Since the start of the Technological revolution, Computers got involved in every aspect of our lives. Even in chess, many softwares were developed to beat the world chess champions starting with the famous deep blue all the way till the current AI super computer Alpha zero.

In this article we are going to discuss why computers nowadays are better than human, why they would beat the world champion in any match and why the effect of computers on chess as a sport doesn’t really matter!

Why are computers better than humans in chess?

The answer for this question is quiet simple. Computers can calculate millions of moves and variations in few seconds depending on their hardware configurations. A well programmed software backed up with super computer hardware would be simply unbeatable. This was proven in multiple occasions where top grandmasters challenged chess computers in the last thirty years.

Computers also don’t have emotions. They base their decision on calculations and algorithm. Humans on the other hand can get emotional, in some situations in chess, they key for winning is to stop in the middle of an ongoing attack and to play some sort of waiting move that gurantees that your opponent won’t have a chance to get a draw.

Sometimes chess players and even top grandmasters get carried away by their emotions and continue their attack based on their feeling of the game. This makes it super difficult for humans to beat computers as the computer can easily detect these type of moves!

We have wrote a detailed article about this, you can find it Here and you can find a slightly encouraging results for the humans Here . However, Humans would be always on a disadvantage versus computers due to their calculations ability and to the fact that computers simply don’t get tired!

The AI revolution, Did it affect chess?

Artificial intelligence has accelerated the technology development rate process, They are able to learn anything very quickly giving outstanding results and performance. Some tech people even start to fear how far can they go such as Elon Musk.

In the last few years, a new AI called Alpha zero was invented to become the top chess Engine in the world.it learned chess in 6 hours, was giving only the rules and was allowed to play a match vs stockfish which is the strongest engine at this time with fide rating over 3000!

Stockfish got humiliated and was not able to win a single game vs the AI alpha zero. Alpha zero won or drawed his games vs stock fish in a 100 game match!!

Some people estimated the fide rate of this AI as 3200+. Humans has never reached 3000 rating in standard chess before.This means that simply any match between the strongest human which is currently the world champion Magnus Carlsen and The strongest Engine which is Alpha zero would result in an overwhelming win for the Engine.

For this reason, Carlsen mentioned he never like to play vs computers as they make him feel stupid!!

Conclusion :

Nowadays the best computers are considered impossibile to beat by the best humans over the course of several games. This was proven in a recent human vs computer match where the best computer beat a former world champion. Keep in mind now, the human was allowed to look at the computers thoughts while the computer was in it’s opening book and he still lost.

On the other hand, Just because Computers can beat humans in a field doesn’t mean that the sport should seize to exist! , for example a car would beat a human in a race everytime, yet running is still a fomous sport in the olympiads and people still compete very hard to break previous “human” numbers. This is what Magnus Carlsen is trying to achieve as he is approaching the 2900 fide rating that no human ever reached it in classical chess in all human history!

We hope that people would understand that we love chess for its beauty and as karpov once said “Chess is everything: art, science and sport” !