alt Hacker NewsMy friend is an electrical engineer and just passed a FIDE chess rating of 2000. Has played for 30 years, started the chess club in high school. Knows a little programming from the stuff he had to do with microcontrollers in college.
I'm an infra/admin jack of all trades with a comp sci degree and have been a hobby programmer for 30 years. I have a Lichess rating of 1000 on a good day.
We tried doing a chess bot competition (open book, use AI to program it, pull in opening books, end game tables, whatever, free for all) and I absolutely stomped him, but I've only beat him in real life over the board twice in 20 years.
He will beat 99% of random players in real life, and I will beat maybe 20%.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, but it seems to me that maybe domain knowledge isn't everything anymore? Or the domain itself has shifted?
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what does actually playing chess have to do with writing an efficient game tree search algorithm beyond a few simple principles? You challenged him to a programming contest and won, as the vastly more experienced programmer. Even though he could use AI, your domain knowledge here proved to be the deciding factor.
I think a charitable interpretation is that from the perspective of AI, some domains are shallow (like chess), and some are deep (you can fill in the blank here).