I was watching a chess video and Deep Blue, the IBM computer, was able to beat the best Chess player in the world at the time. If we made the computer and it bases its moves off of moves already made in real life shouldn’t we be able to beat computers like any other player? This isn’t chess specific but can be for any multitude of games.
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Computers can do some things that humans either cannot or have a harder time of doing. For example, in a turn-based game such as chess, the computer can look at all possible moves in a fraction of a second. For each of those moves, it can look at all possible following moves in a fraction of a second. While those fractions do eventually add up as you get deeper into how many moves ahead to look, a powerful computer can look far ahead into the game.
Computers can also have huge tables of board layouts which have pre-determined outcomes, allowing it to avoid further computation should a sequence of moves arrive at one of these layouts.
The challenge with games like chess is that the search space grows exponentially large, so even a computer has a hard time looking at all possible outcomes. Programmers can use some conditions to allow the computer to filter out certain boards from further consideration and use the aforementioned look-up tables to keep computation time down. Grandmaster chess players have had some success by making some unexpected moves and thus preventing it from using the lookup tables and any other pre-determined algorithms, forcing it to have a smaller search depth. But as computers get more powerful, have more access to memory, and generally have more data from which their algorithms are designed, they can get to the point where it will be extremely difficult for a human to overcome the advantages a computer has.
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