A publication about the people who already work with AI.

In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. The following year, in León, he invented another way to play: each player has a computer to explore possible moves, but the human makes the decision.

He called it advanced chess. It later became known as “centaur” chess: half human, half machine.

In June 2005, the website Playchess.com hosted a “freestyle” tournament open to every alliance of humans and machines. In the final, Russian grandmaster Vladimir Dobrov and a high-level teammate faced an unknown team, ZackS.

Behind the pseudonym: Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, two amateurs from New Hampshire rated 1685 and 1398 (USCF), playing with three ordinary computers. They won. David Epstein tells this story in his book Range.

Twenty years later, AI has left the chessboard. The Centaur Observer documents today’s centaurs: lawyers, doctors, architects, teachers, craftspeople. We don’t judge the tool. We look at how it’s used.