Stories change and the chess players’ visions of the game too. However, it changed the tales, the stories around the game, which are so important to all the chess players. But, again, this didn’t bring chess to an end. Even Magnus sometimes is careful to express a definitive opinion on a move before checking it with a chess engine. The pundits and the authorities of the past were really shocked by the rising of the computers just because their opinions had a less impact – if any – on anybody else. There was a common style in chess, based basically on the fashion of the period, as everything else. It was a typical experience in the chess clubs to listen carefully to some authorities that can shut up you because you start to play a different opening, for instance. But there is one exception: the role of the “pundits”, the great authorities of the past, is changed once and for all. On the opposite, chess is more alive than ever before. They did not end the game, they did not calculate everything in advance (as far as it is mathematically impossible), they did not influence the interest of the players in the game. At any rate, the rise of the computer cheaply enough to be used really by anybody did not decide anything about chess. They were still playing, but they used to grudge, a major, nice virtue of many chess players as all human beings, after all. When I started playing chess, everybody was worried by the idea that a computer can be better than humans playing chess. Although Italy is still an extreme case, many people were worried when DeepBlue won the match with Garry Kasparov, as it was reported by Tim Van Geleder, in a philosophical analysis in which all the usual concerns were carefully considered. He did not grow up, as I did, in a place and in a time in which everything about technology and innovation is seen with great suspicious to say the least. After all, Magnus is too young to bother that a piece of technology is able to perform a task better than humans. Magnus, appropriately, seems to not taking care too seriously of this entity more able of him playing chess in the universe. Is Magnus Carlsen better than AlphaZero? We don’t know actually, but it would be difficult to argue the opposite. Giangiuseppe Pili, Dublin City University)
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