DeepMind's superhuman AI is rewriting how we play chess

Since 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue beat world champion and chess legend Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, chess players have accepted that machines are stronger at chess. We have taken some comfort from the fact that we taught these machines how to play. But strangely enough, despite being programmed by humans, traditional chess engines don't play quite like humans. Despite the hand-crafted heuristics, the fundament of an engine's superiority lies in calculation: sifting through vast numbers of moves to find concrete ways to solve a position. Back then, chess grandmasters were hired in to evaluate a series of typical positions and describe the considerations that led to the assessment, and then programmers turned these considerations into ever more sophisticated heuristics.