Some people argue that the art of writing a chess engine lies in the evaluation function. A programmer gets into the expert knowledge of the domain of chess and encodes this via evaluation terms in his engine. We had the division between chess advisor and chess programmer, and with speedy computers our search algorithms were able to reach super-human level chess and outperform any human. We developed automatic tuning methods for the values of our evaluation functions but now with Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning present I wish to point that we entered another kind of level, I call it trans-human level chess.

If we look at the game of Go this seems pretty obvious, I recall one master naming the play of A0 "Go from another dimension". A super-human level engine still relies on handcrafted evaluation terms human do come up with (and then get tuned), but a Neural Network is able to encode evaluation terms humans simply do not come up with, to 'see' relations and patterns we can not see, which are beyond our scope, trans-human, and the Reinforcement Learning technique discovers lines which are yet uncommon for humans, trans-human.

As mentioned, pretty obvious for Go, less obvious for chess, but still applicable. NNs replacing the evaluation function is just one part of the game, people will come up with NN based pruning, move selection, reduction and extension. What is left is the search algorithm, and we already saw the successful mix of NNs with MCTS and classic eval with MCTS, so I am pretty sure we will see different kind of mixtures of already known (search) techniques and upcoming NN techniques. Summing above up, the switch is now from encoding the expert knowledge of chess in evaluation terms to encoding the knowledge into NNs and use them in a search algorithm, that is what the paradigm shift since A0 and Lc0 and recently NNUE is about, and that is the shift to what I call trans-human chess.

NNs are also called 'black-boxes' cos we can not decode what the layers of weights represent in an human-readable form, so I see here some room for the classic approach, can we decode the black-box and express the knowledge via handcrafted evaluation terms in our common programming languages?

Currently NNs outperform human expert-systems in many domains, this not chess or Go specific, but maybe the time for the question of reasoning will come, a time to decode the black-boxes, or maybe the black-box will decode itself, yet another level, time will tell.