[halfcat]

By far, the fastest way to improve at chess is with a coach. Books work in the beginning, but soon you are crawling around in the dark. You can't identify your weaknesses, so you can't correct them. After studying the wrong thing for a year, you fix one of your weaknesses by accident, and you improve. A coach bypasses all of that wasted time. The challenge is not to automate a chess curriculum. That already exists on many websites selling chess software. Those are useful to learn certain theory and burn it into your brain by drilling over and over. The challenge is to create a chess teacher that can identify your specific weaknesses and correct them. A middle ground approach might work well, where you take one mental model of chess and develop a program to train that specific mental model. For example there is the Nimzowitsch model where chess is seen as siege warfare, with specific meta-strategies. If that model fits with how you think, then great. But it doesn't fit everyone. One day this super efficient learning will be reality. It sounds kind of boring. With an exponential game like chess, everyone will be at about the same level, except a few who throw their life away chasing n+1 while everyone else settled for n and having a life.