Chess will never be solved, here's why

I think that it will be shown to be a draw.

     A couple of years reading comments on chess.com forums leads me to believe that a sizeable % of posters here believe they are laboring under the conditions you describe.

Don't mind me just getting my first word achievement

Does that mean you'll believe anything?

     So relying on the judgement of GMs to eliminate broad categories of games/positions from consideration, thereby making the task easier, isn't actually relying on the judgement of GMs? 

     The consensus of expert opinion at one time was that the only opening moves (for either color) that could lead to success against best play was using one of the center pawns. It was once the consensus of expert opinion that K+R endings with 4 pawns vs 3, all on one side of the board, was a win for the 4 pawns (Capablanca had ground out a few such wins). Many times a GM will venture an opening or defense that their opponent has declared to be inferior just to prove them wrong. GMs disagree on many points, and even generally accepted opinions sometimes turn out to be incorrect in the long run. Using a possibly unreliable basis for the investigation may well yield unsatisfactory results.

     My own belief is that chess is a draw with best play. I also believe that 1.e4  e5  2.Ba6  is a certain loss. Beliefs are easy to come by--some believe humans will be raised from the dead by divine powers to live forever, some believe that human souls are just reincarnated into new bodies, some believe there is no such thing as a soul. Beliefs can be incompatible and not all can be true. Irrefutable proof is another matter.

It wouldn't make sense to create such an achievement.

First post is easy.  The check occurs at the time of posting by user A and the lookup is on user A's account.

If you want to create an achievement for user A that gives them credit for getting their first reply, then you have to check user B's posts at the time they are made...that is, every single post any other user ever makes, essentially, just to determine if it happens to be the very first reply user A has ever gotten.  The lookup for each post by every user on the forum would therefore need to look up the post count of the user they are responding to, which is a lookup on another account and an extra call to the database/datastore.

It could be done anyway ...but on the backend, this would mean you want to, say, pull all the pertinent details of all the posters every time you open a new thread page, which adds its own overhead...but that could makes sense if you need all those details anyway for other purposes.

what

Exactly.

oh sorry, next time I want to get the first comment award, I'll make sure to scroll all the way down

@5234

"So relying on the judgement of GMs to eliminate broad categories of games/positions from consideration, thereby making the task easier, isn't actually relying on the judgement of GMs?"
++ The bulk of the work is done by the engines calculating from the humanly prepared starting positions towards the endgame table base or a prior 3-fold  repetition. The GMs initiate the calculation and also terminate it when there is no doubt at all like in the opposite colored bishop ending presented. The GMs use knowledge only, no judgement. They know when all other things are equal and thus when there is no compensation of any kind to a material deficit like 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6? They know when an opposite colored bishop ending is a draw and when not.
The use of knowledge is allowed and beneficial.
Allis solved Connect Four with knowledge: 9 rules.

"The consensus of expert opinion at one time was that the only opening moves (for either color) that could lead to success against best play was using one of the center pawns."
++ AlphaZero independently corroborates that old opinion with no other input but the Laws of Chess, ranking 1 d4 and 1 e4 above the other. That is a bit narrow, so I would widen it with 1 c4 and 1 Nf3, consistent with the rule of 4 candidate moves in the calculation.

"a GM will venture an opening or defense that their opponent has declared to be inferior"
++ Practical play differs from theory. Miles defeated Karpov with 1 e4 a6. That does not mean Miles believed 1...a6 to be the theoretically best move, it means that Miles rightfully thought that 1...a6 gave him the best practical chance against the World Champion.
'Any opening is good enough, if its reputation is bad enough.' - Tartakower
In practical play it is often good to deliberately play an inferior line to provoke the opponent or get him out of his preparation and comfort zone.
1 g4? loses by force with best play from both sides. Nevertheless IM Basman got good results with it against masters and grandmasters e.g. in the British Championship.

"Using a possibly unreliable basis for the investigation may well yield unsatisfactory results."
++ The GMs or the engines must not evaluate or adjudicate positions unless they are absolutely sure. If any doubt, then calculate. If no doubt, then save the calculation. It is like they play an ICCF WC game: if no doubt, then offer / accept a draw. If any doubt, then play on.

"My own belief is that chess is a draw with best play. I also believe that 1.e4  e5  2.Ba6  is a certain loss." ++ I consider both proven by enough evidence to compell the mind to accept both as the truth.

What I take as solving chess would entail solving all possible ridiculous and reasonable positions that could arise from the starting position. It would be a 32-piece tablebase minus positions where any side has more than 8 pawns or any pawns on the most rear rank, illegal positions, and rules to do with the fact that pawns can't move past each other without taking anything (the limit to the number of pieces on the board would be lower if there are extra bishops, knights rooks or queens) and perhaps other impossibilities. However, I'd guess the number would not be reduced by much since the original number is so insanely high.

If some computer was ever to approach this it would have to start with the endgames first and build up to more pieces. For example, it would not be rigorous to start from the opening, calculating, and declaring a loss for white after 1. e4 e5 2. Ba6 after some negative evaluation that is not a checkmate or draw evaluation as much as common sense would have it. It would be rigorous to prove from the ground up that 1.e4 e5 2. Ba6 loses based on all of the previous analysis from more basic positions and showing that all positions will end up in previously solved positions, which you don't have to keep proving since you've proved it before. But before that, one would have to prove more and more basic things until the level of certainty is like of a 7-piece tablebase right now. The essence from starting more basic is that you would have more confidence that weaker engines will not differ from an imaginary perfect chess engine, and you'd upgrade your computer along with the complexity, instead of starting with more complex positions and having analysis wasted with new analysis.

This may make solving chess sound deceptively easy since we just keep upgrading technology, but infer from the first paragraph that the calculations step up massively each time a piece is added. But with technology that increases so quickly, who knows.

