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Comment by noosphr

17 days ago

Last I heard, which was last year, human + computer still beat either by themselves. You got a link about what's changed?

I'm curious what you heard exactly. As far as I can tell, centaur chess looks completely dead.

Nobody ever wins anymore in the ICCF championships (which I believe is the most prestigious centaur chess venue, but am not sure).

This is not an exaggeration. See my comment from several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022581.

The last public ranking of chess centaurs was 2014, after which it is generally held to be meaningless as the ranking of a centaur is just the same as the ranking of the engine. Magnus Carlsen’s peak elo of 2884 is by far the highest any human has ever achieved. Stockfish 18 is estimated to be in excess of 4000 elo. Which is to say the difference between it and the strongest human player ever is about the same as the difference between a strong club player and a grandmaster. It’s not going to benefit meaningfully from anything a human player might bring to the partnership.

Magnus himself in 2015 said we’ve known for a long time that engines are much stronger than humans so the engine is not an opponent.

https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2026/stockfish-18/

https://www.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-th...