story
Software running in a smartphone can play deep games against each other.
Chess engines aren't like car engines are to sprinting. They are more akin to text-to-image AIs but as though every single picture they produce is better than what any artist ever could produce.
Part of that is because Chess is easily defined (the win conditions are comparatively simple).
I'm rambling now and I think that's enough wall of text for a hot take.
Why does it have to be humanoid? The chess engine isn't.
But yes, people will continue to play chess, go and spear throwing because it doesn’t matter if something non human is better.
Are they? The throwing sports? How many people do you know who regularly follow shotputting or javelin (outside of possibly the olympics). How much do the top 20 javelin throwers in the world earn in sponsorship and prize money and how does that compare to other actually popular sports.
I have no doubt that chess will remain at least as popular as javelin or shot-put for the foreseable future. I'm just not sure that counts as 'popular'.
Why would chess engines playing very well mean human chess stops being interesting? I don't see the relation.
However, TAS is very unlikely Computer Chess because the TAS is actually a composite of a vast number of individual human player inputs - assembled by in effecting rewinding and continuing the game over and over. The TAS is not a machine beating the game, but the effect if humans played the game as well as they know how. That's why they have "sync" problems during a GDQ, the playback device has no idea how to play, it's just robotically carrying out actions.
And a computer performing a TAS isn't playing the game at all.
So many cheating scandals boil down to splicing, which is again not playing the same game.
Tools that don't hack the game are very often allowed and openly used.
I think this is questionable. While we can understand the physical limitations of a human compared to an engine, we tend to alleviate the intellectual limitations. Just like an engine can deliver far more power than a human could ever do regardless of their training, a computer performs far more chess move computations than a human ever could, regardless of their training. It's just that our brain is biased toward alleviating computational cost, because we implicitly think "in the end, a human could as well play the same moves as a computer"
I do agree however on the premise that chess is a zombie sport, but I think it has more to do with the ease of cheating. If you consider cycling for example, there has also been cases of cheating with an electric engine inside the bike, and new cheating methods are likely to be developed faster detection procedures. And in this case "Bike engines are like car engines are to sprinting"
In fighting games, most AIs are discredited and stupid because they have no reaction time. I don't know of any that name in a nondeterministic 10-15f of reaction time. It really complicated things.
E.g. I remember early 3rd party Starcraft AIs would beat humans just by micromanaging certain nimble flying units.
Why? That seems like a completely arbitrary line to draw.
