Chess will never be solved, here's why

Important to you with your logic maybe not so important to me with mine.  1 person 1 thousand 8 billion i can still draw my own conclusions and the number of voices doesn't have any bearing on it whatsoever. You can come to a conclusion with incomplete information  in fact i would personally argue every conclusion a human comes to or even a computer is with imperfect knowledge of our world. To say having your own opinion is to omit information you don't subscribe too seems likewise silly to me. In fact based on the wiki i read with the article its based on a 95% confidence interval meaning they are 5% sure their own number is wrong. So while in this case the number they give makes more sense to me based on me agreeing with their logic more it has nothing to do with how many agree or their authority.  So i agree his number is not proven but neither is the other one it just seems to me to have more evidence an important distinction.  

Proven within + or - 5% is a far cry from an opinion that has zero backup at all.  But in our new "I am the hero of my own movie" lives, people take any personal opinion they like and equate it with decades of research and empirical data as well as industry consensus, etc.  It doesn't work for drinking fish bowl cleaner because you think it's Hydroxychloroquine, it didn't work for CooloutAC after watching Queen's Gambit and thinking he was going to turn the chess world on it's head, and it doesn't work here for Tygxc.

So yes, you are free to use your own formulated brand of logic to make your conclusions.  People are also free to discard/dismiss them.

Not proven their best guess is there is about a 5% chance they are wrong.  Proof to me is 100% sure. Not many things in this world are like this self defined things math that only appiles in a vacuum and not the real world etc.  For me anything shy of actually having a complete 32 piece table base will never be proof.  I've seen many scientific articles that claimed 5% p values I thought were complete nonsense.  This is my issue I don't think one person have an opinion is a problem on the contrary i like when people use their own ideas and agree like you said no one has to subscribe to them i certainly don't here.  By contrast I think treating science with such dogma as people do now is incredibly dangerous for the same reasons it was with religion.  many people tell me they know there is a god and many more that there is not and all i know is that neither of them can to me prove anything.  I often find people like to pass their own logic and reason as universal unable to admit there may be something beyond their understanding.  The fact that people can see the success of science in front of them makes them believe it dogmatically this is dangerous assuming its always right is a path to tyranny.  So no i don't care about this guy or some other random poster but i do care about  passionately putting out the idea that people should think for themselves not submit to the ideas of others.  Each person is capable of thinking for themselves so they can choose to believe whatever they want but blinding believing in studies without reading them yourself and determining if what they are saying make sense i think is a bad practice. 

Anyone know what compression Syzygy uses? It is extremely impressive, at 0.35 bits per position.

But it still had to deal with every single one of 423,836,835,667,331 positions (except for a small factor for symmetries - 2 for most positions with pawns, 4 for most positions without pawns. Castling is the thing that can mess up the symmetry). i.e. near enough 2 overall, since almost all positions have pawns and a very small fraction of positions have castling possibilities).

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Syzygy_Bases

On a totally unrelated note

Demonstrably not the case, but thanks for another amusing juxtaposition.  

My goal has always been to get so good at chess that I break the game. I'm starting to think I won't be able to do that...

#3680
"I don't know where you get the 3 million figure" ++ It is not for the 32-men table base, it is for weakly solving chess 10^17 positions : 3 cloud engines and 3 grandmasters during 5 years.

#3684
"The 10^44 number is supported by a large number of people, 10^17 is supported by one. "
++ 10^44 is the correct number of legal positions, i.e. the number of positions in a 32-men table base to strongly solve chess.
To weakly solve chess only the subset of sensible, reachable, and relevant positions is needed: 10^17. Losing Chess has been weakly solved visiting only 10^9 positions, not 10^44.

1. You are incorrect, your proposed solution does not even meet the criteria for an ultra weak solution.

2. Losing Chess is a garbage game, and forced captures are a dream for easy solving.  They do not remotely compare, and you know it.

#3698
"forced captures are a dream for easy solving"
++ That is right, that is reason 1 why weakly solving chess requires more than 10^9 positions.
That Losing Chess has been weakly solved using 10^9 positions proves that chess can be weakly solved with less than 10^44 positions too.
Checkers (32 squares, 24 men, 2 kinds of men) is simpler a game than Losing Chess (64 squares, 32 men, 6 kinds of men) but needed 10^14 positions. That is because Checkers is a draw like Chess and not a white win like Losing Chess. That is reason 2 why weakly solving Chess needs more than 10^9 positions.

When they solve chess, I'm pretty sure it would be a draw. I believe it's going to be solved in a year or two at longest (if it's not already but hadn't reported to broad public yet).

On each 1st move white play black would be having at least one drawing response.

Terminating the 50 moves rule eventually would have no effect to the solution(s) either.

#3702
Yes, part of it is probably already solved but not public.
Here is for example the most recent finished game of the ICCF World Championship.
That is 50 days per 10 moves, engines allowed. This is 99% sure to be a perfect game.
It ended in a 7-men endgame table base draw. To weakly solve chess is to prove that none of the 57 white moves could be replaced by a move that wins.

I agree with the first part, for all practical purposes chess has already been solved. 

And with the 50 move rule chess is likely a draw. Even with a "200 move rule" chess is also likely a draw. 

But I disagree with the last part, without the 50 move rule chess is likely a forced win for white. 

That's an interesting take what makes you think its a forced win for white.  I assume the opposite based on the fact that nearly every engine with the same programming from the starting position draws.  What makes you think white would have a forced winning line.   What line do you think white uses for this advantage seems like stockfish at high depth right now likes queens gambit declines but whenever i do things like depth 60 fish vs fish move for move its always a draw.  Granted I'm pretty sure it has the 50 move rule built in.  

Unfortunately,  while the conclusion for chess a reasonable belief, your unfortunate and (to be frank) characteristic inappropriate insult towards very intelligent people more knowledgeable than us merely reveals your lack of understanding. That is a hazard of such types of statements.

The reason is that there are plenty of examples of games where an ultraweak solution exists. This certainly makes the term meaningful (and useful to game theorists).

A large class of such games is where the rules ensure that the result is a win for one player or the other (no draws) and strategy-stealing is possible. It is simple to prove the first player has a winning strategy in such games, yet in complex examples it may be impractical to determine what this strategy is.  Note that in many other games where draws are possible, the same argument shows the second player cannot have a winning strategy. Tictactoe and many variants are examples of this.

[To be clear, the rules of games like chess, shogi, checkers and go don't enable this useful technique].

If you're going to insult technical language as inaccurate, it's best not to pick on anything in STEM... game theory is a branch of mathematics, so it's easy to guess that "ultra weak" will have both a precise and meaningful definition.

Any other field though, sure, both their language (and ideas) are often inexact and even frivolous.

#3705
"without the 50 move rule chess is likely a forced win for white"
++ No, not at all. The 50 moves rule is in practice never invoked before the 7 men endgame table base is reached, neither in top GM games, nor in ICCF correspondence.
Without the 3-fold repetition rule it might be a win, because the 3-fold repetition is a major drawing resource both in GM games and in ICCF correspondence. I mean 3 fold repetition is a loss, like in Stratego or Go.

Your words were <<As jargon, "ultra weak" is just another bit of complete nonsense, invented by people who didn't know any better.>>

This is false and an unjustifiable insult to the game theorist who invented the term (just to be clear, that was not me, so your most recent post is - surprise, surprise - also false).

"Ultra-weak" is a meaningful and useful term used by game theorists in several 21st century peer-reviewed papers, for example:

Calculating Ultra-Strong and Extended Solutions for Nine Men's Morris, Morabaraba, and Lasker Morris - IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 8(3), July 2014