@5250

"What I take as solving chess would entail solving all possible ridiculous and reasonable positions that could arise from the starting position."
++ That would be strongly solving chess: a 32-men table base with 10^44 legal positions.

Chess can be weakly solved in 5 years with 10^17 relevant positions.

So ++no, it relies on GMs who fail to use their judgement. One could well understand their judgement might be severely impaired after five years with no sleep evaluating chess positions once every 17 seconds.

It is sad that @tygxc does not understand the definition of weak solution, as used in the peer-reviewed literature on solving games. The idea that the definition permits "proof by proclamation" is laughable.

For example, here is a @tygxc-style proof of the weak solution of chess.

1. the initial position is symmetrical, so white cannot be lost (waving hands deals with any possibility of zugzwang)

2. there are a lot more draws between strong players than white wins, so obviously that is the right result.

QED

[While that is a parody, it fails to be a weak solution to the same extent as what he suggests].

Of course we can, if we wish to be. We can also be sure that we will be alive in 24 hours time. In both cases, our belief is reasonable probably right, and may be confirmed by the facts in the future, but certainty cannot be justified right now. 

I can see why it is difficult for a chess player without substantial familiarity with the general truths about all inductive knowledge not to understand this, and that is to be expected. What it amounts to is a poor estimate of a probability in a way that is qualitatively extremely wrong, but pragmatically unlikely to matter.

Due to the difficulty, I have on several occasions attempted to lead people through the non-technical sequences of thoughts that make the result clear, but I am well aware that many people - especially when they are not young - have no real interest in replacing long-held erroneous ideas with correct ones.

For those with young, lively brains, one line of reasoning goes like this. We (an individual, the human race, the human race assisted by as many computers as you like, as long as they are inadequate to properly weakly solve chess) start from a position of total ignorance. We don't know whether 1. d4 wins or not. From there the meta-proof that the appropriate quantification of the belief state that 1. d4 wins is not one proceeds inductively.

At each step you start from a position of uncertainty, quantified by some probability p < 1, then you acquire one element of inductive evidence.  The sort of thing is the generation of the legal moves from a position.

The question is what example of such a step could change the probability of 1. d4 being a win from a value p < 1 to a value p = 1.

If we assume that we have not reached a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess than it should be clear that one single piece of evidence cannot turn uncertainty into certainty.

I would hope that everyone here would understand that if you have a sequence of values p_i <= 1 with p_0 < 1 and p_n = 1 then you need one of the steps to take a value p_i < 1 to p_(i+1) = 1.

Is that really too difficult to understand as an explanation of why uncertainty is epistemiologically correct?

@5259
"five years with no sleep evaluating chess positions once every 17 seconds"

++ No. The 3 engines work non stop 24/7 and exhaust 1 position per 17 second. 
The 3 ICCF grand(master)s work 9 to 5, 5/7. They launch the calculations, preferably from a 26-men position. They exceptionally intervene to terminate a clear drawn endgame.

Lol no. Your "reasoning" is complete nonsense.  Let's start with the basics: you can't just assume that we don't have a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess. That's a completely unsubstantiated claim. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that suggests we DO have a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess.  For starters, we have the fact that computers can now beat the best human chess players in the world. This is strong evidence that we have a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess, since computers are able to solve chess problems that are far beyond the ability of humans.  Furthermore, there have been multiple occasions where humans have come close to solving chess. In the 1970s, for instance, a team of Soviet researchers came up with a chess program that could beat almost any human player. And more recently, in 2013, a team of researchers from the University of Alberta came up with a chess program that they claimed could beat any human player.  So your claim that we don't have a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess is simply not supported by the evidence.  But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that we don't have a sufficient body of evidence to make a weak solution of chess, your argument still doesn't make any sense.  You say that "one single piece of evidence cannot turn uncertainty into certainty." But that's not true. One single piece of evidence can, in fact, turn uncertainty into certainty.  For example, let's say I'm trying to decide whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow. I might start out with a 50% chance of rain, based on the current forecast. But then if I see that the sky is clear and there's not a cloud in sight, that would be a piece of evidence that would turn my uncertainty into certainty: I would now be 100% certain that it's not going to rain tomorrow.   So your claim that "one single piece of evidence cannot turn uncertainty into certainty" is simply false.  In conclusion, your entire argument is based on flawed reasoning and unsubstantiated claims. There is no reason to believe that we can't solve chess, and plenty of evidence to suggest that we can.

@5260

"@tygxc does not understand the definition of weak solution"
++ I do understand. I quote peer-reviewed literature on solving games:
'weakly solved means that for the initial position a strategy has been determined to achieve the game-theoretic value against any opposition'
calls for opposition, i.e. an act of opposing, of resisting against the game-theoretic value.
'the game-theoretic value of a game, i.e., the outcome when all participants play optimally"
calls for all participants to play optimally
't is often beneficial to incorporate knowledge-based methods in game-solving programs'
encourages to incorporate knowledge

"1. the initial position is symmetrical, so white cannot be lost"
++ Yes, that is correct. Moreover white has the advantage of 1 tempo.
1 tempo is worth less than 1 pawn, about 0.33 pawn.
You can queen a pawn but you cannot queen a tempo.
So black cannot be lost either. So the initial position is a draw.

"waving hands deals with any possibility of zugzwang"
++ There is no Zugzwang in the initial position.

"2. there are a lot more draws between strong players than white wins, so obviously that is the right result."
++ Yes, the stronger the players, the more draws. The longer the time, the more draws.
Over the years the draw rate goes up.
It is impossible to explain in a consistent way the results of the ICCF WC: 136 games = 127 draws + 6 white wins + 3 black wins assuming chess being a white or black win.