Can chess be perfect?

Fate I believe has already decided who will win or who will lose.

Like life you find your courage you take your chances come what may. You may win or you may lose you will not know unless you take a chance, you will not know until you try. Their are stories of people who took chances not knowing the outcome, you need look no further then the people who had a idea to start a web site unlike any other, Chess.com. Yes I believe in fate, but the not knowing that's the kicker. And you will not know until you try. nuff said.

Well, to answer your question, not it can't be perfect.  Nothing can be.  It take brians, luck, and some witchdoctor somewhaere doing the voodoo chess dance.   Some say it takes science and its an art form, maybe so.  But first it's a game with variables from the first move on.  After that it anybodys game. The best player can be beat by the worst player on any given day.  No matter what you call it, it's a combanation of many things and luck is just one of them.  Nuff said on the subject.

Can I just point out that since tennis is win by two, there is no point that is match point for both players?  If one player in the tennis senario gets the point, he wins, if not, the game continues. 

I believe a player can "get lucky" and have his opponent make a bad move that he wouldn't really make.  Maybe it is a matter of what state of mind the other player is in, whether he is looking at the wrong part of the board, or a once-in-a-lifetime "bad" move that costs him the game.  As was stated, the game starts at a draw, and should theoretically end in a draw, provided both players make equally GOOD moves throughout the game.  It only takes one CAUGHT slip-up to lose, though.  That is where you get into real "skill."  The ability to CATCH your opponents "mistakes" regardless the point in time during the game.

yes, i know that moopster! but if you don't believe me watch the damn movie! ;)

txs Shivsky, nice post.

bamboozel, I believe you that the movie was wrong! 

"Luck" in chess would be if someone bumped the table making your opponent's king wobble just so that it touches his hand while he's reaching for his queen.  Touch move and a poor king move is forced.  That would be lucky.

An opponent making an uncharacteristically poor move is not luck, regardless of the reason for it.  Fatigue and psychological considerations are also part of the game -- factors that can inhibit a player from understanding the logical position on the board. If your opponent makes a bad move, obviously it was not really uncharacteristic of him.

Chess should be solvable but whether as a win for either side or a draw remains to be determined. 

Still, I think chess is complicated enough that two people over the board couldn't memorize and know all continuations.  Human chess will always be about understanding the position as we can always leave book. 

One player at my old club knew the Sicilian/Reti systems inside and out.  He whooped my ass in tournament play a few times until I decided not to play into his book.  Instead, I came up with some twisted (and no doubt unsound) b5 gambit and beat his Reti.  Next tournament game I transposed his Sicilian into French Advanced and got another victory.  We can always leave book.

Absolutely agreed -- and even in the case of the touch move example, you'd be a bit of a jerk not to forgive it....

Definitely

"Chess should be solvable but whether as a win for either side or a draw remains to be determined. "

?????? it is already determined to be a draw..both parties start with equal pieces and both parties will end with equal pieces if they play perfectly.

That by no means is determined... there is something in chess which can never be equal, namely whose move it is. Being on move is generally (but not always!) an advantage, and so there is a possibility that white wins from the starting position due to having the first move. There's also an incredibly remote possibility that the game begins in mutual fatal zugzwang and black has some very strange forced win, but this is incredibly unlikely. However, given the top levels of play today, it seems that chess is probably drawn if ever solved - though with the enormous number of possible positions, the likelihood that it will be strongly solved is incredibly small; the most likely way that it will be solved, actually, is if there's some forced win for white found out of the start position. I'd guess that such a forced win would probably involve something like 200 moves - taking into account the speed at which technology increases, databases, and some guesstimation, the soonest I think we could see such a solving would be around 80 years from now; possibly a rather decisive advantage could be shown slightly earlier, but all of these possibilities are maybe on the .001% scale of likely magnitude.

Some of you found the Steinitz' Laws useful.  What is really cute is that you can see it in action. How? Try this out ...

