Thanks For Ruining Another Game Forever, Computers

We may have reached an inflection point. The problem space of chess is so astonishingly large that incremental increases in hardware speed and algorithms are unlikely to result in meaningful gains from here on out. Turns out I was kinda … totally completely wrong. The number of possible moves, or "problem space", of Chess is indeed astonishingly large, estimated to be 1050: Deep Blue was interesting because it forecast a particular kind of future, a future where specialized hardware enabled brute force attack of the enormous chess problem space, as its purpose built chess hardware outperformed general purpose CPUs of the day by many orders of magnitude. In the heady days of 1997, Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million chess positions per second.