Friday, October 7, 2022

"Centaur chess" and the "Wicked Problem"

From a long interview about the state of cheating in high level chess:

Machines alone can beat the world’s best chess master easily, but human-machine teams can beat that machine.

That was a very counter-intuitive result. [Former U.S. Defense Deputy Secretary] Robert Work famously used “centaur” chess to promote the Third Offset Strategy, where humans and computers work together, combining human strategy and computer speed. This fed a big argument at Defense about whether tactical battlefields should be just AIs acting alone and coordinating things, or a human-computer team. I actually was consulted on this.

...

In the current controversy, I’ve read some pretty crazy commentary, like, “Oh, maybe one of the players was using a sex toy as a remote communication device” to send vibrations to signal what an off-site machine thinks he should do, which I assume is not substantiated.

Yeah, but there’s one case in 2013 that I was involved in, where a player getting buzzes on his thighs was substantiated. It’s believed to have been a cellphone in a pocket. It was Morse code.