I think the parent comment meant professional, high-level chess. The kind people get played to play, not just do for a hobby. That's absolutely on life support.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would look like in the math field, but it probably involves a lot of mathematicians losing their jobs and the quality of human-produced math decreasing overall.

The quality of the math in general would be fine, since in this scenario cpus will keep producing it. The quality of cpu-cpu chess games is quite high, beyond human understanding in many cases.

Chess is a weird example because it doesn't really have any utility beyond itself. Even pure math sometimes ends up having use in the strangest places. Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is?

It's a bit like a tree falling in a forest. If an LLM proves a theorem but no one understands it, did it make a sound?

Also, you learn to be a better chess player by... playing better players. The widespread availability of chess engines has made flawless opponents available to every player.

If your goals are understanding the game, self improvement, building thinking skills-- this is the best chess has ever been. It's only if your goal is to beat every opponent you can find that chess is in a bad place.

I mean, this is the problem with analogies and trying to use them to prove things, right? People working through problems from an analysis book with their friend (or an LLM) is not the same as research mathematics. People playing in a chess club is not the same as what makes for a good chess tournament. Lumping everything together is just making this branch of the conversation less relevant.