Are today's GMs better than 100 years ago?

 Murphy, Alekhine, Botvinik and Co., How would they fare with today's Carlsen, So, MVL, Caruana and Co.? How much has the game evolved?

Morphy would get slaughtered straight out of the opening.  

Alekhine would do well because he excelled at complicating things and turning it into tactical chaos. The opening advantage would then count for little.  

Botvinnik might struggle because he went for direct and logical play rather than creating chaos on the chess board. The problem is some of those positions and principles are now known to be inferior and Botvinnik would be slowly ground down if he didn't complicate. 

Has the dynamics of play changed? I looked at games played by both of different generations and I can't seem to differentiate the strength of play.

There is a theory that today's people would generally score much better than the people of 100 years ago.  If this theory holds true, then the same can extended to chess.  However, no one would say that people wouldn't preform the same with the basic maths.  According to this logic, both generations would preform similar in regard to tactics, but the older generation would have to familiarize themselves with the advances found by computers.  Today's GMs aren't better, they just have more information. 

Alekhine, Capablanca, Rubinstein, Lasker, Tarrasch and Nimzovitch; will do well against Modern. Today top GMs aren't that good and in fact their rating are inflated, Caruana lost in a won game and he was check mated, give Morphy and Anderssen that same position and they would of won it: And Nakamura had a easy won endgame and blow it, give the same position and Morphy, Steinitz, Tarrasch, Chigorin, Alekhnie, Rubinstein, Lasker and would of it very easily.

say whaaaaaaat

Lasker was a much better endgame player than Carlsen will be, he played precise and could defense very difficult position and endgame; in a recent tournament { Sinquenfield Cup 2017}, Carlsen miss a win against Nakamura, Lasker would of found the win.

Do we have much data on the accuracy of predictions about the tournament performance of the reincarnation of players from somewhere around a century ago? In any event, would a 2017 competition be, in any sense, fair without giving the reincarnated player a chance to look at stuff that has been available to modern players?

Today's GMs with their knowledge would utterly destroy 100 years ago GMs, I think. If, however, those GMs were allowed to use all the modern technology and data to keep up with time, then, I think, they would do, at the very least, as well as they did at their time.

well duh

IM John Watson wrote a description of the Nunn investigation:
http://theweekinchess.com/john-watson-reviews/historical-and-biographical-works-installment-3

@kindaspongey: Your post is obviously a copy-paste from the long running thread about Morphy's actual playing strength, but in any event, it is in there. Nunn examines the Karlsbad 1911 games of Hugo Suchting. His conclusion was that on his best days, Suchting was around 2100, and even if you assume Suchting was 2100 all the time, his score (11.5/24) gives an average rating for the tournament of 2129.

...Waiting for someone to say the big names of the past would be no better than 2000 or so rating today.....there's always one that does it. 

Anyone can have a bad day.

Exactly. And GM Nunn's study shows that the old masters blew winning positions much more frequently than modern top players.

Wow. 

https://www.chess.com/article/view/laskers-worst-loss

Lasker was a great endgame player, but he was already surpassed in the endgame in his own day by Rubinstein and Capablanca. After that, Botvinnik, Averbakh, and of course Smyslov were great endgame technicians. And then Bobby Fischer, Ulf Andersson and Anatoly Karpov showed what the next generation had learned from the past.

But even those greats, whom I love and studied, can't hold a candle to today's elite GMs. Time after time, they have to navigate incredibly difficult endgames with almost no time on the clock, no adjournments, and no seconds to help them. And yet they play computer-perfect endgames. This is in large measure because they practice endgames on a daily basis with perfect machines. 

Even in these rapid games, where mistakes happen far more often than not, these guys can defend difficult technical games with great precision. 

Lasker was great. But in terms of pure technique, he can't hold a candle to what today's players do, even in rapid and blitz time controls.

Carlsen is good at endgame too, but he got lazy in that game, and performed far below his normal. The huge difference between most modern top players and the ancient ones is the computer assisted homeraparations. I think the old masters generally were better in endgames than the current masters, because they spent more time in the endgames. These days too often  endgames are blitzed out in time trouble and therefore not well calculated.  I guess the old masters if they could come here with the strength of their youth they could do very well, because they were strong enough to usually survive the first 40 moves, and better at endgames.