Man-Machine Chess

Tyler Cowen:

… a striking percentage of the best or most accurate chess games of all time have been played by man-machine pairs.  Ken’s explanations are a bit dense for those who don’t already know chess, computer chess, Freestyle and its lingo, but yes that is what he finds, click on the links in his link for confirmation.  In this list for instance the Freestyle teams do very very well. . . .But the “human plus computer” needs time to improve on the computer alone, and at sufficiently fast time controls the human attempts to improve on the computer may simply amount to noise or may even be harmful, given the possibility of human error.  Some commentators suggest that at ninety minutes per game the humans are no longer adding value to the human-computer team, whereas they do add value when the time frame is say one day per move (“correspondence chess,” as it is called in this context.)  Circa 2008, at ninety minutes per game, the best human-computer teams were better than the computer programs alone.  But 2013 or 2014 may be another story.  And clearly at, say, thirty or sixty seconds a game the human hasn’t been able to add value to the computer for some time now.