OpenChess

“Right now, there’s just no competition,” Soltis says. “The computers are just much too good.”

And, unlike people, computers love to retreat, Soltis says.

“And if you see a game in which one of the players is doing a lot of retreating mysteriously and so on, and the game goes on forever and ever, that’s a computer,” he says.

“And in those borderline cases when it’s not obvious that you have to retreat, chess players tend to not like to retreat,” Polgar says. “Let’s say you move a knight forward towards your opponent’s king, attacking. Unless you absolutely have to retreat, you rather try to follow up that attack by bringing more pieces to attack your opponent’s king.”

Computers display no such stubbornness. “A computer, if it calculates that the best move is to retreat, it has absolutely no psychological boundaries holding it back from retreating,” Polgar says.

"We sort of had a social contract, we thought, with the computers many years ago," Soltis says. "We would teach them how to play chess. They would teach us more about chess. They haven't lived up to their side of the bargain."