@fchollet
Importance score: 4 • Posted: March 29, 2026 at 19:39
Score
4
Let me explain what I mean using your chess analogy... Imagine a world where chess doesn't exist. In this world, humanity encounters an alien species, and they say "let's play a game of Glurg, it's our traditional pastime. Here are the rules, see you tomorrow" -- and it's the rules of chess. My claim is that following this interaction, a working group of the world's best minds, leveraging current externalized cognitive infrastructure (computers, the internet, etc.) would be able to analyze the rules and develop a working 3000 Elo chess engine within 24 hours, in time for the match. Give them an extra 3 weeks and they'd have a 3500 Elo engine that's 10x more compute efficient. So human intelligence is already at a level where we can go from "here are the rules" to "I can play at 3000 Elo" immediately. Not optimal yet, but not too far off.
On @fchollet's view (I'd summarize) the domain of real life is closer to chess than to Go, with human play already near-optimal and top machines giving only knight odds; rather than God having a 5-stone handicap, as thought to be true of Go. (He is being silly, of course.)
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