For decades, chess has served as a laboratory for studying intelligence and decision-making. It is well established that today's chess engines can outperform even the strongest grandmasters. But far less is understood about how their play actually differs.
By analyzing move-by-move interactions in more than 2,000 human vs. human and AI vs. AI chess games, a team of researchers from the Complexity Science Hub and the University of Parma found a fundamental difference in how humans and AI handle what they call strategic tension.
"People and AI do not simply differ in how strongly they play," says study author and CSH senior scientist Vito D. P. Servedio. "They differ in how they manage complexity. Human players quickly reduce it. AI is able to sustain it."
The researchers measured this difference by quantifying how many possibilities remain open after each move. The wider the range of possibilities still open at any given point, the greater the "strategic tension" players experience.
At the beginning of a chess game, strategic tension is low. The pieces are still largely disconnected, and the consequences of individual moves are relatively limited. As the game unfolds, each move reshapes the network of possible moves, creating increasingly complex arrangements.
