What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields. So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence.

Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72-it didn’t lose once… Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators-not even standard openings. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.

The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading.

.as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. *Inform students that the tic-tac-toe gif featured above always ends in a draw! What advantages do you think the supercomputer had over the human brain? No machine could beat a chess master until IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov under standard tournament time controls in 1997. Is it possible to create an algorithm for chess that would ensure that a player never loses (analogous the one we just attempted for tic-tac-toe*)? Explain your response. To what extent is the game of chess a mathematical algorithm? In what other ways could checkmate in four moves be described? Combine the playing pairs in groups of four to tackle the following questions:

Next, after all the hands-on fun, it is time for some collective critical thinking. When the time is up, ask if anyone is unbeaten? Announce that the next task is to formulate a succinct algorithm (rule) that, if implemented tirelessly, will ensure that a player never loses at tic-tac-toe. Using pencil and paper as the did as children. Next, students should find a partner and get ready to play tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) for at least five minutes.

Algorithm for chess program