AI Is Now the Undisputed Champion of Computer Chess

It was a war of titans you likely never heard about. One year ago, two of the world's strongest and most radically different chess engines fought a pitched, 100-game battle to decide the future of computer chess. On one side was Stockfish 8. This world-champion program approaches chess like dynamite handles a boulder--with sheer force, churning through 60 million potential moves per second. Of these millions of moves, Stockfish picks what it sees as the very best one--with "best" defined by a complex, hand-tuned algorithm co-designed by computer scientists and chess grandmasters.