CAN AI SOLVE CHESS’S STALEMATE?
AI will ruin chess. It will turn players into robots, encourage the “endless dry manoeuvring” that normally leads to drawn games, as former world champion Garry Kasparov warned in a 2018 article for Science magazine.
That was the conventional wisdom, and it certainly looked like it was coming true. Take that year’s World Chess Championship between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, where all 12 games ended in a draw. The match had to be decided on the chess equivalent of a penalty shoot-out – three games of rapid chess – to find a winner.
“You’re starting to have a real problem when you have 12 classical games drawn,” said Nigel Short, the former World Chess Championship finalist, speaking exclusively to PC Pro.
It looked like being a similar scenario in the latest World Championship, held in December 2021, when Carlsen and challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi recorded five consecutive draws in the opening salvo of games. The deadlock was only broken after an eight-hour, 136-move battle of attrition in game six – the longest game ever in the World Chess Championship’s long history.
Have players trained laboriously by AI engines made the pro game more boring? Perhaps, but there’s also evidence of the opposite: that new forms of AI, which taught themselves how to play the game, are becoming more creative. More, dare we say it, humanlike. That 2018 Kasparov article we talked of earlier? He wasn’t bemoaning AI, but praising DeepMind’s AlphaZero for adopting a “dynamic, open style like my own”.
Whatever the impact of AI on the pro game, the deadlock among the world’s elite players isn’t putting players off the sport. Far from it. A combination of lockdowns, Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit and the emergence of a generation of Twitch-streaming grandmasters has made chess more popular than ever before. Not to mention the AI, which is teaching millions of new players how to play the game.
“We’ve got almost five million daily players on,” said the site’s founder, Erik Allebest. “That’s four or five times bigger than it was before Covid and The Queen’s Gambit, and those players are now sticking around. It wasn’t just a bump and they’re gone, they’re staying.”
