[nemo1618]

Centaurs are a transient phenomenon. In chess, the era of centaur supremacy lasted only about a decade before computers alone eclipsed human+computer. The same will be true in every other discipline.

You can surf the wave, but sooner or later, the wave will come crashing down.

[pegasus]

They are transient only in those rare domains that can be fully formalized/specified. Like chess. Anything that depends on the messy world of human - world interactions will require humans in the loop for translation and verification purposes.

[stevage]

>Anything that depends on the messy world of human - world interactions will require humans in the loop for translation and verification purposes.

I really don't see why that would necessarily be true. Any task that can be done by a human with a keyboard and a telephone is at risk of being done by an AI - and that includes the task of "translation and verification".

[pegasus]

Sure, but at the risk of running into completely unforeseen and potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. We humans are wired to use human language to interact with other humans, who share our human experience, which AIs can only imperfectly model.

[pas]

I have to say I don't feel this huge shared experience with many service industry workers. Especially over the phone. We barely speak the same language!

[halfcat]

> Any task that can be done by a human with a keyboard and a telephone

The power doesn’t stay on solely from people with keyboards and phones.

[satvikpendem]

From a human, to a centaur, to a pegasus, as it were.

[Davidzheng]

Sure, but in pure mathematics there are a lot of well specific problems which no one can solve.

[pegasus]

Mathematics is indeed one of those rare fields where intimate knowledge of human nature is not paramount. But even there, I don't expect LLMs to replace top-level researchers. The same evolutionary "baggage" which makes simulating and automating humans away impossible is also what enables (some of) us to have the deep insight into the most abstract regions of maths. In the end it all relies on the same skills developed through millions of years of tuning into the subtleties of 3D geometry, physics, psychology and so on.

[direwolf20]

How is chess not fully specified?

[Brian_K_White]

They said chess was an example of something that is fully specified.

[awesome_dude]

I'm guessing that they were referring to the depth of the decision tree able to be computed in a given amount of time?

In essence, it used to be (I have not stayed current) that the "AI" was limited on how many moves into the future it could use to determine which move was most optimal.

That limit means that it is impossible to determine all the possible moves and which is guaranteed to lead to a win. (The "best" than can be done is to have a Machine Learning algorithm choose the most likely set of moves that a human would take from the current state, and which of that set would most likely lead to a win.

[Centigonal]

How transient depends on the problem space. In chess, centaurs were transient. In architecture or CAD, they have been the norm for decades.

[lanyard-textile]

Agreed. But I don't think the time scale will be similar.

Chess is relatively simple in comparison, as complex as it is.

[wat10000]

On the other hand, chess is not very financially rewarding. IBM put some money into it for marketing briefly, but that’s probably equal to about five minutes of spend from the current crop of LLM companies.

[noosphr]

Last I heard, which was last year, human + computer still beat either by themselves. You got a link about what's changed?

[dwohnitmok]

I'm curious what you heard exactly. As far as I can tell, centaur chess looks completely dead.

Nobody ever wins anymore in the ICCF championships (which I believe is the most prestigious centaur chess venue, but am not sure).

This is not an exaggeration. See my comment from several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45768948

As far as I can tell based on scanning forums, to the extent humans contribute anything to the centaur setup, it is entirely in hardware provisioning and allocating enough server time before matches for chess engines to do precomputation, rather than anything actually chess related, but I am unsure on this point.

I have heard anecdotally from non-serious players (and therefore I cannot be certain that this reflects sentiment at the highest levels although the ICCF results seem to back this up) that the only ways to lose in centaur chess at this point is to deviate from what the computer tells you to do, either intentionally or unintentionally by accidentally submitting the wrong move, or simply by being at a compute disadvantage.

I've got several previous comments on this because this is a topic that interests me a lot, but the two most topical here are the previous one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022581.

[seanhunter]

The last public ranking of chess centaurs was 2014, after which it is generally held to be meaningless as the ranking of a centaur is just the same as the ranking of the engine. Magnus Carlsen’s peak elo of 2884 is by far the highest any human has ever achieved. Stockfish 18 is estimated to be in excess of 4000 elo. Which is to say the difference between it and the strongest human player ever is about the same as the difference between a strong club player and a grandmaster. It’s not going to benefit meaningfully from anything a human player might bring to the partnership.

Magnus himself in 2015 said we’ve known for a long time that engines are much stronger than humans so the engine is not an opponent.

https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2026/stockfish-18/

https://www.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-th...

[jibal]

You're the one claiming "Last I heard" so you're the one who owes a link.

[mw888]

Why do you nitpick his illustrative example and entirely ignore his substantive one about finance?

[eranation]

I'm highly worried that you are right. But what gives me hope is that people still play chess, I'd argue even more than ever. People still buy paper books and vinyl records. People still appreciated handwritten greeting cards over printed ones, pay extra to listen to live music where the recorded one is free and will likely sound much better. People are willing to pay an order of magnitude more for a sit in a theater for a live play, or pay premium for handmade products over their almost impossible to distinguish knock offs.