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  "considered to be much better than either people or AI in isolation."
Is this really shown to be true?


I went down this rabbithole a few years ago. At the time, I looked around but couldn't find any more details about centaur chess, or evidence that centaurs could outplay AIs.

Then, last year, I stumbled across the following pair of articles. It's about the correspondence chess world championship, where both players are allowed to use engines, and (crucially) have a very long amount of time to analyse each position in-depth and consider long-range strategic implications of each move. The chap interviewed learned to exploit his opponent's over-reliance on the engine, and played in such a way that he was able to gradually accumulate small but compounding positional advantages that eventually gave him an edge. The whole time he used his own engine to catch tactical weaknesses in potential move sequences. A fascinating read.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...


There's correspondence play which allows engines (or any resource) and certain players which are consistently better at the game under those conditions.

Some of the other players surely try just running Stockfish overnight and taking whatever it says is the best move, and apparently that strategy isn't equally good.

Note that I think the "centaurs" are kind of playing a pretty different game than regular chess: they might have a knack for knowing when a particular engine is weak or strong and then trusting the corresponding engines lines more, or something like that.




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