[scheveningen]

It's much more difficult than it used to be, but I think there is still some value to human guidance, more as a "referee" than anything else.

Right now we have essentially two top tier engines -- traditional brute force with alpha beta pruning (stockfish), and ML (leela). Both alone are incredibly strong, but they are strongest and weakest in different types of positions. A computer chess expert, who knows what kind of positions favor stockfish and what kind favor leela, could act as a "referee" between the two engines when they disagree, and when they are unanimous, simply accept the move.

Ten years ago, a grandmaster driving a single engine could typically beat an equal strength engine. I don't think that's the case anymore.

But I think if you have someone who is an expert at computer chess -- not so much a chess grandmaster, and you gave them Leela AND SF, and let them pick which one to use when in the case of conflicts -- they would score positive against either leela or stockfish in isolation.

Larry Kaufman designed his new opening repertoire book by doing exactly this -- running Leela on 2 cores + GPU, and stockfish on 6 cores, and doing the conflict resolution with his own judgement.

The human can certainly no longer pull his own moves out of thin air, though.

[roenxi]

Computer mastery of Go has reached the point where it is a difficult task for an expert (read: grandmaster level) human to even follow what is happening. It is totally implausible that a human could resolve a conflict between top engines in a meaningful way.

It is unlikely that Chess is any different. Any superficial understanding by a human of which move is 'better' is just ignorance of the issues around evaluating a position. If you have statistical evidence that is something. 'But I think' is not evidence.

It might be entertaining to have a human involved. It isn't going to help with winning games.

[tuxiano]

I can't speak for Go but in Chess the best players in the world understand the nuances of a position still better than the computer engines and - if occasionally proven wrong by the computer analysis - are able to understand the refutation and refine their strategic eveluation. I know this because it's what I've been doing in the past seven years in the realm of correspondence chess to gain the title of international master.

[scheveningen]

I don't even know the rules of Go, but I am a long-time chess enthusiast, and I have a decent, but not top-level, understanding of chess (I am a FIDE master and I also play correspondence chess (which is human+engine) and have an interest in computer chess heavily).

I can absolute guarantee you that a human (who is an expert in computer chess, someone like Larry Kaufman) + engines will beat a single engine over the long run. With current tech and computing power, this is ONLY because we have brute force (with alpha-beta pruning) and ML engines that are at near-equal strength, and have strengths and weaknesses in different types of positions, and that those strengths and weaknesses are understandable.

If we did not have AlphaZero, I don't think the human would be able to add anything at all currently.