| I think brute force (coupled with powerful heuristic of course) is the optimal way for increasing strength of chess play in engines. It has long ago surpassed even the best humans anyway. What is interesting to me - and really underexplored at the moment - are chess engines that are more human-like, but not for their strength of play. They might be a tad weaker, but much more useful for humans. Such an engine would be able to annotate (human) games reconstructing most likely intentions of the players - which is what a good human annotator does. It would therefore be able to teach humans by identifying their specific weaknesses on conceptual level; not merely highlight bad moves. It could truly play like a human for entertainment or training - current chess engines suck at it, you can weaken them, but their mistakes won't have the same feel as blunders made by human opponents. Such intelligent chess engines might be able to perfectly simulate playing style of human masters, living or deceased (based on recorded games of course) - so one day we might find a fairly probable answer to how exactly would a 1975 Fischer-Karpov match play out : ) Or generate beatiful, breathtaking games on purpose (there's already been some research devoted to evaluating beauty in chess, eg. https://en.chessbase.com/post/a-computer-program-to-identify...). |