Chess will never be solved, here's why

#3205

"It was only ever an assertion in the first place, nothing more than a PRACTICAL opinion."
++ No, it was his theoretical opinion. This is not about practical chances in practical play, it is about the theoretical status of the opening.

"And he was of course right to say he hadn't exhausted it." ++ No, he said he exhausted it.

"His reasoning is the practical chess player's reasoning that if you try a tiny sample of plausible lines, you will generally get a good evaluation." ++ Sveshnikov looked at all the important lines.

"Now we understand that chess engines that examine a billion lines and AI engines that examine a million lines are strictly better" ++ Looking at unimportant lines brings nothing.

"it quite often happens that a human evaluation is wrong and the silicon evaluation is right."
++ Yes, but Carlsen and Caruana rented cloud engines during the months to prepare their world championship match. Carlsen confidently played for the Sveshnikov B33 in all games. Caruana first avoided it altogether with 3 Bb5 and then avoided the main 7 Bg5 line. So we can conclude that both Carlsen and Caruana and their teams of grandmasters and cloud engines arrived at the same conclusion as Sveshnikov in 1988: the Sveshnikov B33 draws.

"This is so often so that a top silicon player to able to defeat any human almost all the time."
++ Humans get tired, humans get distracted, humans get nervous in time trouble. ICCF grandmasters fall ill.

As usual, you just repeat yourself. Objections have been made to those calculations and their basis: the assumption that the game value is a draw (I sligthly edited your post to make it shorter).

To you.

To you again. The evaluations become usually more stable with depth, but how many times we see an engine change its evaluation dramatically even after a wide and deep search?

"By publishing a monograph on the 5...e5 system in 1988, I practically exhausted this variation." - Sveshnikov

The idea is to find a weak solution to ascertain which are the important lines, not to use opinions about which are the important lines to get a non-mathematical solution.

#3218

"Objections have been made"
++ People make all kinds of objections. Try to find yourself an explanation: tell how many of the 127 draws, 6 white wins and 3 black wins contain how many errors under whatever of the 3 hypotheses: draw, white win, black win. It does not even have to be right, if it is plausible then it is OK. I claim you cannot get a plausible explanation aside from chess is a draw, 126 perfect games 1 draw with 2 errors, 9 decisive games with 1 error.
That is just statistics and probability.
Moreover, I can pinpoint the errors in the 9 decisive games.

"That is the only consistent way to explain the observed data.
To you." ++ If not to you, then try to explain yourself: give the numbers of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4... errors for the 136 games under whatever of the 3 hypotheses. If you claim you have an alternative consistent way, then please show it. Facts and figures, not opinion.

Now if chess were a white win, then the draw rate would keep getting closer and closer to 100% with increasing time per move and then suddenly plummet to 0%. That is absurd.
To you again. The evaluations become usually more stable with depth,

"but how many times we see an engine change its evaluation dramatically even after a wide and deep search?" ++ It is not about an evaluation number changeing, it is about the outcome of thousands of autoplay games. To me it is absurd that the number of drawn games would steadily creep to 100% and then magically drop to 0%. To you that sounds normal?

"The idea is to find a weak solution to ascertain which are the important lines, not to use opinions about which are the important lines to get a non-mathematical solution."
++ No, it is allowed to use chess knowledge in the brute force method. Especially chess knowledge in the 3 AlphaZero papers is logically derived from nothing but the Laws of Chess, axioms in your lingo, so it is unbiased knowledge that follows from the Laws of Chess, not some opinion. Sveshnikov by his own account almost weakly solved his Sveshnikov Variation B33 in 1988 alone and without engines or table bases. So much more is possible now with engines and table bases. The teams of grandmasters and engines of Carlsen and Caruana confirmed this: black confidently went for the Sveshnikov and white avoided the main line, so both tacitly agreed that their preparation had come to the same conclusion: B33 draws.
If the good lines cannot win, then the bad lines cannot win either.
It is certain that 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6 does not win for white, it is known that it loses. No need to calculate.
1 e4 most probably draws and 1 d4 most probably draws as well, but 1 a4 is absolutely certain not to win.

Already answered: post (1), post (2).

And I claim otherwise: post(1).

Already answered: post(1),  post(3).

Already answered: post(2).

Already answered: post(1). No magic involved.

Already answered: post(4), post(5), post(6), post(7).

Object the objections, instead of restating the things which raised those objections.

#3220
You dodge my questions and then you falsely claim you have answered them.
As to the objections it is mostly like I did not read this -> I do not understand this -> it must be wrong -> it is unproven -> it is not true.

Again:
ICCF
I say chess is a draw, you say.....?
127 draws, I say 126 games with 0 errors, 1 game with 2 errors, you say....?
6 white wins, I say 6 games with 1 error, you say ....?
3 black wins, I say 3 games with 1 error, you say ...?

Example:
You say:
chess is a white win
127 draws with 1 error
6 white wins with 0 errors
3 black wins with 2 errors
This makes no sense the distribution of 0 - 1 - 2 errors would be 6 - 127 - 3. There is no explicable reason for the distribution to peak at 1 error.
Another try
chess is a white win
127 draws 70 games with 1 error, 57 games with 3 errors
6 white wins with 0 errors
3 black wins with 2 errors
Makes no sense: a distribution of 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 errors of 6 - 70 - 3 - 57 makes no sense.
It is not monotonous.

