You miss the point. Humans don't mind competing with others. I love competition, but I don't want to compete with you and your machine. I love to play chess, I don't care if you are grand master, whoop my ass. But not if you are going to pair up with stockfish. I don't even care if you are a newbie that started playing yesterday with an ELO rating of 900. If I wanted to play the damn computer I'll do it myself. Likewise, mathematicians will not mind sharing and competing with other fellows, but if another has a billion dollars worth of GPU and you don't? Then you best be carefully what you say.
I agree with you and I'm nitpicking, but if you play a GM, you more than likely are playing Stockfish until your opponent's out of book.
Could you tell the difference between a grandmaster and stockfish if playing them online? If not, why would you care which one you are playing against?
Of course you can. Stockfish plays very different compared to a human, and it never ever blunders or makes mistakes.
I’ve never played against a grandmaster, but I have a feeling that he/she would play very different compared to me and would never make mistakes I could notice. Though admittedly I’m not very good at chess.
I've played both. The GM plays tremendously differently than Stockfish.
Engines - specifically heuristically-driven ones like Stockfish - don't play like a strong GM. They play engine-perfect chess, which isn't how a GM plays with any consistency.
I'm only a decent amateur (1550 USCF) but when I lose to a titled player it's largely explainable in human terms how it happened.
Grandmasters absolutely make mistakes, and you could learn to notice them with a few months of guided practice.
I think I'd care because the entity on the other side cares about the game in a similar way to me. It's not just the technical details of how the pieces move, it's a human interaction.
because we value competence