Over the last 15 years, ~50% of improvement in chess engines is due to smarter programming, not better hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/76cwz4/15_years_of_chess_engine_development/
What other domains are like this? Lossy audio/image compression is definitely better today. There must be others situations.
miniblog.
Related Posts
The Bitter Lesson: how implementing generic search and scaling compute outperforms custom logic in many situations:
I've released difftastic 0.48! Highlights in this release:
* Subword highlighting in replaced strings! This is a big improvement in many situations.
* Better Scala parsing
* Better Haskell handling
Codeforces is a huge website with a wealth of well-defined programming problems: https://codeforces.com/help#q1
(Useful for program synthesis and other situations where you want a large problem set to play with.)


