AnAn: Do You Prefer Playing a Person or a Bot?
Do you prefer to practice chess against a person or a chess bot (such as the chess bots on chesskid.com)? Why?
BY ANAN LIU - NORTH GWINNETT MIDDLE SCHOOL
HER LEAGUE MEMBER & HER NEWS COLUMNIST
Courtesy of NBC News
Do you prefer to practice chess against a person or a chess bot (such as the chess bots on chesskid.com)? Why?
Chess, the use of your brain and wit to command an army to destroy another’s king — it’s a fun hobby for all of us to play, and it’s extremely competitive. With the growth of new chess players, many are looking to become experts fast. In fact, one chess.com report from January showed that at least 250,000 different accounts were being opened every day. But with this many chess players looking to improve, numerous games will be played to practice chess and an individual's skill set. But on many chess websites, such as chesskid.com, chess.com, and lichess.org, there are two different options as to how to practice: steady computers with strong mindwork or opponents that have a sudden move and advantage. Or, stated simpler, robots or humans?
Robotic machines in chess are a work of art when put to their utmost potential. Stockfish, one of the best chess engines, is considered “unbeatable” — only grandmasters who are the highest of the highest can manage a draw against the top level engine. But the benefits of playing with bots don’t end with a simple “you play, you improve.” With bots, there’s also no time limit (unless you choose to have a clock set), meaning that players can take the time and think about positions thoroughly, analyzing them better. This is not always possible when players compete against humans, where each side must think fast or else they lose. And this fact comes with another huge advantage: analyzing better makes you become better, and once you’ve destroyed all the chess bots on your rating/level, you can simply take it up a notch and advance from there.
But one flaw marks the robots in particular against humans. According to one Quora user, robots in chess games have a randomized mistake generator, which basically means that they have been programmed to mess up or have a missed win in six moves, twelve, twenty, and so on. Humans in nature don’t have this. They’re bound to mess up somewhere — if you have the creative mind to trick them into falling for a trap, whilst robots can simply ask themselves and defend. When you’re playing against humans, you also have a mindset of a real chess player in life: pressing time, small talk, and interactions. You get to experience what every chess grandmaster does at every tournament. Have you ever heard of shaking hands with a bot or telling it, “Good game”? And although playing against bots really does make you improve, you only truly improve against bots, not people. You can customize and allow hints (from bots) in a game, but you can’t do that in a player vs. player setup. Even with the benefits of the hints and undo buttons, we can’t stop ourselves from nonstop pressing the buttons to destroy Stockfish Level 15 — the human mind is designed to stop at nothing to improve, so the urge can be too strong to keep on using hints even when we try to ignore it. As @nklristic on chess.com wrote, “Games against bots are a poor substitute for playing humans. You can play them for fun, but those games can't be taken seriously because bots do a poor job of imitating lower rated humans.” And although the “lower rated humans” were said in here, bots are also poor at playing at a high level as well. In fact, many grandmasters avoid playing against bots because of their poor execution of copying humans. Just take a look at Magnus Carlsen or other chess masters’ chess history and games — Carlsen had never played a bot on chess.com and out of ten other grandmasters in the leading world rating, Hikaru Nakarmura was the only one that played a chess game against bots.
So, the question is still there: which is better for you, bots or humans? Bots are better for analyzing and preparing you in the short run if you’re looking to beat your best friend. But if you’re planning on taking chess for a long time and getting better, humans will be your best bet. Just remember, no matter which one you pick — make sure you learn something new in every game.