

#CHESS ONLINE VS COMPUTER FREE#
In December, the Maia chess engine, which grew out of the research, was released on the free online chess server, where it was played more than 40,000 times in its first week. Kleinberg is a co-author of “Aligning Superhuman AI With Human Behavior: Chess as a Model System,” presented at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, held virtually in August.

“So chess becomes a place where we can try understanding human skill through the lens of super-intelligent AI.” And yet in chess, computers are in every possible sense better than we are at this point,” Kleinberg said. “Chess sits alongside virtuosic musical instrument playing and mathematical achievement as something humans study their whole lives and get really good at. This not only creates a more enjoyable chess-playing experience, it also sheds light on how computers make decisions differently from people, and how that could help humans learn to do better. In new research, a team including Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, developed an artificially intelligent chess engine that doesn’t necessarily seek to beat humans – it’s trained to play like a human. No human has beaten a computer in a chess tournament in 15 years. Since IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, advances in artificial intelligence have made chess-playing computers more and more formidable. When it comes to chess, computers seem to have nothing left to prove.
