"Can you beat your phone at the highest level?" podcaster Joe Rogan asked Magnus Carlsen on his JRE podcast. "No, no chance," said the World No. 1 chess player. For Carlsen, regarded as the strongest chess player of all time, to outright dismiss his chances against strong computer chess programs should answer a great deal about how good AI is when it comes to chess.

Carlsen, who has been World No. 1 since 2011, has the highest Elo rating of 2882, reached in 2014. Elo ratings measure a chess player's relative strength. Norwegian Carlsen's current rating is 2833, which is still super impressive and by far the best, as only one other player (Hikaru Nakamura—2802) is rated above 2800 at the moment.

By comparison, at least five different super chess engines have Elo ratings that are believed to be more than 3300. Stockfish 13, with an Elo around 3550, is considered the strongest chess engine commonly used, mostly by elite chess players to analyse their games and prepare.

However, all that changed in December 2017 when Google's DeepMind launched AlphaZero. One of the founders of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, was a child prodigy in chess and attained a peak Elo rating of 2300.

AlphaZero has redefined the potential of AI-based (artificial intelligence) chess engines. AlphaZero and Stockfish were paired up for a 100-game match, with the Google project not losing even once. AlphaZero scored 28 wins and drew the remaining 79 games against the strongest chess engine.

Former world champion Garry Kasparov was the first to face off against a strong computer in public when he played Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997. Kasparov won the first match, but Deep Blue came back stronger in the rematch. However, Deep Blue's Elo rating was reportedly only around 2800.  

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