> Now what is your cyborg player going to do?

Build and configure the machine better. Quick, tell me, what's better at playing Chess:

* Or is Xeon Platinum 8180 with maximum 8-way SMT memory sharing with a big-ol 1TB shared transposition table the fastest computer?

* Or will it be cheaper to rent AWS-instances with their V100 GPU in the cloud? Or is the latency for the remote-access bad?

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The cyborg player has to still build and program the machine to compete. It is all part of the competition. Can you run a transposition table shared between chess engines over RDMA 10Gbit SFP+ Fiber? Or is that too slow?

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This isn't hypothetical at all. The winner of the World Computer Chess Championship 2019 was 8 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 running Komodo vs 24 x Amazon AWS Intel Xeon E5 running Shredder.

Configuring and building the computer is still an incredibly difficult part of cyborg chess.

> Build and configure the machine better.

It's a stretch to categorize that as a cyborg player. You might as well categorize any chess program as a cyborg player because a human had to program and train it.

The key difference between cyborg/centaur/advanced chess and plain old computer chess is whether there is a human in the loop making the move decisions. My argument is that having a human in the loop will result in a worse player.

At a minimum: building the opening book alone will require human intervention.

When you build an opening book, you need to pick-and-choose which engines will self play. Will you build an opening book vs Stockfish? Komodo? LeelaZero?

If so, how will you generate these LeelaZero games? You'll have to build a computer (or rent one from AWS) to play these LeelaZero games. What are the time-controls of matches?

Self-play at 40-minutes + 15-second increment means that you'll only create a game every hour or so. Spend 30-days building databases at 40-minute + 15-second increment games, and you'll only reach ~720 games of analysis per month of preparation.

Self-play at 1-minutes + 0-second increment results in a game win/loss every 2-minutes (maximum), giving you 21600 generated opening book positions per month of analysis. But these 21600 games are of lower-quality.

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Spend 1-month building an anti-Stockfish database, an anti-LeelaZero database, an anti-Komodo database... and you're now 3-months into preparation and there's still Shredder, Johnny, and all other programs that may arrive at the contest.

Its not exactly as easy as you think it is. There's no algorithm that automatically builds the best opening book (or "counter" opening book) against your opponents. Its a human choice for what the computer will spend the next-3 months self-analyzing and self-playing.

Lets think about how to build anti-LeelaZero seriously. Which of these networks do you download as the LeelaZero representative? https://lczero.org/networks/

You don't have the time to build an anti-opening database for all of those networks.

Again, building an opening book does not take place at move decision time. Aside from that, there are several optimization techniques that you can apply to choose the hyperparameters appropriately, but once again, this has nothing to do with cyborg chess.

> this has nothing to do with cyborg chess.

From my perspective, cyborg chess is about playing the best game of chess in all time... only stopping once we have discovered "the perfect game" (aka: proving that White-wins, Black-wins, or a Draw is always possible with perfect play)

The computers currently playing Chess, and Go, are incredibly powerful. But they are far from perfect. People have constantly found weaknesses in chess playing programs over the past 20 years, and as a result, have improved chess programs significantly.

Go has only had 2-years in its "cyborg" state, where we can finally use computers as a methodology of exploring the game state.

Solving Go is an interesting theoretical pastime, but there is no reason to expect any particular overlap between people who are interested in playing the game (like Lee Sedol) and people who are interested in building machines to asymptotically approach a solution beyond human understanding.

Most of the resistance you're getting in this thread seems to be due to the fact that you think people who are interested in the game should also be interested in the other thing, and it just seems that a lot of them aren't (including Lee Sedol).

Playing Go challenges your mind with vast complexity and immediate feedback of winning or losing every game. It's a deeply engaging hobby for people who are susceptible to that kind of thing, and it used to be a meaningful career, with competitions, schools, and professional teachers. All of that changes now that software is vastly better at it than any human can ever be. The rush of competing by the strength of the moves you understand and make, by the unaided strength of your own mind, cannot be compared to picking between different engines to make moves for you based on some heuristics about which engine is better at openings. The era of human Go is simply over, for better or worse.

Claiming that the era of human Go is over seems melodramatic. Computers were better than the best humans at chess decades ago and professional (human) chess is still big, with schools, tournaments, prize money, superstars (Magnus Carlsen is a pretty big deal) etc.

This whole train of thought is silly. People still want to play chess, the existence of computers that are better than them is irrelevant. Nobody is going to pivot from playing chess to this, they're just going to play chess, because nothing is stopping them.