You are right if by "better" you mean "competitively stronger at tournament or rapid conditions". Humans are still way stronger strategically and competitively if given enough time and resources to avoid tactical mistakes. So yes, humans still provide unique insight into chess every day in correspondence chess or analytic research.

Humans aren't stronger strategically anymore either, under any conditions.

In 2014 a heavily handicapped Stockfish beat the 5th ranked player in the world (Nakamura) under tournament conditions despite no access to its opening or closing books and a one pawn handicap.

The match you are referring to was played under tournament conditions that clearly handicapped the human Grandmaster. I read from the report of the match [0] that "The total time for the match was more than 10 hours [...] The two decisive games lasted 147 and 97 moves." This unfavourable conditions clearly penalized the human and so the result can hardly be taken as meaningful regarding the strategic superiority. From the quietness of my room I instead regularly find strategic plans that overcome my and my opponent's computers. Feel free to join the correspondence chess federation [1] to experience the joy and pain of strategic research!

[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-... [1] www.iccf.com

That's absurd. He works on human+chess research. He obviously hasn't given up on human insight.

What he has given up on is a single human beating a computer.

I haven't seen any recent (last 5 years or so) articles by him showing he's doing any work on it. There's a few recent articles where he talks about how humans should work with machine learning, but nothing specific.

When he recently came out of chess retirement he didn't talk about it at all in either 2017 or 2019:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/06/king-back-chess-...

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/sep/06/chess-leonard-...

There's nothing recent about him on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

Can a human + computer beat just a computer?

I can't imagine a human doing anything besides making things worse or even.

It's much more difficult than it used to be, but I think there is still some value to human guidance, more as a "referee" than anything else.

Right now we have essentially two top tier engines -- traditional brute force with alpha beta pruning (stockfish), and ML (leela). Both alone are incredibly strong, but they are strongest and weakest in different types of positions. A computer chess expert, who knows what kind of positions favor stockfish and what kind favor leela, could act as a "referee" between the two engines when they disagree, and when they are unanimous, simply accept the move.

Ten years ago, a grandmaster driving a single engine could typically beat an equal strength engine. I don't think that's the case anymore.

But I think if you have someone who is an expert at computer chess -- not so much a chess grandmaster, and you gave them Leela AND SF, and let them pick which one to use when in the case of conflicts -- they would score positive against either leela or stockfish in isolation.

Larry Kaufman designed his new opening repertoire book by doing exactly this -- running Leela on 2 cores + GPU, and stockfish on 6 cores, and doing the conflict resolution with his own judgement.

The human can certainly no longer pull his own moves out of thin air, though.

Computer mastery of Go has reached the point where it is a difficult task for an expert (read: grandmaster level) human to even follow what is happening. It is totally implausible that a human could resolve a conflict between top engines in a meaningful way.

It is unlikely that Chess is any different. Any superficial understanding by a human of which move is 'better' is just ignorance of the issues around evaluating a position. If you have statistical evidence that is something. 'But I think' is not evidence.

It might be entertaining to have a human involved. It isn't going to help with winning games.

I can't speak for Go but in Chess the best players in the world understand the nuances of a position still better than the computer engines and - if occasionally proven wrong by the computer analysis - are able to understand the refutation and refine their strategic eveluation. I know this because it's what I've been doing in the past seven years in the realm of correspondence chess to gain the title of international master.

I don't even know the rules of Go, but I am a long-time chess enthusiast, and I have a decent, but not top-level, understanding of chess (I am a FIDE master and I also play correspondence chess (which is human+engine) and have an interest in computer chess heavily).

I can absolute guarantee you that a human (who is an expert in computer chess, someone like Larry Kaufman) + engines will beat a single engine over the long run. With current tech and computing power, this is ONLY because we have brute force (with alpha-beta pruning) and ML engines that are at near-equal strength, and have strengths and weaknesses in different types of positions, and that those strengths and weaknesses are understandable.

If we did not have AlphaZero, I don't think the human would be able to add anything at all currently.