Chess will never be solved, here's why

 "you think that's air your breathing right now?" Suffice to say I don't think we are gonna agree on what tasty wheat tastes like.  Whether we point to god or science as an authority people can still choose not to subscribe to either.  Still a fun thought experiment 

As for insults, everyone knows how you operate on your own threads. If anyone disagrees with you they are prodded into conformity. If that fails they are insulted. If that fails they are provoked into retaliation and then blocked. Because you do not have the ability to answer people's arguments. You always block them for insulting you, or so you pretend. You've done it to 100s of people with MY knowledge. So leave out the pretence. The insults ALWAYS start from you.

sorry about that.

Sorry for what I didn't take offense to anything you have said?  I do think maybe its not worth either of your time with the back and forth can have some fun semantical debates without getting upset with one another I think. 

Maybe you need to read your own posts.  But of course, in Opti-land, saying that nobody in the thread is anywhere near your mental ability is just a statement of fact and not an insult to everybody here, right?  So when you review your behavior, it's all statements of "facts" by you about being superior, and ergo insults only come from other quarters.  Is that about the size of it?

You are the bull in the china shop.

Delusional thinking.  It's your defining characteristic.

"IQ"?

Isn't that something kids get measured to give a hint of their potential to develop other skills that are more substantial than doing little puzzles?

Also something narcissists tend to exaggerate.

The quoted text is more substantial than the comment. It points out that there is a proof that an optimum strategy exists for games in a class including chess (I think the full description is finite, deterministic games of perfect information, all defined in texts. They left determinism implicit), and refers to the established name of the theorem. It also draws attention to the fact that there are three logical possibilities and what they are.

Note "perfect information" and "deterministic", as conventionally defined, are independent. While poker is neither, other games can be one but not the other. You could transform a game where the state was visible but the result of actions uncertain to one where the state was uncertain and the uncertain part of the state was what altered the effect of actions, so maybe they are being cleverer than me and realising you can do without the additional category.

What's amazing is that the 10^120 fact that everyone throws around doesn't even scratch the surface of every possible chess position... The famous 10^120 positions assumes a game that goes on for exactly 40 moves. Considering the fact that with the 50 moves draw rule the actual longest possible chess game is several thousand moves, you can only imagine how many orders of magnitude higher the actual number of chess positions are. Maybe something like 10^200 which is a number almost impossible to imagine

To be fair, it's possible to work out the number of positions by simple arithmetic. That doesn't alter, dependant on the number of lines. It's the number of possible games which increases as the move numbers increase and not the positions, which is fixed.

Every possible position isn't relevant. Every relevant position or line is relevant

I apologised because you were being positive and all I was doing was continuing an argument, and it came straight after your post so I believed I owed you an apology, whoever you are.. I haven't read his rejoinder and I'm not reading any of his posts from now on, because it isn't worth my time. I've been working for the past few hours and decided not to respond any more to the people who don't get it. They had their chance. Just hopeless.

#3922
"Maybe something like 10^200 which is a number almost impossible to imagine"
++ Please do not produce such nonsense.
It has been proven there are 10^44 legal chess positions
https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking

It is obvious the three sample positions make no sense.
A better estimate thus is 10^37
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.09386.pdf

The number needed to weakly solving chess is much smaller.
Losing Chess has been solved using 10^9 positions.
http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/~watkins/LOSING_CHESS/LCsolved.pdf 

#3901
"rubbish" "they can't think straight" "completely dumb" "people of low ability"
++ Why if you are rated 2500 in debating you have to sling insults like a toddler?
"See how I put the definitions into plainer English."
++ Like a a translator with perfect conduct of English, but no clue about the subject. 
Why with IQ 170 you cannot appreciate that the definitions are carefully worded so as to apply to all cases? This is just hubris. This emeritus professor van den Herik is completely dumb, of low ability, cannot think straight and writes rubbish. I Optimissed will rewrite it so that it makes no sense whatsoever.
The same with chess being weakly solvable in 5 years. When Sveshnikov, grandmaster, 65+ world champion, author of books, professional chess analyst, MSc. Eng. near the end of his life says in an interview chess can be weakly solved in 5 years, you coud at least listen and think instead of outright dismissing it on no grounds at all.

Exactly.

99.7% of all possible positions are not relevant.

#3905

"I just understand that all your shortcuts require determinations to reduce the 10^44 positions "
++ No, there are no determinations needed at all. Only a tiny fraction of the 10^44 legal positions shows up during the solving process. Losing Chess has been weakly solved with only 10^9 positions not 10^44.
Look at the 3 sampled positions counted into the 10^44
https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking
It is clear that errors must have been made to reach those positions.

"Your arbitrary reductions will require a massive amount of computation to apply your arbitrary criteria to each position simply to eliminate it from consideration."
++ You still do not get it. I do not apply criteria and I do not need any computation to reduce positions, they just do not show up during the solution.

"More like a watered down attempt at a forward moving tablebase to meet the retrograde analysis in the middle." ++ That is how Checkers and Losing Chess have been weakly solved.
Have you read how they have done it?
http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/~watkins/LOSING_CHESS/LCsolved.pdf

https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dprecup/courses/AI/Materials/checkers_is_solved.pdf 
They did not start from the set of legal positions and then reduced that. They started from the initial position and then calculated towards the table base and at the end they had weakly solved it and then they counted they had visited 10^14 resp 10^9 positions in the process.

"you are not working backwards from mate" ++ I am not trying to strongly solve chess and compile a 32-men table base, that is not feasible.

#3927

"99.7% of all possible positions are not relevant."
++ Only 10^17 positions of the 10^44 legal positions are relevant.
That is 1 position in 10^27 positions.
  0.0000000000000000000000001% of legal positions is relevant.
99.9999999999999999999999999% of legal positions is irrelevant.

Do you think. The confidence of 1/80 will do? 

#3911

"The lines that no one has explored down to the tablebases yet, are unkown elements."
++ Many positions with more men than 7 are known draws or losses as well.
Many endgames with opposite colored bishops are known draws.
Many positions with huge material differences like a queen up are known wins.

"how do we know that the positions in S are draws?"
++ For all positions of 7 men or less and even some positions with 8 men it is known from the table base. For some endgames like opposite colored bishops it is known from analysis. For some middlegame positions with huge imbalance it is known from experience and from logic.

"you have no reason to believe that there will ever be a reliable proof." ++ A matter of money.

"All analyses will be impossible to check." ++ And for Checkers and Losing Chess?

"To me the only real proof is an exhaustive one" ++ Connect Four has been solved independently in two different ways: an exhaustive one by Allen and a set of 7 rules by Allis.
I believe weakly solving chess will be a combination of both.

"If one million mathematicians do all agree that T is a theorem, they might all be mistaken."
++ This has been heavily debated for the Four Color Theorem, but in the end it was agreed.

"A statement like "chess is a draw because of the equalizing tendency" really cannot be considered scientific, or nearly as reliable as a computer-assisted proof by exhaustion."
++ That is vague.
However: white is 1 tempo up, experience shows 3 tempi are worth 1 pawn, 1 pawn is enough to win a game by queening it, 1 tempo is not enough to win, makes sense.

Also: 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6 white is a bishop down. A bishop is worth 3 pawns. A bishop is enough to win. 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6 is a win for black. That is without an exhaustive calculation to checkmate in all lines.

Okay, so that leaves with 10^41 positions.  What's your next step?

I know.

I was rather figurative.