For those (probably few) of us who play chess, we have become more than accustomed to losing to cheaters, playing engine prepared lines, and looking at our engine evaluation after games (if you do not play chess, an engine is a computer program commonly called "Stockfish" which finds the best move in any position by using computer algorithms. Stockfish crushes humans. The world champion would be luckily to last 35 moves). In a way, chess engines have been helped chess advance. The progress made in opening theory, material imbalances, and position play in the last 30 years is far greater than the progress made in the rest of chess history combined. However, in another way, engines are seriously ruining the game. There are several aspects of modern chess which engines destroy.
Firstly, engines have created a cheating epidemic in online chess. Obviously, engines are prohibited in online play since it is essentially making a computer play for you. However, Chess.com closes almost 1000 accounts every single day from cheating alone. This massive number makes it really difficult to play chess online. Within the past week, three of the people I have played against were banned for cheating, meaning that out of the 15 formal games I played, 20% were against a cheater. This cheating epidemic makes the game almost unplayable, as it is just not fun to get crushed in fifteen moves by a computer.
Another major problem that engines pose are the development of computer prepared lines. When any chess game starts, typically the first 10-15 moves are played in about 5 minutes, and the next 10-15 moves take around 4 hours between the two players. The reason for this is the concept of opening theory. For hundreds of years, players have been studying the best moves to play out of the opening, and the average player knows a ton of opening theory. For example, I am in the 90% percentile of chess players, and I have about 20 opening variations memorized for my main openings. This way, I can try to get an equal or better position out of the opening. However, this has been taken to the extreme, and now we are seeing that, in the top chess tournaments in the world called "Super GM Tournaments", the players have memorized up to 30 moves of engine theory. The games take less than five minutes and end in a draw, since both sides know the engine moves and they reach a completely drawn endgame after only a few minutes. This is making high-level chess boring to watch, as everyone knows the outcome of the game before it even begins.
A final problem chess engines impose is that they take away form the previous culture of chess. For example, Super GMs in the past would play 40 moves one Day 1 of a tournament and then pause the game! Everyone would go home for the night and the two sides would spend the whole time analyzing the position with their friends. The next morning, the game would be resumed and both players would continue to play. This is obviously no longer feasible, as both sides would just use an engine to analyze the position.
Overall, engines have really developed the game of chess, but they also have hurt it much more than we think. At this point, it might be best if we get a little old-fashioned and thought for ourselves, without clicking on Stockfish.
