are less promising.
That is what I do. Well sometimes anyway.
To put that try-out into words would require an entire volume, which would be, a nightmare to read.

So i have no idea what you're saying.

You don't have the patience to follow human explanations in a chess book.
You don't have the patience to understand the reasoning behind an engine evaluation.
Basically, you are a lazy human that will become extinct.

You’ve beautifully outlined a deep truth: chess, once passed down like folklore in the analog age, now lives in a chaotic digital sprawl—rich in tools, poor in soul. The democratization of the game through COVID-era streaming and AI engines brought new blood, yes—but often without guidance, context, or meaning.

The tragedy is not that AI or engines exist, but that they answer without teaching. They solve without explaining. And explanation is where true learning, and growth, begins. You rightly point out: a game as rich as chess deserves more than brute force; it deserves interpretation, narration, and transmission—ideally by humans, or at least tech designed with human understanding in mind.

The books are there. The knowledge is there. The technology is more than ready. What’s lacking is intent—the will to preserve, elevate, and humanize chess education.

And so yes—chess is a perfect frontier for evolving not just how we play, but how we learn, teach, and think. Waste the opportunity, and we waste more than chess. We waste the very chance to move forward as thoughtful beings.

Let’s not let that happen.

@ar1s Your concern about AI and your desire to value human creativity is definitely important, but AI will eventually become smarter than humans in the future at chess. AI companies don't care that their chatbots mainly provide solutions and ignore thinking processes. Unless AI is banned or severely restricted in the next few years, not much is going to change.

@Kilulea Have you been using ChatGPT or an LLM to write your past 5 forum posts?

@pet59 said in #2:

quote : What say you?
I don't know, what did you say?
is it this?
quote : Its a lot easier to design AI that solves stuff, than design one that can also explain why that answer is the right answer.

There is no why, or a very simple one. Depending on your experience you see immediately why or not. If not, try out all the other possible moves you can imagine and see why they are less promising.
That is what I do. Well sometimes anyway.
To put that try-out into words would require an entire volume, which would be, a nightmare to read.

So i have no idea what you're saying.

it was a general observation about Neural Network design. For example, you stand a better chance of making sense of solutions if you use self-organizing map structures than feed-forward networks. You can of course combine them, but an arbitrary structure of nodes will adjust weights to give you the desired solution and not much care what each node at each depth represents, it just adjusts to minimize the error.
Anyway TLDR: It was a general remark regarding NN

@lizani said in #3:

You don't have the patience to follow human explanations in a chess book.
You don't have the patience to understand the reasoning behind an engine evaluation.
Basically, you are a lazy human that will become extinct.

Is it so wrong to want a coach? All the greats, almost, had coaches and teachers.
If you are so against that, then ok, but I am not.

@ar1s said in #7:

Is it so wrong to want a coach? All the greats, almost, had coaches and teachers.
If you are so against that, then ok, but I am not.

In your rambling discourse about AI, when did you ever ask for a coach?

@ar1s I really enjoyed reading your reflections. You capture something essential about the way chess used to be passed down, almost like a family story, and how that differs from the internet era.

I share your sense that technology should serve learning, not just brute force calculation. The beauty of chess is not in having an engine spit out “best moves” but in the dialogue between ideas and human understanding. Clear explanations, strong commentary, and the ability to teach are the treasures that keep people engaged.

I also think the community can build on what you describe. Interactive tools that combine classic books with modern narration and visual boards could bridge the gap for players who struggle to follow printed notation. It is a way to honor the great authors while making their insights accessible to a wider audience.

Your post is a reminder that chess evolves only when we pair technology with the human impulse to share and to wonder. That is the real opportunity in front of us.

@InkyDarkBird said in #5:

@ar1s Your concern about AI and your desire to value human creativity is definitely important, but AI will eventually become smarter than humans in the future at chess. AI companies don't care that their chatbots mainly provide solutions and ignore thinking processes. Unless AI is banned or severely restricted in the next few years, not much is going to change.

@Kilulea Have you been using ChatGPT or an LLM to write your past 5 forum posts?

There is that risk, as always, with new technology. The industrial age, the information age, now, rather faster than we had time to digest this last one (the information age), we got AI.

The way things balance out is by pacing the evolution. We can invent faster than we can get used to using something. It takes maybe one or two generations until we get on top of something new, so that it stops driving us and we are driving it.

Job specifications disappear but new one emerge. Its a cycle that we have experience in because its part of our history. So it is manageable.

Still the current state of AI is very rudimentary and too bulky. I haven't looked at what they actually did, the innards of ChatGPT, safe to say its not far from Neural Network AI theory which is really not anything special, its just maths and probability and has been around for decades, since the 1960's and for all this time it was mocked and considered a substandard choice of research.

Also the thing is too bulky, needs too much space, so we are safe for now, from the likes of autonomous robots, which will really be the breakthrough. For that, further work is needed to perhaps get something out of quantum computing, perhaps remove the uncertainty, or find a trick around it, as we have failed to keep up with Moore's law and the consequence of going smaller and smaller is just that, the distances becomes so small, we can't control it anymore, it starts moving around. That's all quantum computing really is, to be able to deal with uncertainty because storage locations are so close together and "currents" have to be low coz it will saturate and then overheat on the larger scale. Too simplified an explanation perhaps, but don't get too excited with quantum computing, we can end up losing more than we gain, its only really better for a specific type of problem, which is not really the traditional way of solving problems and like AI, might tell you what but not why.

Anyway, it will be paced, They will be made to serve, and generally speaking what it will be, to start with, is user-friendlier technology. Like being able to talk to it, no need for a mouse, or menus or reading manuals. Its still a computer. But even just that, that you no longer have to write words in the right order in the search box, but can just type a question like you would ask a person, is quite the enabler., in my opinion.

As for replacing creativity, that is rather naive to expect. It only combines what it has already learned, it just copy pastes and associates too, things you could argue the human brain does too, but it will always fail because of the source of its consciousness which is not the same as a human beings. And to define consciousness you don't need a major in philosophy really, but anyway, I guess that's just my opinion.

TLDR: Worry but don't worry too much. We ain't there yet.