We call them chess ai. But they’re not actually real A.I. chess bots work off of opening books, predetermined best practices. And then analyzes each position and potential offshoots with an evaluation function.
They will then start to brute-force positions until it finds a path that is beneficial.
While it may sound very much alike. It works very differently than an A.I. However. It turned out that A.I software became better than humans at writing these functions.
So in a sense, chess computers are not A.I. They’re created by A.I. at least Stockfish 12 has these “A.I inspired” evaluations. (Currently they’re on Stockfish 15 I believe)
And yes. We also did make “chess AI” that is as bad as the average player. We even made some that are worse. Because we figured it would be nice if people can play a chess computer that is on the same skill level as the player. Rather than just being destroyed every time.
The definition of “AI” is fuzzy and keeps changing. Basically when an AI use case becomes solved and widespread it stopped being seen as AI.
Face recognition, OCR, speech recognition, all those used to be considered AI but now they’re just an app on your phone.
I’m sure in a few years we’ll stop thinking about text generation as AI, but just one more tool we can leverage.
There is no clear definition of “real AI”.
Those are all still AI. Scientists still have a functional definition that includes these plus more scripted AI like in video games.
Essentially, any algorithm that learns and acts on information that has not been explicitly programmed is considered AI.