#3221
1 g4 might lose by force.
#3223
There are many Mr Boastalot here on this forum, but none has the scientific (MSc. Eng., almost PhD. Eng.) and chess credentials (GM, World Champion 65+, author of theory books) of Sveshnikov.

Hypotheses and jumps to conclusions. Just explain why do you think those objections are wrong and move on.

I said it's impossible to say before a weak solution has been determined, post(2). Maybe it's you who doesn't read!

I said that your calculation of the error rate per move is flawed, starting from the unproven assumption that the game value is a draw and then using it to prevent the exploration of a horrible number of lines that could disprove the assumption itself, post(1).

I'm not sure about that, but anyway we do not to appeal to authorities, do we? Nonetheless, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

#3226

I said that (a) chess is a draw and (b) 126 games with 0 errors, 9 games with 1 error and 1 game with 2 errors are the only way to explain the data: 127 draws, 6 white wins, 3 black wins.
You only say: "it's impossible to say before a weak solution has been determined"
So you dodge the question and implicitly acknowledge the correctness of my claims.
I say no other explanation is possible. If you dispute that, then come up with an explanation:
Game theoretic value? Number of games with 0, 1, 2, 3... errors?
I say draw, 126 - 9 - 1

"we do not to appeal to authorities" ++ No, but when one of the world leading analysts said something about chess analysis, then people should at least consider it instead of dismissing it on no grounds at all. Weakly solving chess is the ultimate chess analysis.

Hi, we do agree that experiments cannot give 100% of certainity about what we measure (is it the real value of that physical quantity? Does it even correspond to reality – phenomenon or noumenon?) Even if we do accept these as the best proofs we can get, they are usually obtained after statistical hypothesis testing, which is based on theories already targeted by an avalanche of criticism. In our case, if we assume that the game is a draw, the evidence does not support very well the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that wins are due only to chance), because White wins more than Black,  but there are other problems: do players draw because perfect players cannot get more than that, when they confront other perfect players, or they draw because they do not know how to win? Are better players closer to perfection, or do they play less random, but also more biased moves? Using Bayesian inference, as alternative to statistical tests, does not solve these problems.

The main point is that @tygxc claims that the assumption of the game-theoretic value as a draw makes it possible to cut away a priori an enormous amount of lines, which in fact might disprove the assumption itself; such "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

No, I said that it's impossible to establish the number of errors per game from the fact that most of them, at high level, are draws. Read my previous post.

Are you kidding me? from post(1): "the increasing draw rate in games between engines of the same strength, and in particular in autoplay, can be explained with the increasing stability of the evaluation functions, both because of the introduction of neural networks, and because the evaluations become (on average) more stable with depth. For this reasons it becomes more and more difficult to overcome an opponent of the same strength, but that does not mean that the game value is a draw. I think that if the increasing drawing rate depended on the game-theoretic value, we should not see the playing strength and ratings of the top engines increase at the current rate."

My explanation is independent from the game-theoretic value and the number of errors per game, errors which obviously will be known only after a weak solution, as you yourself admitted in another post(8):

I think there is no basis even for an estimation.

I did not dismiss what Sveshnikov said on "solving" chess. Indeed, I have probably considered it even too much. It's you, who dismiss what all the others (experts or not) say about the topic.

His arguments are far more cogent and coherent than yours.  Stay in your own lane.  Plenty to fix there.

Yes, he ignores objections (even subjective ones) that he doesn't know how to challenge, denying they have even been raised. He is attempting an argumentum ad nauseam. Maybe we can ask the moderators to just close the thread in light of that?

#2329
"About 20 people have provided various arguments."
1 Sveshnikov > 20 weak players

#3237
"ask the moderators to just close the thread"
++ We cannot handle the truth, so let us forbid to talk about it.
Let Galileo swear that the Earth does not revolve around the Sun.

There is a solution to Chess. Heres why:

Chess has many limiting rules that makes its largest possible moves a finite number therefore solvable and they are:

1. Time constraint

2. 3 move repetition

and 3. 50 move rule

'Time constraint' is apparently never used in the table base projects and almost never used in discussions about solving chess.
The other two things are used - but so far in these discussions its my humble opinion that 3-fold and 50 move rules have been presented insistently and technically rather than with perspective.
Arguments about terminology rather than trying to present those factors generically.
Regarding any project to 'solve' chess ... it should be recognized there are multiple projects within the bigger project.
Most of the posts are reactions to or defenses of an invalid '5 years to solve' because of 'nodes' and Sveshnikov and arbitrarily cutting the number of positions to be solved to less than a quintillionth of its value.
Having said that though - this being a chess site means that the marketing is directed towards clients who 'have time'.  

ty

@tygxc, how much money the project would require?

#3243
rental for 5 years of 3 cloud engines of 10^9 nodes/s each as modern computers plus 3 (ICCF) grandmasters as good assistants cost a few million $.
The most feasible is probably to run a pre-project for just 1 ECO code.
Checkers and Losing Chess have been solved by hobbyists using desktop computers.
Chess requires more.

A little vague, how many millions? Schaeffer is an hobbyst to you?