Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, is considered better than humans at chess. Stockfish is the best chess engine and we generally use it to check our games. But how did Artificial Intelligence go from being horrible and being used for helping humans check if they made any simple errors to being stronger than humans? Let's take a look how.
In 1951, Alan Turing published a program(developed on paper) named "Turochamp", that could play a complete chess game. During this time, new chess games and chess-playing programs were created and improved, but they weren't successful, probably due to lacking resources and tools.
Alan Turing
The creation of "Turochamp" created fascination among engineers and they decided to develop better versions of A.I. chess engines as the years went on but they were never as good as master-level chess players until the 1980s.
Garry Kasparov vs A.I.
The world champion of chess and one of the greatest players of all time, Garry Kasparov, made a bold statement that AI chess engines could never beat top chess grandmasters. He played against IBM's Deep Thought in 1989 which he won. He also played against IBM's Deep Blue in a 6 game series in which he also won, 4:2 in 1996.
However, in 1997, a year after losing to Kasparov, Deep Blue came back and beat him in a rematch. Kasparov lost 2.5:3.5. Although Kasparov initially denied the win by Deep Blue, most people regard it in favor of Deep Blue. In a recent interview, Kasparov agreed that he lost fairly.
Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.
Yasser Seirawan
Modern Chess Engines
Modern chess engines are now so developed that they will always win against humans. Magnus Carlsen, known to be the best chess player in history and has a FIDE rating of over 2800 in all formats, played against Stockfish 9 and lost. Computers playing each other have become popular and Stockfish is known to be one of the best chess engines ever. However, Leela Chess Zero, a computer didn't know how to play chess and learned by "self-play" beat StockFish in a 100-game match 53.5 to 46.5. This shows that chess engines were so strong that they could learn the game of chess by themselves with no manual assistance and become so strong that they could beat one of the best chess engines in the world.
Conclusion
Computers have had a tough beginning. They were weak and people thought that they could never be strong. However, Deep Blue proved everyone wrong by beating Kasparov. This paved the way for later engines such as Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero to flourish.
