Let us begin by tipping a small, respectful, slightly terrified king to the International Chess Federation, which has managed to connect three things that reliably make people feel inadequate: chess, artificial intelligence and education. At FIDE’s “Chess & AI in Education” Congress in Menorca, Spain, in April, the message was not that robots are coming for the classroom with a rook lift and a lesson plan. It was that AI is turning chess into a test lab for how people learn, think, teach, compete and occasionally accuse one another of consulting a silicon oracle in the bathroom. Chess has always been catnip for technologists because it looks so clean. There are 64 squares and six kinds of pieces. A child can learn the rules and fail to master them throughout their lifetime. That made it an ideal proving ground for early AI, from Claude Shannon’s 1950 paper on programming a computer to play chess to IBM’s Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997 and gave the world one of its first mainstream “the machine has arrived” moments. The answer to the obvious Weekender question is brutal but clarifying. No, a human can no longer really compete with top AI at chess. Not in the pure “sit down and win a match” sense. Today’s engines do not get tired, do not tilt, do not fall in love, do not overthink lunch and do not make a speculative sacrifice because they once saw Mikhail Tal do something beautiful on YouTube. Stockfish,…
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