Strongest chess player, ever

I bet it would be unnerving for someone like Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen to play this program, where it would have 1 minute on the clock and they could have the whole day. It would make many of the moves in under a second and they'd be better than the grandmasters' moves!

Have computers and software progressed that much since the Deep Blue days? I didn't realize that chess has pretty much been solved now. Are computers really that much better than people nowadays?

Only realistic if they were preparing for some sort of Man vs Computer tournament.

Computers don't play like humans, and they are consistent in their weaknesses as well as their strengths. As players are more exposed to playing against various chess programs, they learn what positions computers are not so good at (long-range strategical themes, beyond the typical move horizon). A local optimisation, of sorts.

So players start adopting an anti-computer style of play, which requires a different mind set to pull off. That in turn affects their natural style of play.

So I argue the opposite, for preparing for top-flight tournaments, players probably avoid / severely limit playing against chess engines, to avoid this natural anti-computer bias to their play.

Sure, the engines are good for checking variations and analysis, as an assistant. But not as a leader, nor as an opponent.

> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy.

Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software.

In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, and me telling the computer the long term strategy.

Stockfish has been available for quite a while, and over the last few years has been recognised as being the strongest open-source chess engine.

It's fantastic to see it take on the best commercial engines toe-to-toe and come out on top.

These ratings are computer ratings, and because they are playing very much isolates (computers vs other computers), without enough external human encounters, the ratings are consistent within the computer sphere, but not really like-for-like with human rating lists.

A lot has happened since Deep Blue - that was just a 6 game match, which really only proved that machines can play near a grandmaster level, but without nerves. And at times that is good enough to beat a world champion in match conditions, because the human is more susceptible to the psychological events.

Since Deeper Blue we've seen the emergence of chess engines on personal computers (rather than racks and racks of RS6000 mid-range servers), so Chess Genius, Fritz, Shredder, Junior, Rybka, Houdini and now Stockfish pushing chess engines ahead.

The Chess Genius - Junior levels show chess engines capable of matching grandmasters at blitz/active-play speeds, but still struggling at slower time controls.

Rybka onwards show a computer engine where elite grandmasters are seriously challenged.

Chess hasn't been solved. Just watching Magnus Carlsen's play shows we are expanding chess knowledge incrementally one game at a time. Yes, progress has slowed down, but the incremental improvement are still there.

Chess technique is refined to such a super high degree, but still far short of "solving chess". Perhaps this current generation can beat grandmasters when psychological factors are minimised, it's hard to tell.

It's certainly not as clear cut as a Porsche vs Usain Bolt over 100 meters.