Can you solve chess?

The Final Theory of Chess

Superb read. Not sure if it has been discussed here before in this forum. Will carry out appropriate sentence if required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess

"The Final Theory of Chess is a practical opening guide for correspondence players, an aggressive repertoire for over-the-board players, and a solid foundation for future chess theory to build upon."

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Half (or more) of the openings it lists I believe are useless for correspondence players, so that's funny.

lol, no no no. A repertiore based enteirly on engine lnes? Way too impractical. Seems like a non-player wrote that sentence.

Oh, you mean the wiki article?

Yeah, it's been argued on here before. IMO the informed people understand it's not practically possible. Technology wouldn't just have to advance, it would have to be completely different from what we use today.

For example, a storage device the size of the moon could only hold a small fraction of the full solution. That's not something that's going to happen any time soon.

Send me $100 and I'll send the solution.

..... Shannon, C. (March 1950)..... A typical game lasts about 40 moves to resignation of one party. This is conservative for our calculation since the machine would calculate out to checkmate, not resignation. However, even at this figure there will be 10¹²⁰ variations to be calculated from the initial position. A machine operating at the rate of one variation per micro-second would require over 10⁹⁰ years to calculate the first move!" .....

I am not that good at maths and computer science but,

what does "unsolvable" mean anyways? I mean most of the machines can beat virtually any human. So it is possible to "invent" a new kind of algorithm that will be able to trounce those machines and hence 'solve'? Hmm..

Sure, in some sense it's solved in that an engine can beat a human... it can't play better in every position, but at the very least on average it makes less mistakes.

Looking at an endgame table base you can see how a full solution would work. Moves aren't calculated or evaluated like 1.23. It's only win in __# of moves, draw, or loss in __# of moves. http://www.k4it.de/?topic=egtb&lang=en

So yes, a full solution would always win or draw against present day engines.

Danelishen's book is what can be expected from an 1800 with an engine and too much spare time.

It has nothing to do with solving chess; one might even argue that it has nothing to do with chess at all.