alt Hacker NewsMy friend is an electrical engineer and just passed a FIDE chess rating of 2000. Has played for 30 years, started the chess club in high school. Knows a little programming from the stuff he had to do with microcontrollers in college.
I'm an infra/admin jack of all trades with a comp sci degree and have been a hobby programmer for 30 years. I have a Lichess rating of 1000 on a good day.
We tried doing a chess bot competition (open book, use AI to program it, pull in opening books, end game tables, whatever, free for all) and I absolutely stomped him, but I've only beat him in real life over the board twice in 20 years.
He will beat 99% of random players in real life, and I will beat maybe 20%.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, but it seems to me that maybe domain knowledge isn't everything anymore? Or the domain itself has shifted?
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I think a charitable interpretation is that from the perspective of AI, some domains are shallow (like chess), and some are deep (you can fill in the blank here).
Chess is a precisely defined mathematical problem in a fairly simple artificial world. Most domains aren’t like that.
I think this might be one of the worse examples of the dynamic, for the reasons already mentioned by others (programming a chess bot is really more of a programming exercise than a chess exercise), but it’s food for thought, so thanks for posting it. Some IRL domains are definitely more chess-y than others.
Writing software for which a full spec is available before you begin — in this case the rules of chess — was an easy problem even before AI.
what does actually playing chess have to do with writing an efficient game tree search algorithm beyond a few simple principles? You challenged him to a programming contest and won, as the vastly more experienced programmer. Even though he could use AI, your domain knowledge here proved to be the deciding factor.
A terrible example, because chess is very, very simple - deterministic, rules fully specified in a few pages. We're talking about how you operate in a "games" which, among other complexities, involve the economy and human social dynamics. Billions of other agents. Find a plumber and try to beat them when someone calls you with a clogged toilet. Find a teacher and try to beat them when a student is repeatedly acting out.
There's a difference between having built up intuition through experience about how to play chess, and figuring out how to encode that information in a program. In other words, the amazing chess player can probably provide valuable insight into any given board position, but they may struggle to generalize that insight.