For FiveThirtyEight, Oliver Roeder reports on the current World Chess Championship from New York City:
The two grandmasters play alone in a separate room, accompanied only by two stoic match arbiters. On the inside, the room resembles the bridge of a sci-fi spaceship. To the spectators on the outside, though, it evokes a reptile house in a zoo. You enter the dark, hot and humid viewing gallery through thick black curtains. You’re hushed as you enter and reminded to silence your phone. The lights inside are dimmed, and an eerie purple light glows from behind the thick glass of the one-way mirror. You can see Carlsen and Karjakin, leaning in close to each other over the board in deep thought. They can’t see you.
And along with all the spectators, ruminating over the game strategies employed by the masters, is this monster:
The computer chess engine Stockfish was in full agreement [concerning the first two draws], seeing both games as nothing but deadlocked.
Ya gotta wonder how American chess whiz Bobby Fischer would have reacted to a computer critiquing his play. I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the social consequences of computers taking over our favorite intellectual games, such as Chess and Go. Will, or even have, leagues develop in which computers are either banned, or are exclusive, or an intermixture of human and computers? Will the progress of a human in a computer league be followed with rapt attention? Or would that progress never occur?
