How should we use chess engines?
Around the time of the World Chess Championship, the amount of interest in chess usually goes far beyond tournament players. Of course, this is a good thing. Free internet broadcasts have my most casual chess-playing friends following along and pinging me with questions.
However, with how powerful the average individual's laptop now is, the strongest chess computers in the world are also available to everyone. On one hand, this allows the average player (and above-average ones too!) to get a general sense of how the game is going. On the other hand, I see drastic differences in how people watch, react, and even commentate on games now. Let's start with coverage.
1. The Media
I'm a huge math and data nerd. A lot of my main hobbies and passions revolve around calculating odds and working with data to provide insights on markets, sports, games, and more. So I was excited to see that fivethirtyeight had written about Fabiano Caruana's path to being a World Championship challenger, and in fact had assigned a senior writer to cover each game.
The article itself was fantastically written (as most everything is on the site), but I noticed a glaring flaw in how Caruana's skill was being portrayed:
"Running on my laptop, Stockfish, the powerful chess engine, assesses black — Caruana, in this case — with about a half-pawn disadvantage after the first two moves. Nevertheless, Caruana won the game."
For me, this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a computer evaluation is telling us, and reduces each position to a number. In fact, a computer evaluation in any opening is mostly meaningless, other than to indicate clear blunders or clearly inferior openings. Inherently, White has an advantage - they get to move first. As you'll notice, computers work this out to about +.3-.7 across the board, depending on what line has been chosen to play. However, this is by no means indicative of the actual strength of the position! So much of the board and play is undecided, that drawing conclusions from a number where a position hasn't even been fully fleshed out is ridiculous.
While this is obviously a small example, this mentality spills over to the broader spectating community. Most of the chat streams I see are filled with users spouting the engine evaluation as gospel truth, and using it as a crutch to say "Magnus blundered", "Caruana blundered", when the number evaluation moves by less than .5. While most stronger GMs doing commentary tend to stray away from using the engine to assess positions, some of the 'amateur-friendly' streams have this nasty habit of solely going over engine lines and attempting to interpret the computer, rather than assessing the position with their own, objectively more human, eye, which brings me to my second point.
2. Computer Chess is not Human Chess
Undoubtedly, computers are better than humans at chess. The processing and programming boom have created engines that are nigh-unbeatable, and humans aren't ever really going to catch up skill wise. Thus, it's absolutely necessary to run your preparation through a computer. How exactly are we supposed to interpret what the computer is saying, though?
There are plenty of top-level games I've been watching where the computer is suggesting one move, but the player has clearly been planning on going another direction. It's almost impossible to understand why computers play the way they do in certain positions, which makes players like Magnus, who can tap into a computer-like instinct in some positions to find ridiculous ideas, such a pleasure to watch. Sometimes, these spheres of 'computer chess' and 'human chess' merge, and we get extravagant preparation combined with human intuition to follow the game to it's best conclusion. A lot of the time, however, it's completely overlooked that computer chess and human chess are two separate things entirely. A computer, at it's essence, is based off of pure calculation. A lot of the modern ones have opening books built in, and a plethora of default endgames worked out, but the raw function of evaluating a position starts with narrowing possibilities of 'good moves' and calculating them out as far as their processor will let them. At the end of the day, it's a "compare, search, and sort" problem. Humans, on the other hand, don't follow this method at all. Sure, there is some calculation, and sure, we have to find a way to narrow down our candidate moves, but no strong chess player can succeed without some level of intuitive ability - that sense that, for some reason, this move just looks right. No search function can replicate that hunch, and no amount of calculating ability can match the computer's. The halves of computer and human that make up chess are, for the time being, lobotomized.
3. How Should Computers be Used?
To stop myself from sounding like too much of a chess Luddite, I want to make it clear that I'm not advocating that we stop watching games with engines up, or stop using them to go over our games. But I do want to advocate for a healthier use of engines rather than the near-mindless acceptance that the evaluation is everything. Most stronger players I know that follow and play chess seriously tend to use an engine evaluation as nothing more than a relative strength gauge. Statements like 'White has an advantage of +.7" become "White can press in this position", or "Black needs to play accurately to hold", and look to find moves on their own. Sure, sometimes a positional evaluation becomes clearly winning contingent upon one side finding a move. However, though it is revealed to the audience, missing a win isn't inherently a 'blunder', as sometimes it's not humanly possible to see things in given situations. Engines have no context of stakes, time pressure, or mental state - they can only spit out what their algorithms have evaluated to be the best. Let's try and think about chess in a little more human manner.
