Our sun will explode way before we develop a 32 piece data base.
Even if we travel to other planets to live, we will not develop a 32 piece data base.
In the mean time in practical play sometimes a human can solve a chess problem the very best chess engines cannot solve.
Computers are all about tactics and chess is 99% tactics...so there you go. Computers can never have intuition or "improve" with experience.
I think you are incorrect on your statements.
Once computing technology gets better, programmers will be able to create 32-piece databases.
That's when chess officially dies.
How would it die? No one could remember all that. If the starting position is proven to be "Mate in 104," that would comprise billions of lines that no human could ever memorize.
Take away the human-developed library of openings from these computers, and they aren't even able to accurately assess mainline opening positions. It's hard to call them "unbeatable" when they are so dependent on human-derived knowledge, and not on their computing power, in the openings. That's my understanding based on discussions I have had with a couple of CS students at MIT and CMU, anyways.
Well they do have opening book but anything in computer program is human derived. They strenght comes from human developed evaluation function (many granddmaster have contributed to this work) and human eveloped tree search wtih humand developed ways of pruning the tree.....
So why pick one human developed thing out of the list? The whole point od artificial intelligece is to automate some part of human decission making.
Besides I thing very small portion of humans would do a one bit better against a computer without opening book.
Talk about completely missing the point.
The general populace is working very hard to convince me that I should not bother, and doing a great job of it. Kudos.
To argue that we should not play chess because there are machines that can beat us would be to say that we should not run because machines are faster. There is still great interest in the 100 m sprint at the Olympics despite the fact that machines can move much faster than us. To be the best human at chess or to be the fastest person on Earth is not diminished by their being machines that are better.
Besides, what about playing for the fun. That is the main reason I play.
Tomorrow i could start a jogging training. Maybe in 5 years i would still run very slow and only short distance (Elo 1000). Maybe i would run marathon distances in some years with a very decent personal record (Elo 2000) But all i could reach is very far away from professional runners (Elo 2500 and more) and of course more far away from my car (Elo 3300).
Its all about fun and reaching personal goals.
I agree completely. But why chess in particular?
"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In playing with people of similar rank on chess.com you are stretching your mind to its limit, but not beyond. So you are walking the line between boredom and stress that leads to great joy. It's also a repeatable experience - it's not like (say) reading a novel where you can't be certain if you are going to be bored or excited before actually trying to read it.
It's not about winning, you will lose 50% of the time on chess.com if you are "doing it right". If you only play much lower ranked players to get 100% you will be bored, if you only play higher ranked players you may get frustrated.
If you aim to increase your rank on chess.com then you have an objective measure of improvement, something very difficult to find in such a pure form. Amazon don't give you a measure of how your ability to read novels is improving 
.
Atomic computers, young man. Atomic computers.
Why lift weights when we have invented forklifts and front-end loaders?
Why do cycling when we have invented motorcycle?
Why play sport when we have invented TV to watch it instead?
Dumb question is dumb
Why lift weights when we have invented forklifts and front-end loaders?
Why do cycling when we have invented motorcycle?
Why play sport when we have invented TV to watch it instead?
Dumb question is dumb
It is not dumb , in fact why we must do calculations if we have calculators?,why trying to learn by heart history if we have invented the Dvd? , the new generations to come are relying more and more on machines and it is not absurd to say that in the future humans will become more lazy as long as machines are doing the work for us.Yet it is clear that we play chess for fun and to sharpen our minds ,speaking of my case, the question is :Why our way of playing chess it is still the same?, since we have computers shouldn't we be developing engines and having them legal to play with,this will be the real revolution that hasn't fully started yet ....
Why lift weights when we have invented forklifts and front-end loaders?
Why do cycling when we have invented motorcycle?
Why play sport when we have invented TV to watch it instead?
Dumb question is dumb
It is not dumb , in fact why we must do calculations if we have calculators?,why trying to learn by heart history if we have invented the Dvd? , the new generations to come are relying more and more on machines and it is not absurd to say that in the future humans will become more lazy as long as machines are doing the work for us.Yet it is clear that we play chess for fun and to sharpen our minds ,speaking of my case, the question is :Why our way of playing chess it is still the same?, since we have computers shouldn't we be developing engines and having them legal to play with,this will be the real revolution that hasn't fully started yet ....
Your thinking is also flawed, as well.
We didn't like digging by hand, we invented shovels.
We didn't like walking all the time everywhere, we invented the bycicle.
We didn't like our food spoiling as fast, we invented the fridge.
It's the same thing in a different cloak.
These are just tools that help us.
There are examples in every age, in every part of the world.
@ GnrfFrtzl:
can you explain more please?
I can only say that the examples that you brought and mine in the previous comment are very diffrent .
I made the previous comment to prove that there is nothing wrong with the first question(for that i brought examples in wich "the machine can't replace humans" but to be precise i will say examples in wich humans must remain active for the our best and for me in your examples we don't have the same situation that's why i asked you to give me more details :) ) but what is really wrong is to ask about the reasons to keep playing chess and changed the first question to why we are still playing the same way.
About my thinking being flawed, i just wanted to say that we are humans :D
Why run? There are planes which can go about mach 3 in speed.
Let's do.
Why do we humans exist if we can let robots take over the world?
Even with difficult-to-beat computers out there, I prefer to play chess, myself, for the same reason I prefer to breathe fresh air instead of using a ventilator.
Guys, what are you talking about engines play without databases? I have fritz with several engines and their suggestions are not the best. Of course when they play they use opening and ending databases but without them they are not so strong. Despite how good evaluation algorithm is but it's fixed and not ideal.
Yes same can be said to people rated significantly under Magnus Carlsen. He seems unbeatable to us but we still play, Because it's fun. My coach once said to me computers are better but we can still play, like running there are planes and cars better than us yet we run, so I guess we do the same with chess. computers don't have positional skill whatsoever.