An artificial intelligence system has evaluated the great chess masters of all time. This is the result.
So far the method of evaluating the chess abilities of the grandmasters is a simple system. This is the Elo method, which takes the games played and assigns points based on the results. In this way it is predicted what would be the winner in hypothetical games , kept between players from different eras. But the conclusions are very simplistic. That is why a specialist researcher at the University of Toulouse has created an artificial intelligence algorithm to more accurately evaluate the game of the great masters of chess.
The world chess championship it began to be celebrated at the end of the nineteenth century. These were times of light for European thought and art. Intellectual activity was highly valued in the heart of the Old Continent and the desire to organize international events emerged. We had to compete to demonstrate, meet to share and, above all: progress, one of the favorite contemporary verbs.
The first world chess champion was Wilhelm Steinitz originally from Prague, he won the title in 1886. From there there has been a long list of champions and, above all, of great chess players who are considered among the best.
The Elo system, created by Hungarian Arpad Elo in the 60s, offers a ranking of the best chess grandmasters of all time. But its accuracy is much disputed. Current players are much more likely to be up in the leaderboard due to points.
Thus, Magnus Carlsen, the young Norwegian who is the undisputed champion in recent years, is first on the list. So far so normal. Carlsen has proven to be a true out-of-the-box and many experts agree that he is the best in all of history. But among the next five places, Kasparov is the only previous player 2014. In fact, among the top 12 of the list only the Russian and the Indian Anand have played before 2014.
The system proposed by Jean-Mar Alliot, of the Computer Research Institute of the University of Toulouse, is based on artificial intelligence to rank the best players. He does it with the game data. But it also uses the moves that the players made in each game. Thus, the algorithm is able to evaluate the quality of the plays.
These moves were compared to those that Stockfish would execute in each case. A program that works on the OSRIM supercomputer and is able to move in the most perfect way. This is how 26,000 games have been analyzed since the beginning of the world chess championship.
The ranking extracted from the work of the University of Toulouse
With this data the system is able to predict the results that the games could have yielded among the great champions. And it has done so precisely, because the comparison with games played has been mostly coincident.
The ranking developed by artificial intelligence also led by Carlsen followed by the Russian Kramnik. The third player is American eccentric Bobby Fischer, who is followed by Kasparov and Anand.
Images: Maggie Osterberg, University of Toulouse
