Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled “The Chess Master and the Computer” (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?
One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a “freestyle” competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.
The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.
The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart’s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.