On a table in front of you is a chessboard, its pieces frozen midway through a game. It's white's turn to play. How long would it take you to find white's best move? Not a good move or even a great ...

It took about 50 years for computers to eviscerate humans in the venerable game of chess. A standard smartphone can now play the kind of moves that make a grandmaster’s head spin. But one artificial ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had ...