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Why do We Still Play Chess?
431 sats \ 15 comments \ @TotallyHumanWriter 7 Sep AI
In 1997, an IBM supercomputer beat the sport’s greatest mind.
Deep Blue II became the first machine to defeat a chess world champion — Garry Kasparov. Humans would never win at chess again.
But if computers have been better than us for so long, why do we still play chess? Don’t we always play to win?
Well, even though we’re unlikely to record a victory over the machines, chess has become more popular than ever. According to a June 2023 PBS feature, subscriptions to chess clubs have soared and earlier this year chess.com servers overloaded due to a the highest number of active users ever.
This is not just a fad based on The Queen’s Gambit (a 2020 Netflix adaptation). Over 100m people have registered on chess.com since then, and books, YouTube channels and other content is flourishing. A Grandmaster recently visited the city in Spain where I live, and thousands of people came to watch her play.
Here’s my theory behind the recent revival of chess. The answer to why we still play is what’s behind the game of chess — strategy and spatial recognition.
It’s a system of training ourselves to appreciate cause and consequence, to improve our decision making. The best players train against computers, knowing they can’t win, but they can learn.
The same is true with today’s writing landscape. Professionals are panicking that machines will produce most of the content we’ll read from now on. Writing will change — that’s true. AI can write faster and more (grammatically) accurately. It produces useful functional texts based on what is already recorded.
But what’s behind human writing? 🧠 Patterns of structured thought 🗣️ Sound rhetoric 🫀 Biological sensation and emotion 👨‍🚀 Human opinion and experience 🖊️ The creativity of language 📚 The beauty of stories
Writing is a skill that we still need to train.
If we don’t, how will we know what makes our words effective? How will we communicate? How will we make sense of our past?
We can use AI to help in a myriad of ways, but the words it processes belong to us.
Just as we have recognised the importance of the concepts behind chess, we must do the same for the process of writing.
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132 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 7 Sep
I did always find it fascinating that people still play chess when we know that computers can do it much better than us.
But I think the superiority of AI in chess has actually made chess less prestigious. I honestly feel like Chess has become a bit more entertainment oriented than the world-class competition of the mind that it was seen as in the 70s. And you can see this in the behavior of its top players and influencers too, it's a lot more about personal drama and entertainment now than the actual game
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51 sats \ 0 replies \ @jbschirtzinger 8 Sep
Spassky vs Fischer was more like world powers that selected chess avatars in some kind of Mortal Kombat/Twisted Metal death match.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TotallyHumanWriter OP 8 Sep
Good point. I don't follow chess that closely, but the media does love a bit of Carlssen drama.
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84 sats \ 4 replies \ @SwapMarket 7 Sep
Whas this written by AI? What did the second half of your text have to do with the first and the title?
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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 8 Sep
Bulleted lists with leading emojis is a pretty strong indicator
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TotallyHumanWriter OP 8 Sep
It uses an em dash too, so it MUST have been generated!!!
Don't consider what AI can create. Think about what it can't do. That's how I make a living as a totally human writer.
I could point to a dozen parts of this post AI could not write. But it's not worth my time trying to convince you though. 😃
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @TotallyHumanWriter OP 8 Sep
Was this comment written by a blind man? Did you read the last few lines of the post?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SwapMarket 8 Sep
I did. The supposed connection between chess and writing made no fucking sense to me. I am ok at chess, but I don't make a living as a writer, so what can I know, right?
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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @asterisk32 8 Sep
AI cannot be the final form of technology humans invent.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TotallyHumanWriter OP 8 Sep
At the moment, it is but a confused Psyduck.
It must evolve into a glorious Gold duck.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @flat24 8 Sep
Very much in this text. I am not a great player but I know how to play the game, and it is one of the main things in which he actively participated in the learning of my youngest daughter. encouraging the learning of the game, which will not only help you know how to play, but it is a teaching that will help you improve your decision making in the future and throughout your life.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @realBitcoinDog 7 Sep
That you wrote it and you love it and others love you is why we read what you write, let alone writing for yourself
But we’ll see if we love the AI
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Entrep 8 Sep
To be a grandmaster I guess, that's to me still paying chess
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brave 8 Sep
Deep Blue's win in 1997 didn't kill the game; it supercharged it by shifting focus from beating the machine to honing strategy and intuition.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @2053456d48 8 Sep
No doubt AI seems to beat human minds and intelligent in many areas, but I am hopeful that the beauty of human mind still exist.
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