Take a really recent chess game between super-GMs. Use your favorite chess engine's "evaluation" graph feature. The one that plots the "game" score (+/- 0.5, 0.3 etc.) on a per move basis. Give the engine about 1-2 minutes per move (so that it can be pretty accurate)

So if you plot the graph, you'll see the game start at around 0.30 (or 3/10ths of a pawn, the normal advantage for being White) and gently ... and I mean gently go up or down....never really jumping by more than 0.2 to 0.4 per move until the GMs themselves annotated a move as a "blunder" at which point it will shoot up or down, say from 0.5 to 1.2 and then after a while...it will stay near 1.2 (almost winning for white) and grind itself to a 1.5 or 1.6 at which point Black (for the sake of example) would resign.

Very very intuitive to see this graph...you will rarely see jagged spikes up or down because GMs are "good" enough to uphold Steinitz's Laws....they never really "improve their position", they just try to play the best move and keep the evaluation score of the game (+-, +/=. +/- etc.) the "same" as it was before. Once their opponent actually induces a weakness, then the evaluation changes (DUH) from say +/= to +/- and once again, the GMs will play the best move to keep the game at that "new" evaluation score). So yeah, a nice smooth graph which tends to slope gently in one direction or the other...maybe both, but I prefer to think of this as a sand dune more than a rollercoaster.

COMPARE this with a game between 2 beginners or even 1400-players. What do you think the graph will look like?  A cardiac-arrest on the EKG is one example. A sawtooth shape is another ... basically showing that even when a terrible weakness was induced, the weaker player is just INCAPABLE of playing the best move to ensure that the weakness has been taken advantage of.

Just an add-on observation to help visualize Steinitz's laws in practice. :)

You don't know this for a fact because it hasn't been solved.  Your intuition is telling you this but you can't logically prove it. Your explanation is not proof... it's not the solution.

@Shivsky:

I'm not sure your modern example of Steinitz' laws is a good one.  I don't think Super-GMs are trying to maintain parity, for the most part, when they decide their moves.  They are trying to press and create the advantage.  It's just that their equally capable opponent is doing so as well and that is what causes the parity.  In the vast majority of cases Super-GMs play the best move available because its the best move, not because it maintains parity.  Players rated 1400 or so will make more blunders than best moves while making many inaccuracies and other "average" moves. 

Remember, Steinitz wrote his laws during the late 1800s when it was considered rude to not accept a sacrifice and cowardly not to sacrifice.  He was refuting the style of the Romantic era by, essentially, redefining the idea of what a good move meant.  He looked at chess strategically as opposed to tactically which let us appreciate the entire board.  In a way, you could say he preached a totalitarian approach to chess.

Basically chess is "the game of mistakes" for me, every move induces weaknesses and strengths. A bit like a dance, if both dancers know their choreography well, they will dance the most intricate positions without hitting each other. A draw. A perfect game? well maybe, but let's not forget that chess is also a game and a win is required.

So how do we get a win? Well we need to introduce a move that upsets the balance, This will force our opponent to find the apropiate counter-move. Now given an infinite amount of time and an infinite brain, finding the correct move poses no problem. But this is not the case. We are only human, and chess is slightly above human capacity.

Now given that we can't analyse every posible move to the end, we use intuition to consider the right move, and here, well I guess there is an element of luck. Who hasn't wasted valuable clock time analysing useless variations, or failed to examine enough because after a few moves it doesn't seem good enough, when going in a bit deeper... Or lastly, who hasn't placed a piece in a square just because one felt it was right, and this ends up winning us the game?

But thsi is what makes chess a great game. If we could play perfect chess games in the way we can play perfect tic-tac-toe games, we would be perfectly bored.

PizzaKing:

I was not implying that parity was the end goal, merely t hat game-theory suggests that parity is the best you can hope for.  That is heart of the Steinitz theory!

That does not however take away the fact that a good opponent can make it "VERY" hard for you to find the best move...kind of like taking you through a minefield blindfolded.  We have all experienced this in many sharp positions where there is only "one" saving move ... that is quite hard to find :)

What you said is completely true. All I'm saying is that if we "look" at chess through Rybka/Fritz's cold, emotionless eyes, youy  see the Steinitz theory wonderfully implemented.

I hear (well, read) you Shivsky. 

I just wanted to make sure no one was falling into the trap of looking at this from the wrong end of the microscope.

Parity of the result of two people trying to win.  Winning isn't the result of two people trying to maintain parity.

as capablanca says:

 a good player is always lucky

some day, a combanation will be found that allows white/black towin every time