Smart Enough to Create it, Dumb Enough to Need it

Few are the things in life I truly admire: art, science, and chess. Let's be honest, that covers most of the areas that surround our daily lives, from the series we watch on a Sunday night to the very device you now have in front of your eyes. But it is simply impossible to ignore how exquisite and complex human ingenuity is.

Across millennia and generations, we have marveled at what others are capable of achieving, and it is precisely art and science where the essence of being human has historically manifested most clearly. Why? Paraphrasing the words of N. Wells, art has always been a channel for reflecting the human experience: our joys, lamentations, tribulations, triumphs, and our own identity. Science, on the other hand, has been the conduit through which human beings discern their own existence and draw from nature the elements needed to improve their quality of life.

You only need to look back and you will find countless examples of this, including how the two intertwine and complement each other. Think of the cave paintings on the island of Sulawesi, the fauna carved into the monolithic pillars of Göbekli Tepe, the invention of the wheel, the development of writing.

And what does any of this have to do with chess? The short answer is: everything.

If you have already spent years in chess, you will already be familiar with the four labels attributed to it: game, sport, art, and science. Its nature as a game is unquestionable. It is a sport because FIDE itself refers to itself as the "governing body of the sport of chess" and, since 1999, the International Olympic Committee has recognized it as a sporting discipline.

As for whether it is an art, one need only look to the past and contemplate the combinations of the great masters: games like The Immortal Game or The Evergreen Game remain held in high esteem in chess books and clubs alike, because their sequences are hypnotic, aesthetic, and, more importantly, awaken in the viewer an almost indescribable sense of wonder. Capablanca himself expressed it clearly, saying that chess was an art comparable to painting or sculpture.

To describe its scientific nature, it is also necessary to look back. Depending on how strict one wants to be, we can trace it back to texts such as the Vasavadatta, which contains one of the earliest records of Chaturanga, the direct predecessor of chess; or to treatises like the Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas, compiled by King Alfonso X, the Wise, which not only contains the rules of the game, but problems and variations are also presented.

Regardless of the considered reference point, a pattern emerges that mirrors the nature of the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, testing, analysis, and conclusions.

Thus, as chess began to spread across cultures and gain more practitioners, new observations generated new ideas, which were put to test in games. If they were good, they were refined; if they were bad, they were discarded or reinterpreted. Conclusions were shared and made known within the community; it has been this way from the Middle Ages to the digital communities of the present.

It is throughout this process that science and art intertwine in chess through the human factor: the curiosity of those who observed, the audacity of those who experimented, and the generosity of those who shared what they learned.

It was thanks to that passion, that genius and creativity, that little by little the game carved out a special place in society. Places like El Café de la Régence in France stand as some of the greatest witnesses to this; hundreds of people traveled from all across Europe to gather there with the hope of playing a game against the experts, or simply to listen and watch others as they did.

But here comes the irony and, given the date, it seems appropriate to point it out.

Today, it is no longer necessary to travel far to find a community, or to listen to anyone in particular. And yet, a recurring thread in chess clubs and cultural centers (as they are known in Latin America) is that learners want to improve quickly, raise their ratings in little time, and aspire to great things; however, they show little willingness to build the tools and the instinct required to get there. Reading about the generations that came before us, it is palpable that they approached the game with genuine curiosity; today, it seems people approach it with intrigue, yes, but also with an inexplicable sense of urgency.

Another recurring topic among veteran players and teachers is that when they try to explain the idea behind an opening, the principles of transitioning into the middlegame, or the basic sequences in endgames, some students interrupt as though they already know. And not because they have built real knowledge, but because they searched Google, consulted an engine with an evaluation bar, or blindly followed what an influencer posted. The difference between the two, between knowing and believing one knows, used to be at the heart of chess learning. Now it is, more often than not, an invisible obstacle.

This is where the paradigm shift enters. While chess was being built through centuries of curiosity, admiration, and documentation, technology was also evolving. One of those branches, which you likely know well enough to consider yourself an expert user, is artificial intelligence. Although the first approximation of the concept in chess arrived more as a mechanical hoax in the late 1700s, in the form of the automaton known as The Turk, that hoax planted the seed of what would become an information revolution by the mid-twentieth century: what if machines could learn to think like us?

Time passed, and the work of figures like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon gave rise to a new branch of knowledge: computing.

Chess, by its nature, proved to be a particularly attractive training ground for this new field. And so the first engines and the first computer chess competitions were born.

By 1996, these machines had reached a level capable of competing against the reigning World Champion, Garry Kasparov, and by the following year, they had defeated him. Deep Blue passed into history as the first machine with a chess-playing ability superior to that of the greatest chess player in the world. The difference was this: Kasparov had decades of accumulated knowledge and practice that, combined with his ingenuity, allowed him to move the pieces across the board; the computer, was a collection of databases and optimized mechanical evaluations that allowed it to find the statistically most efficient move for each situation.

Over time, the engines became even more powerful. When it was believed that Stockfish had essentially solved the game, AlphaZero appeared, the first engine to integrate neural networks  and demonstrated that there were still paths left to explore. The book Game Changer, by GM Matthew Sadler, discusses this at length.

So far, everything sounds fine. What is the problem?

The problem arises when people come to trust what the machine says more than the words of another human being. If we use these AI systems to evaluate games that had been studied for decades or centuries, we find that many of the brilliancies and hypnotic sequences emerge from imprecisions and errors. When preparing an opening repertoire, the focus is no longer on the comfort of one's playing style, but on weighing statistics: what percentage of games does White win if...? The question is no longer what does my instinct tell me? but what does the bar say?

And the phenomenon does not stop at chess. Around the world, universal interactive models are being developed that have become so integrated into daily life that, little by little, people have stopped developing skills in order to delegate them to these systems. Need an image for your blog, a logo for your company? Ask Midjourney or Grok. Want a song? Turn to Suno or Udio. Have a research paper? Perplexity and Consensus are there. Content creation? ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Analyzing a chess game? Stockfish NNUE, Leela, Torch.

Technological progress is, among other things, unstoppable, and that has led us into an era where, if you do not naturally possess the knowledge of a subject or the skills to perform a task, you have tools to which you can delegate your shortcomings and construct, at least artificially, the appearance that they do not exist.

Fewer and fewer people are willing to listen to other people, because the real voice of real people is heard with diminishing intensity.

The media and the different spheres of daily life have been flooded with the reverberation of silicon words that some, having no voice of their own, replicate ceaselessly. In chess, especially in digital communities, you no longer need to be a master or have vast experience to know whether a position is good or bad: you simply look at the evaluation bar on the side and you will know who has the advantage, even if you cannot understand why.

With all of this, I am not trying to say that new tools or progress are a biblical-scale evil. However, I cannot shake the thought that, by depending so heavily on these machines and delegating our thinking to soulless systems, we lose, little by little, the essence of what once helped build and shape the beautiful game that chess is.

Our opinions come no longer of pure human knowledge and ingenuity; they are the replication of the words of an algorithm that works on patterns and statistics, one that is complacent, and at the same time, incapable of appreciating art or rigor, and incapable of marveling at them.

I am not a person inclined toward humor, but I do notice the ironies that surround us.

Today, with all the tools we have, instead of being more capable, it seems we have grown weaker. Today, with our technological dependence and our growing insensitivity to the real voices of real people, there is no need to construct or formulate a joke. We are the joke, and we are telling it without realizing it, every single day.

Perhaps there is no better way to close than with the words of someone who has spent decades observing human contradictions:

"We're smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can't figure out if we did the right thing." — Jerry Seinfeld