Isn't this like saying we should abandon professional road cycling as a sport, because motorcycles have been invented and exist and are a faster method of two wheeled transportation?

Or we should abandon rowing as a sport because we now have 9hp Honda outboard motors?

Well, cycling is plagued with lots of similar problems (doping, people hiding electric motors in their bikes etc.), so yeah, I would argue the same there. On the other hand the very act of cycling improves health, so it's much more suitable as a sport for humans. Chess may have some arguable benefits, but it's very hard to detect so.

Of course, everything depends on "the market" - if people want to watch human chess tournaments (or cycling tournaments), they will... but I suspect with time it will either have to become a hilarious, anti-cheat porn or it will die out. I'm rooting for the latter :-D. I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.

> I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.

I rather doubt that. Go was thought to be much harder to solve, but AI has caught up there, and with techniques that will probably generalise to any similar games.

I didn't say "similar" games, just games that are better suited for humans than computers.

Well, if you want to replace Chess you'll need something that scratches the same itch, which will probably involve some level of similarity. It's hard to even define the terms of a question like "is cycling better than chess?" - maybe, but even if you have a compelling argument for why, you're unlikely to convince people to switch from one to another.

Well very many people think it's fun to watch sports or other competitions regardless of if a robot could do it better. I don't think anybody cares about if its "solved" or not, it's just fun to see humans interact in a controlled dramatic way I guess.

Chess also has the added bonus of providing a lot of interesting puzzles for those interested, they can sit and analyze lines with engines after the games as well or watch Agadmator on YouTube analyze it. It's fun!

I'd love to watch robot football (the European variety) where robots beat humans. If they can do that, it's probably singularity time (or robot apocalypse).

I agree that puzzles are fun, but cheating will be a problem for the competitive part. And I think it will degrade the appeal to watch/follow.

There's a deep learning bot that can play virtual football (rocket league) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyuh5iy5Ito

The best players in the world can still go toe to toe against three of these things, unless they choose to intentionally avoid high flying shots. In which case this bot wins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2ZtowNHhrQ

A car can go faster than Usain Bolt yet I'm still going to watch him. If you were familiar with chess culture, you would already be aware of the appeal of human chess champions. If anything, the sport has grown enormously in the last few years. What ismprobably going to decline is the relative focus on OTB Classical.

Chess is far from solved, either. AlphaZero's play has actually led to the emergence of additional theory.

> It's (mostly) a solved game for f* sake, move on.

This is completely incorrect. We have fully solved chess with 7 pieces, and 8-piece tablebases are in progress. The initial chess position has 64 pieces, and solving gets exponentially harder as more pieces are added.

> We (as humans) can't beat computers.

We can't beat cars at races either yet competitive foot races still exist.

I took "solved" as in "the computers can whip our asses sixteen ways to Sunday".

But the competition in chess was never about the computers, it's about the players. And that's true for many sports, otherwise we'd only ever watch the Olympics.