When Chess gets "Solved"...

Hey people,

What do you think the will happen to the game if it gets solved?

The new coputers are beginning to outclass our brains so they might make it!

Moon...!

I will be still playing.

There is now a game with 2 new pieces also, Omega Chess and Fisher always claimed for random starting positions of the pieces.

I still be playing the original ches though.

When they solve it, you can sit down and study all of the manuals for perfect chess, and then when you play an imperfect move, your opponent will have to think, since you didn't play the "right" move.  We play imperfect chess all day long, and it is great!

when they solve chess, they'll also solve fischer chess cause even though there are "random" starting positions for all the pieces, there are only so many possible random starting positions.  the equation for solving chess would be applied to every possible random starting position and you would have a solution for that starting position as well.

I think chess could lose a lot of its popularity and that would be very bad.

When playing against a computer, chess programs will be able to have a "perfect move alert" instead of the crude "blunder alert" they have now.

Chess learning computers are quite interesting - provided that they have started out from not even knowing how the pieces move - in the same way that people have to. Set one of those loose on chess.com, have it play a thousand games against random people, and see what it has learnt (if anything)!

This has been a concern of mine as well. It seems to me that the greatest impact would be upon those players who can be considered among the "upper echelon" of chess.

I'll continue to play chess, however. Also, there's Fischer Random Chess. That sounds very interesting to me.

When they solve it, if you are worried, just quit playing...or you can play me, and I can assure you I will play a BirdBrain move!

Ok BirdBrain, thanks for giving us this security ;)

Chess will probably not be solved in our lifetime, so there's no need to worry...

Surely if the game explorer became more comprehensive as we played more games, you could potentially look up every move and always choose the favourable one???

play some type of multi-level chess(several are displayed in star trek)..wouldn't that be harder anyway?  don't we play chess for the challenge?  isn't it time to evolve chess?

the solution to chekers is about 256m of information.  That' about 32 phone numbers (if you count the area code as one digit)  It would take some doing but it is definatly memorizable.

The soulution to chess would/will be signifigantly bigger.  Anybody seen any projections on this?  I'm guessing terabytes.  Like a phone books worth of numbers.

Probably more than a normal person could memorize.

I'm not sure about that. I think it is likely that chess ends in a draw, and it does not have to be a game with a lot of moves, but it might be that after only say 30 moves, it may end in three fold rep. draw.

I don't think it will matter to a lot of players. Perfection has been attained in many other sports. Perfect 10's in gymnastics, perfect games in bowling, perfect games in baseball. Do people quit those because perfection has been achieved before? No.

It might take away something from those who like to play against computers. They will know victory is unattainable. However, pitting yourself against another human will always be an interesting challenge.

It would be an interesting thing for game theory probably, but still people won't be able to  memorise all the perfect responses for every move. (By the way, if I understand the problem correctly, the solution doesn't have to be that someone (black or white) wins).

What would be a bore is to play with a computer though, because you would always know how it would end. 

(by the way, if they solve regular chess, it doesn't mean they solve random starting chess)

I will play blitz, playing imperfect moves so as to confuse my opponent.

dylan wrote:

the solution to chekers is about 256m of information.  That' about 32 phone numbers (if you count the area code as one digit)  It would take some doing but it is definatly memorizable.

The soulution to chess would/will be signifigantly bigger.  Anybody seen any projections on this?  I'm guessing terabytes.  Like a phone books worth of numbers.

Probably more than a normal person could memorize.

There are more chess positions than atoms in the universe. So, a solution to chess would not fit on earth.

2 things i don't believe:

1) if they solve regular chess, it doesn't mean they solve random starting chess - i think it definitely does mean they solve regular chess.  whatever method used to solve chess (an equation, a database of positions, etc.), could be used to solve random starting chess.

2) There are more chess positions than atoms in the universe - i'm assuming you're counting every pawn and all possible pieces it can promote to and all possible places those pieces can go, but even then, i doubt that's true. 

It definately can and will happen. However, this solution will be so large, they would need a multi-terabyte hard drive to hold it.

and unless they figure out a way to program a human brain the way they program a computer, no person will be able to hold the entire solution in his own memory banks.

So no worries. This solution would just put us onto equal footing if we all have access to it, so we can all learn as much of it as possible. It would change chess, but there is just too much to chess for it to ruin it.