Have engines ruined Chess?

Have engines ruined Chess? Or made it better?. Do you think their overall impact has been more positive or on the negative side. I dont say they have or not,

but would like to hear opinions. I know there has been threads like this probably a lot though...

Interesting comment. What are the wrong ideas?

Lol

It might not like it initially but that's only the horizon effect kicking in. Black eventually equalizes, like any other sound opening. 

Yeah I think engines mostly ruined chess so many lines in so many openings were refuted and now there are fewer viable choices.  And within sound openings you're preparing against an opponent's computer. 

This article basically explains it:

http://thechesscoachingwebsite.blogspot.com/2013/10/computers-and-their-all-pervading.html

I think that engines simply allow a person to be more of what they are.

Meaning that a hard worker will work harder and more efficiently by verifying their ideas through selective and dilligent use of engines. Meanwhile lazy people get lazier by relying on the engine to do all the work for them.

To put it another way, if you use the engine to analyze your game for you without having first tried to do it yourself then what have you really learned?

I've watched chess players finish a game, run it through an engine, and be done with it forever.  I've done that myself before as well.  I can honestly say that I learned almost nothing that way, whereas the games that I picked apart myself for a couple of hours before using the engine to blunder check are the games where I seem to learn the most.

As a non-titled player I don't find that engines have made very many openings either more or less playable for me.

I think they ruin people's ability to play chess. I run into all these young guys who use computer engines to assist their play on line at my chess club. They sit down and blunder away every game, because they use a crutch to play and check their moves before they make a mistake. So they have decent results on line but can't actually play over the board.

I see the game of chess much like I see the game of mathematics.  I love to sit down at nght with a blank piece of paper and manipulate mathematical objects in interesting ways to me.  A number of times I have proven new things that are interesting to me and maybe a few others in the field I am messing with.

Computers have made such manipulations automatable to a high degree.  I can use symbolic manipulation programs like Sage or Mathematica and rearrange objects without much of the manual effort of years earlier.  That is effort I enjoy - it's part of why I do it, as it's "for fun" and not my profession - but I also understand that it let's me look at problems at a different level.  I can now ask bigger questions and get faster answers, and proofs can be much deeper.

I still need to know how to do manipulations because I have to do them to compose the larger proofs and know what questions to ask, but I don't have to spend time doing that almost exclusively.

The same goes with chess.  When I was younger, I loved setting up a board and thinking about positions.  So reading books and considering openings and tactics and endgames was a long, enjoyable process of having a board and setting up and thinking about positions.

But sometimes not having feedback led me to make bad conclusions.  And not all of the thinking was to practice the skills I needed to, and learning positional motifs took quite a long time.

With computers, I can now ask whether a move is sound and get a quick answer.  I can build opening repertoirs quickly.  I can review my games and find hidden tactics that my in game thinking missed.  I can learn to play deeper games.

I think there are two reasons people don't like what computers do:

1. They use the computers wrong.  They try to simply "get a number" for a position and see a game as "picking the best move" or blundering.  This is a horrible way to use engines.  It is unfortunately the easiest way to interact with engines, but I think it is deeply flawed.  First, the evaluations use positional valuations that are simple heuristics and may miss important postional strengths of specific positions, and they vary engine to engine.  But more importantly, the simple valuations do not tell you how precisely you have to play to get that value.  Some positions may value equal but you have to play the next 15 moves exactly, and any deviation may give a losing game.
2. They have nostalgia for what they loved about learning the game and think new players will miss out.  This is seen in technological advances in most professions, sports, and games.  Anytime someone puts lots of effort into something to get good at it, it is hard to hear you can do it easier.

For the first one, I think that engines need to have better coding to expose better tools to analyse positions for actual players.  But existing interfaces already make it easier to do these types of analyses than working out by hand, and learning how to use the tools better is necessary.  You can't play that engine pawn push in that crazy opening you are booking just because the engine says it is the best valued move.  You have to know the positional strengths and weaknesses it introduces and how your normal play will take advantage of that move.  If you need to memorise the next 20 moves and all 24,779,314,666 variations to get any advantage, it probably is better to stick to a more solid move that is valued less.

Engines are great at resolving material exchange valuations and showing tactics.  They are amazing at proving mating patterns.  And computers will set that board up far faster than you can even think about placing the first piece.  If you use engines where they have great advantage, you can get amazing benefits.  They will only get better at providing that information in useful ways.  In this way, they provide the same benefits as they give mathematicians - they are amazing tools of fast automation, useful where needed to get into the game deeper. 

I will always have fond memories of manual practice and will do it whenever it makes me happy to do so.  But new tools are pretty awesome too.

Hello.

I am overwhelmingly against them, and i don't have one. I am a very ordinary player. I am not even a club player anymore. I used to play competitive club chess more than 20years ago when i was still a teen.

I think they negatively affected the creativity. If i had Bill Gates money, i would simply put players before important toutnaments/matches in a camp for say a month without engines, and then no engines during the tournament.

It should be a game between two players, not between players and their computers. So, who cares if it proves after the game a move wasn't sound? Chess is a sport and the more drama the better.

Engines made it less dramatic.

You can't stop them now though, and i have no doubt at some point in the future there will be a championship for engines.

Didn't they have championships at least since the late 90s?  I hear that Fritz and Shredder were former computer world champions. 

I've been seeing more innovation in opening theory because of engines, not less.  Engine prep often shows GMs playing new variations.  Chess seems to be robustly equal, not sharp on every move.

The article doesn't seem to be against the behavior of engines but simply about some people.  That engines are involved seems incidental. 

I think that horizon effect and shortcomings of infinite analysis have resulted in some lines to fall out of favor in the past decade and we are now seeing certain lines resurrected as people realize earlier engine evaluations were incorrect (being based on less depth, being based on infinite analysis rather than a deeper minmaxed analysis).  

While most think engines will result in fewer openings and lines being considered sound, I think it is possible as computing power becomes more readily available we may find branches being added back into the opening trees because it turns out lines thought refuted are not refuted after all.  

However as a practical matter players may find themselves having to play much more accurately in certain lines.

Forget chess.com... 

.... engines have ruined Formula 1