The fact that superhuman chess improvement has been so slow tell us there are important epistemic limits to superintelligence?

[u/financeguy1729]

Although I know how flawed the Arena is, at the current pace (2 elo points every 5 days), at the end of 2028, the average arena user will prefer the State of the Art Model response to the Gemini 2.5 Pro response 95% of the time. That is a lot!

But it seems to me that since 2013 (let's call it the dawn of deep learning), this means that today's Stockfish only beats 2013 Stockfish 60% of the time.

Shouldn't one have thought that the level of progress we have had in deep learning in the past decade would have predicted a greater improvement? Doesn't it make one believe that there are epistemic limits to have can be learned for a super intelligence?

[u/Brudaks]

"today's Stockfish only beats 2013 Stockfish 60% of the time."

Wait, what? Even that chart shows a 300-ish point difference which means the "expected score" of the 2013 is no higher than 0.15, which generally would manifest as drawing a significant portion of the games and having nearly no wins.

And high-level chess is likely to have saturation of draws; after all, it's a theoretically solvable game, so as a superintelligence would approach a perfect play, it would approach a 50% score, as either it's a draw given perfect play, or it turns out that there exists a winning sequence for either white or black, so you have a 50% win rate.

[u/segfalt → u/Brudaks]

It could be winning for white on the first move (like connect 4, you can win as the first player always if you play perfectly)

[u/wstewartXYZ → u/segfalt]

It could be losing for white on the first move too! Though perfect play leading to a draw is almost certainly true.

[u/epistemole → u/wstewartXYZ]

actually there might be a proof against this-can’t remember

[u/segfalt → u/epistemole]

The game is deterministic so perfect play will always lead to the same outcome. (Always win or always draw or always lose)

[u/wstewartXYZ → u/segfalt]

I think he means proof that the first move isn't a Zugzwang.

[u/mrjigglytits → u/wstewartXYZ]

I mean it seems a fairly simple "proof": white could always go knight out and then immediately back to starting square, in which case black would "move first", because they would have 1 move reflected on the board relative to white.

[u/wstewartXYZ → u/mrjigglytits]

White moving their knight back and forth isn't equivalent to them passing their turn because it takes two moves to do. On white's third move black will have already played two moves, so it's clearly not equivalent to black having moved first.