“Centaur chess” is now run by computers
Remember when man and machine played together to beat the solo computers? It was not usually about adding the man’s chess judgment to that of the machine, rather the man would decide which computer program to use in a given position, when the programs offered conflicting advice. that was called Centaur Chess, or sometimes “Freestyle chess,” before that term was applied to Fischer Random chess. For years now, the engines have been so strong that strategy no longer made sense.
But with engine strength came chess engine diversity, as for instance Stockfish and Alpha Zero operate on quite different principles. So now “which program to use” is once again a live issue. But the entity making those choices is now a program, not a human being:
A traditional AI chess program, trained to win, may not make sense of a Penrose puzzle, but Zahavy suspected that a program made up of many diverse systems, working together as a group, could make headway. So he and his colleagues developed a way to weave together multiple (up to 10) decisionmaking AI systems, each optimized and trained for different strategies, starting with AlphaZero, DeepMind’s powerful chess program. The new system, they reported in August, played better than AlphaZero alone, and it showed more skill—and more creativity—in dealing with Penrose’s puzzles. These abilities came, in a sense, from self-collaboration: If one approach hit a wall, the program simply turned to another.