“We did have a really extensive database that I worked on for four or five years before that,” remembers Stephen. “Steve had contributed to it.”

They also had three PCs chugging through the numbers and these had been specially prepared by Stephen. But crucially, they knew how to actually play a cyborg game.

“We had really good methodology for when to use the computer and when to use our human judgement, that elevated our advantage,” Stephen says.

Cheaters’ charter

And in the end, it all paid off – they won the tournament, leaving grandmasters and some well-known programs in their wake. It was quite a shock but it proved the theory worked: certain human skills were still unmatched by machines when it came to chess and using those skills cleverly and co-operatively could make a team unbeatable. Humans playing alongside machines are thought of as the strongest chess-playing entities possible.

It’s a fact which saves mankind, and rightly so, from the ignominy of simply being beaten by computers at a game we have been practising for millennia. But it’s also fair to note that computers have probably irreparably changed the way that chess is played forever. In recent years there has been a worrying rise in cheating at tournaments, many such incidents involving the use of computers. In April this year, one grandmaster was caught apparently cheating after he kept leaving a match to go to the bathroom. Officials say they found an iPod Touch with a chess app they believe was being consulted during toilet breaks. And in September, an Italian was discovered to be using an elaborate system involving a camera, Morse code and an accomplice armed with a chess program to cheat during a tournament.

Chess has always been and will always be fiercely competitive. The computers may indeed be too strong to beat. But Bushinsky makes an interesting comment. Because young players today don’t even think of challenging them, the era of machines improving out of a direct response to plucky human rivalry may have come to an end. The fact we’ve become too scared to play them may be a brilliant move in itself…

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