Chess will never be solved, here's why

You've already written a criticism of the terms long ago.  It got the attention it deserved then, as well.  Take the hint.  Everyone gets that you don't like the nomenclature chosen.  It's not the greatest.  It is sound, however, and I am sure there is some evolutionary reason for the clumsiness of the terms for the average reader.

I just understand that all your shortcuts require determinations to reduce the 10^44 positions that are going to be roughly equivalent to just traversing the positions, say plus or minus a handful of orders of magnitude at best.

You don't seem to get this.  Your arbitrary reductions will require a massive amount of computation to apply your arbitrary criteria to each position simply to eliminate it from consideration.  Worse, at the end, your "good enough" shortcuts will produce a flawed answer that will not be accepted as a solution anyway.  Like building a house out of 2x4s and then staple-gunning cardboard for walls, then trying to sell it for a million dollars.

You can produce *something* in 5 years...but not a solution for chess.  More like a watered down attempt at a forward moving tablebase to meet the retrograde analysis in the middle.  The forward moving attempt will summarily eliminate valid positions in order to get around the fact that you are not working backwards from mate, which by force culls all of the invalid positions for you.  Not so for your ill-conceived plan.  What you propose would make engines stronger players, but the results would not even come close to being a solution for chess.

You don't have to believe me.  The proof is and will continue to be in the lack of anyone who knows how to build such systems paying the slightest attention to your plan.

I think the more I read this thread the more obvious the reason chess will never be solved is people cant even agree on what we want "solved" to mean XD.  Though I'm sure each and everyone can tell you exactly why how they feel about it is "the correct way".  The older I get the more "truth" seems to be as malleable as "morality". Fun thread to read though lots of nested philosophical ideas and such applicable to other arguments. When people cant even agree on operable definitions for the words used in the arguments you know its finna be a good time XD. 

We need Speedtalk.

It's been impossible to get the others to discuss definitions. They just reel out the rubbish they find online. I just read the Wiki article on solving chess and it looks like it was written by a 13 year old schoolboy who missed a couple of lessons. Some people have been reciting the same bad arguments here for what seems like five years and probably is five years, considering the number of threads on this there've been. And yet sometimes, reading nonsense written by others is a good way to get your own thoughts in order.

For example this. Arrogant nonsense written by a dimwit whose best years are well behind him. He ought to learn when to give it a rest but he thinks he's in charge.

Oh and he's a dozen years younger than me so this isn't ageism.

What is that supposed to mean? The lines that no one has explored down to the tablebases yet, are unkown elements. You are excluding a priori that one, any one, of those lines may falsify the assumption that the game value is a draw.

"Equalising tendency" is too ambiguous. We could only say: 
1) S is a set of positions known to be draws;  
2) if both players play optimal moves from the inital position, it is possible to reach only positions belonging to S;
3) therefore, the initial position is a draw too. 
But then the question would be: how do we know that the positions in S are draws? How can we prove statement 2?

Where do you read "computer-assisted" in my statement? The point is: how do you know that a statement holds true in any possible case, without an exhaustive proof that the statment holds true in any possible case? Because of a tendency? It would be inductive reasoning, overgeneralization. It is good for hypotheses, but not for conclusions.

But that's exactly the argument you are trying to refute: conceiving the "unconceivable".

You and tygxc are about absolute knowledge. To me the only real proof is an exhaustive one, but it might be impossible to achieve that in practice, not only in case of computer-assisted proofs. If one million mathematicians do all agree that T is a theorem, they might all be mistaken. If we all see the sun rise, we might all be hallucinated.
Seriously, true scientists are skeptical in nature: they are aware that they can be biased and that what may seem universal can be in fact just a special case; it's already happened. What makes the difference between scientists and non-scientists is the level of accuracy, universality and stability of the conclusions, they seek. This make them use mathematical models of course, they try to falsify statements, they reproduce experiments, seek agreement with other scientists, etc.
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.

The King of Projection speaks.

The fact that you can never seem to muster anything but crude insults tells the real story.  At every reply, I respond with civil discourse and observation, and you end up turning to one word insults, being unable to operate at the same level.  It's a tired refrain.

No they are not unknown in a similar sense. It's just more of exactly the same chess analysis, whereas Relativity is not more of exactly the same Galilean mechanics. I suppose you don't understand the word "paradigm" though, but if English is difficult, why bother so much?

I'm starting to wonder just what the difference is. OK my IQ is round about 170 and yours is round about 130. There isn't anyone here approaching my mental ability and yet this isn't a difficult subject. I think, though, that it's your attitude that holds you back and prevents you understanding what I'm talking about.

It seems churlish of me to continually have to point out that you aren't very bright, but I'm afraid you aren't. It would be better if you only commented with something positive.

 "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