We have a marvelous thing in developed countries where the IRS (equivalent) already knows how much your tax should be paying[0] and you basically have to just look at a few numbers and click "That seems right". They even have a form where you can change things that aren't correct! Marvelous, I know... we've had that for 15+ years in Denmark.

EDIT: To add, if you get it slightly wrong... you're fine, it'll be adjusted for in next year's taxes.

[0] ...because it has to, in order to investigate evasion.

You're just one step away from all the money just going straight to the government, then they decide how much goes back to you ;)

I'm not sure I get your point. Can you elaborate?

> Playing stockfish is like playing tennis against the wall (for untitled players at least).

It's the same for Magnus Carlsen. Even with Queen odds, Stockfish is literally unbeatable for the best players in the world. It's just too strong at evaluating all kinds of random tangent moves (and ensuing positional advantage) which no human player can possibly pay attention due to the time required.

Stockfish vs any human is like Carlsen vs other players by about 3-5 orders of magnitude[0]. It's that stark.

[0] A wild pun appears.

EDIT: To avoid having to respond to each responder, fair comments about Queen odds. Maybe I was thinking Rook odds? Also, I kinda lumped Stockfish in with all the other engines, but I realize there are other engines with different properties ofc.

Well, that's actually not true at all. Stockfish is not a very good odds player and at queen odds is easily beatable even by bad players like me. It will just trade down into more trivial and easier to win positions that it perceives as "less bad", since everything is super-losing anyway when you start down a queen.

Leela odds networks, on the other hand, are an entirely different beast. I cannot beat Leela queen odds, much less rook or minor piece odds, and even GMs struggle against Leela knight odds.

Without odds though, yeah, Stockfish is just incomprehensibly strong by human standards. All top chess engines are, but Stockfish moreso.

No worries, I know stockfish is unbeatable by humans.

But sometimes, these GMs can flag it, which counts as a win (especially when it's proxied by a cheater). Sometimes they can also explain the idea that cost them the game, so they've learned something maybe.

Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding.

> Whereas us scrubs literally cannot do anything at all for reasons completely beyond our understanding

Computer moves are typically much more concrete than human moves: a human will play based on pattern matching ("intuition") and can only make explicit calculation of a small fraction of possibilities, after which decisions are guided by guesswork. The computers are unbeatable in practice because they can calculate concretely in seconds what might take an expert human long intensive study to notice, and they don't make the same kinds of oversights humans can make.

But if you stop and explore a particular position for an extended time, and if you have an intermediate level of chess skill, you too can probably often (usually?) figure out why it's doing something. Sometimes understanding the computer's reasons takes searching multiple branches of a tree several unlikely looking moves deep, but the collection of threats the computer was preemptively thwarting, traps it was setting, etc. are comprehensible to humans with enough effort, especially in games between the computer and a human.

The frustrating thing about playing against the computer is that it notices and thwarts every plan you might come up with, before you make up the plan yourself, and it doesn't make (human-apparent) mistakes, so the game ends up feeling hopeless. Nothing you try works on it, and if your idea is even slightly inaccurate it will be exploited.

You put it better than I could. The lesson of "in this exact position you can kick the pieces for 7 moves to get a fork, so instead you should play a4" is not something that I can implement into my games

Chess is a fun game. That's why it's been around for 1000+ years.

There was a renaissance during Covid and due to 'The Queen's Gambit' where it gained much more mainstream popularity, but... Chess AI was already far far (like 1000+ Elo) ahead of human players at that point.

The thing is... chess is humans playing (communicating) with humans and that's what keeps it interesting. Check out the view counts of chess AI tourneys vs. human tourneys.

I mean the OpenAI/HuggingFace thing was incredibly similar, except maybe more reckless than specifically intentional, I suppose. Didn't stop them milking the doomer angle for PR.

I have to I say (if it's sarcasm) that I appreciate the commitment to the bit. Unfortunately, it's getting harder and hard to tell these days...

If the whole British Post Office Scandal (Fujistu, btw) in the UK wasn't enough, nothing will be. People literally killed themselves over the accusations/convictions that were 100% false. One of the major people responsible was an Anglican Priest(!) of all people who was so sure that the Computer Is Right... [0]

We're headed for even rougher times if LLMs are going to be taken "at their word".

[0] Now, watching her testimony, it seems she was willfully complicit and it's a disgrace that she isn't in prison, but that's tangential. The "system" was responsible, but without personal accountability, nothing will change. So it goes.

Absolutely. Very happy 10+ years subscribed here and I'll keep subscribing.

(As someone pointed out in the comments, the title of this specific post could have been less heart-attack-inducing, but still... :) )

Yup, they are often just Accountability Sinks.

Not quite what you're asking, but pre-registration does alleviate e.g. p-hacking and such without the need for multiple teams. It doesn't do much for outright fraud, but still...

Only if the study matches its pre-registration and someone is checking that. Which it turns out, they often don't.

https://www.compare-trials.org/

That's a fair point. Ultimately, incentives are all screwy at the moment.

Gotta tie some actual prestige/shame to not following up.

Exponential is also overkill (even with jitter as others have mentioned).

I seem to remember there was a "you failed 5 PIN entries in a row, please wait 500000 seconds before you retry" on Apple phones. So, you probably also want a sensible max... which makes exponential a bit pointless. Just do a basic fixed delay + (large, e.g. 0.5 x the delay) jitter and you'll be fine for most things. You can add a bit of cumulative delay if it's really costly to do retries.

Cap the number of retries before the user has to manually try again. That's fine.