Comment by WarmWash
7 hours ago
I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
The irony with the chess example is that chess has never been more popular.
Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of computer languages.
Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly. shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not the driver for the adoption.
Google Trends data for "Chess" worldwide show it trending down from 2004-2016, and then leveling off from 2016 until a massive spike in interest in October 2020, when Queen's Gambit was released. Since then it has had a massive upswing.
This seems like an over simplification. Do many newcomers to chess even know about time formats or watch professional matches? From my anecdotal experience that is a hard no.
Chess programs at primary schools have exploded in the last 10 years and at least in my circle millennial parents seem more likely to push their children to intellectual hobbies than previous generations (at least in my case to attempt to prevent my kids from becoming zombies walking around in pajamas like I see the current high schoolers).
I'd argue the renaissance is already off the ground; one man's vibe-coded-slop is another man's vision that he finally has the tools to realize.
It's allowed me to tackle so many small projects that never would have seen the light of day, simply for lack of time.
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
> But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned?
Firsrly, yes, you will be banned for playing at an AI level consecutively on most platforms. Secondly, its not very relevant to the concept of gaming. Sure it can make it logistically hard to facilitate, but this has plagued gaming through cheats/hacks since antiquity, and AI can actually help here too. Its simply a cat and mouse game and gamers covet the competitive spirit too much to give in.
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The most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
Chess.com has some cool blog posts about it from a year or two back when there was some cheating scandal with a big name player. They compare moves to the optimal move in a statistical fashion to determine if people are cheating. Like if you are a 1000 ELO player and all of a sudden you make a string of stockfish moves in the game, then yeah you are cheating. A 2400 ELO player making a bunch of stock fish moves is less likely to be suspicious. But they also compare many variables in their models to try and sus out suspicious behavior.
Computers are banned in everything except specific tournaments for computers, yeah. If you're found out to have consulted one during a serious competition your wins are of course stripped - a lot of measures have to be taken to prevent someone from getting even a few moves from the model in the bathroom at those.
Not sure how smaller ones do it, but I assume watching to make sure no one has any devices on them during a game works well enough if there's not money at play?
It’s a test.
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents - but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play throughs.
Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy, StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it played previously because just knowing what it's going to play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The same thing happens with human players, they hide their accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared strategies.
Sounds like we need FIDE rankings for software developers. It would be an improvement over repeated FizzBuzz testing, I suppose.
May we get just a little more detail for the uninitiated?
I'm going to assume you're not implying that Deep Blue did 9/11 ;)