Human and AI choices | ChessBase

The question we asked our readers was: Who are the most intersting chess players in history, focusing on style, rather than just strength? Who do you count as your favourites? We listed a number of candidates: Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Gukesh Dommaraju, R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Alireza Firouzja.

This is the list we got from the feedback of our readers:

How does that compare with what AI thinks?

Ed Schröder, the Dutch software developer, used his program Best of Chess, which we described in an earlier report, to extract the most spectacular games from chess history, evaluating them by three features:

• King Attack
• Material Sacrifice
• Length of the game (the smaller the number of moves in a game the higher the bonus).

Ed ran his algorithms on the many million of high-quality games contained in Mega Database, and it identified the players it considered most attractive. This is the top 50 list generated by Best of Chess:  

Here’s a page that lists the results with all the individual factors that contributed to the final evaluation. Here’s an explanation on how Best of Chess conducts its evaluation. And here you can directly compare the rankings of both groups:

Ed created a page with games of four top scorers. The values for each of the three criteria are quoted in the games, which you can replay it on the page. “BTW, the first Morphy game is hilarious, I did not know it,” Ed writes.

Finally, here’s an animation of a list, based solely on their ratings, that was independantly generated by Chess.com five years ago: