AI’s Chess Prowess

In considering AI’s chess prowess, it is important to understand artificial intelligence as an array of technologies with distinctly different capabilities.

Depending on the type of AI under discussion, AI’s play can be either brilliant or abysmal.

Neural Nets, Self-reinforced Knowledge, and AlphaZero

More than five years have passed since Google’s DeepMind made headlines with AlphaZero, its revolutionary chess-playing neural network AI program. At the time, other chess engines had already beaten the chess world’s strongest players, but those engines were based upon rules and heuristics developed by strong chess players. AlphaZero’s approach was radically different.

AlphaZero was given only the rules of the game and no further human input. Using a technique called self-reinforced knowledge, it then became its own teacher to actually learn the details of the game. Within hours it had achieved a level of chess proficiency that surpassed the level of both the best human players and the strongest chess engines.

Since its debut, the superiority of AlphaZero’s technology architecture based solely on self-reinforced knowledge has been debated. Traditional chess engines have improved.  Komodo chess engine developer Larry Kaufman expects better results to be achieved by a hybrid with neural networks and standard alpha–beta search.

Traditional chess engines remain a competitive force and are incorporating natural language and making existing tools for chess instruction more robust and flexible. For example, at the London Chess Conference in March 2023 Pawlel Kacprzak, founder of chessvision.ai, demonstrated an app to easily scan and analyze chess positions.

Generative AI / Chatbots Dabble in Chess

For young chess teachers and students new to AI who are just beginning to explore the use of  AI content generators, there is often a hope that their newfound chatbot will be able to help them play chess well. Unfortunately the AI technology of large language models and generative AI that can produce stunningly good text, is poor at chess. At least that was what I had been told by some of the teachers in our Chess in Education Certification courses. They were using ChatGPT 3.5. So my starting premise in writing this article was that chatbots were either incapable or poor at playing chess.

Taking Down a Grandmaster in One Move

To test that premise, I ask Google’s Bard if it can play chess. Here is its reply on October 11, 2023:

  a b c d e f g h
8 r n b q k b n r 8
7 p p p p p p p p 7
6                 6
5                 5
4                 4
3               N 3
2 P P P P P P P P 2
1 R N B Q K B N R 1
  a b c d e f g h