Yes, I remember way back in the 1980s with early chess programs that I could beat them sometimes. That became far harder in the 90s where when I finally won a game it relied on a very long term plan I could carry out that the 19 deep ply could not detect soon enough. Now, to win today, I suppose instead it would be more like luck/a lottery ticket even if I played perfectly in my own review of my play, I'd need that luck of making some move choices between ok moves where I happen to keep choosing the only winning one and maybe the odds are going to be more like on the order of like 1 in 10^6 or worse against todays AI (at the moment), etc. But, there's always that tiny possibility, in that chess isn't yet solved. (it will be solved when it's finally discovered what are the only-possible best moves by white -- winning (or perhaps drawing at best) -- and to all of these the best possible response series of moves by black.)
Do you remember M chess - it was a tough cookie to beat on highest grades.
Fritz at the time wasnt bad but far easier to beat.
It was the first time cheap commercial programmes got over 200 ECf grade -say 2300 elo.
I remember the days when a guy called Brian levy began analysing the scope of the problem Pre PC
He Wrote some articles in Baruch woods “ chess magazine” At a time there were not even cheap calculators!
How much memory , computer power it would take , in the days of cards and paper tape.
Its only in the late 80s pcs got beyond 1 m ram and 10-100m disk.
Its hard to remember now but in 1990 a single image wouldn’t fit in PC ram!
Array processors were only Tens of MOps, Although could be networked (, which was the bane of physical modelling - eg weather and signal processing too)
Since then both computer and memory power growth has been exponential growth
, and that rather than cleverness overwhelmed it.
Mchess itself fitted on multiple 1 m floppy disks.( who else remembers them?)
Those programmes were in essence a deep opening database , candidate moves, analysis 5-10 moves deep then mechanised positional analysis which is how players of the time did it too. (The cleverest of them like Fischer were better able to assess position , and could certainly analyse deeper Who remembers when he thrashed other grandmasters 6-0 in world champs games! my idol at the time!)
But Brute force has allowed the problem to be overwhelmed rather than solved,
With the ability to analyse 20-30 moves deep and big hash matrixes of 6 endgame pieces etc,
The point I am making…
the reliance of brute force has REDUCED the need for accurate positional assessment, because the search depth allows the positional advantage ( at say 5 moves ) to translate into material advantage at 10-15 moves or big positional advantage which is far easier to measure, for a man as well as machine. But a machine can think quicker and do more.
Humans have a harder job Because they can never analyse so many or so deep variations , they still have to be better at positional assessment.
in short human reasoning is more versatile than machine , but overwhelmed by mechanised power.
I’ve not followed it last couple of years but
The 2800 elo grade seems to represent pretty much human limits,
