What's the big appeal of chess? We (as humans) can't beat computers. It's probably useful for further research, but I see absolutely no value in (human) competitions.
Or we should abandon rowing as a sport because we now have 9hp Honda outboard motors?
Of course, everything depends on "the market" - if people want to watch human chess tournaments (or cycling tournaments), they will... but I suspect with time it will either have to become a hilarious, anti-cheat porn or it will die out. I'm rooting for the latter :-D. I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.
I rather doubt that. Go was thought to be much harder to solve, but AI has caught up there, and with techniques that will probably generalise to any similar games.
Chess also has the added bonus of providing a lot of interesting puzzles for those interested, they can sit and analyze lines with engines after the games as well or watch Agadmator on YouTube analyze it. It's fun!
I agree that puzzles are fun, but cheating will be a problem for the competitive part. And I think it will degrade the appeal to watch/follow.
The best players in the world can still go toe to toe against three of these things, unless they choose to intentionally avoid high flying shots. In which case this bot wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZtowNHhrQ
Chess is far from solved, either. AlphaZero's play has actually led to the emergence of additional theory.
This is completely incorrect. We have fully solved chess with 7 pieces, and 8-piece tablebases are in progress. The initial chess position has 64 pieces, and solving gets exponentially harder as more pieces are added.
> We (as humans) can't beat computers.
We can't beat cars at races either yet competitive foot races still exist.
But the competition in chess was never about the computers, it's about the players. And that's true for many sports, otherwise we'd only ever watch the Olympics.
