it's well known that the human brain is much much stronger than the best computer in the world.
my question is, why then computers like stockfish can beat a human.
do you think something blocks our brain? I've read some articles that the human brain uses only 5% of full strength.
Human brains are not especially well-suited for a puzzle like chess, so what we should be asking is how have humans been able to play on the same level as computers looking at millions of possibilities in any given position, when humans might look at a few dozen? I think it was only around the time of Hydra's win over Adams that computer dominance had been fully asserted.
Well, a couple things.
1) The "humans only use x% of their brain", where x is a very small number (usually 10) is just incorrect. No one is actually sure where that originated, but it's just false.
If humans only used that little of their brain, then damage to the brain would only rarely have any effect on function, when instead it pretty much always impairs function in severe ways.
Also, studies using fMRI, EEG, and the like quite conclusively show that we use pretty much all of our brain.
2) That aside, it's a bit misleading to say that the human brain is "much stronger" than any computer.
The brain is a marvelous organ, and capable of incredible feats. Indeed, in some activities, especially anything that is predominantly pattern matching (facial recognition is a good example of this), the brain can still outperform computers.
However, that's hardly the same as the brain just being "stronger than" computers in general.
It's pretty obvious that computers "remember" things better than humans. I can save a 10,000 page document to my computer in seconds, but no human could read and remember it that quickly.
Computers are also better at any activity that is strictly applying logical rules to well defined states. So, doing math problems, for example. While the best mental math whizzes are capable of incredible speed of calculation, none of them are going to calculate the results of multiplying 2 thirty digit numbers faster than a computer.
Chess is much, much more like that than it is facial recognition, so it's not surprising that once people hit upon the right sorts of rules for engines to apply, they just surpassed humans rapidly in chess.
Now, that's also why humans (at least the very best) were able to keep up with computers for so long. Computer chess just hadn't discovered the right sorts of rules to be applied, so the engines were very inefficient by today's standards. Couple that with the elephant in the room, the massive hardware improvements over the last 20 years, and it's no surprise that we used to hold our own and now can't.
Of course, there are somehow still quite a few chess players who think that the best humans could hold their own in classical match against Stockfish on good hardware, but where they get this idea baffles me :)
" none of them are going to calculate the results of multiplying 2 thirty digit numbers"
what about autism, people like that can probably do that..
Ok, now you're just trolling.
Nah, you wanna see trolling, go find the question on chess addiction and the put the poster's handle into the Google translation thingy.
My command of the German language is just about enough to understand the "lick my" part of his username.