Chess will never be solved, here's why

Funnily I was just thinking the same thing, that they're similar.

It was some post where, within the span of a few sentences, he said something like "this is just evidence not a proof" then ended with "it's a proof."

Ponz did stuff like that all the time.

[I'll repost this, as I added a lot to it, but the last part needs the first part as an introduction]

You can loosely think of mathematics as being a black box which takes in axioms (and, if you start late, proven theorems) and generates theorems. These are all abstract, timeless and independent of any empirical information.

Science, by contrast is a black box which takes in observations and generates and tests models which describe patterns in those observations. Mathematics is very useful in the models.

The (slightly) confusing bit is that when some mathematics is part of a scientific model, mathematical facts imply facts about the real world.

The first part about mathematics is disputable, because all mathematicians understand that you start with an intuitive notion of a mathematical object - eg the counting numbers - then you find some axioms that represent your intuition. Then you are off to the races (as say Euclid was). The question is where did this intuitive notion of a mathematical object come from? For some, but not all, it is an abstraction of reality. Eg counting came from counting real objects. Geometry came from the structure of space.
But them later on, mathematicians have no problem changing the rules a bit and generating objects they can see are just as interesting and which may or may not be related to the real world.  For example in geometry, they found spherical and hyperbolic geometry by changing one axiom.  They also found geometry in any number of dimensions by another small change.  And there are many generalisations of counting numbers that are not as intuitive.  So it becomes clear you don't need a real world paradigm to create some mathematics that intuitively has value.

Often, invented maths turns out to have real world connections later. Centuries later, sometimes.  While spherical geometry was easy to understand as being like the surface of a ball, hyperbolic geometry turned out to be the geometry of relativistic space-time. It was just that no-one had a clue that relativistic space-time existed at the time hyperbolic geometry was discovered!

Yeah, it's fun how sometimes physicists find a use for something mathematicians had lying around for 100s of years.

The only case I'm aware of the reverse happening is the dirac function. The story I was told was some physicist or engineer came up with it because it was convenient. Mathematicians has scorn for it until a mathematician came along and formalized it.

Math...arbitrary reductions of multiple orders of magnitude based on conjecture.

Theoretical physics has more recently generated a lot of new mathematics that pure mathematicians can then formalise. Your example is a great one, because physicists thought of it as something like a function and just manipulated it by trial and error.

The formal version requires the development of measure theory and distributions, which are a very large extension to the space of ordinary functions (as I am sure you know). Then the whole subject of functional analysis and infinite dimensional analysis in general appears, I think generally before it was needed for modern physics.

But a lot of the stuff for modern particle physics was invented by theoretical physicists and then found to be interesting new mathematics. This would merit a lot more investigation.

Oh neat, I didn't know theoretical physics had been coming up with new mathematics.

True, but would it apply to all potential universes?  One can posit a universe where all numbers are 1 and all math equations reduce to 1.

I'm tired right now, that's a little too abstract for me.

Off the top of my head, I'd say there's no such thing as a reality that is self contradicting. A sort of "can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it" argument... so while maybe there is some sort of arrangement where all equations are 1 (whatever that means) it can't be self-inconsistent... and as long as it's logical, then it can be expressed mathematically, and so math "works" in all potential universes.

Or

Or maybe not, and sometimes math breaks. That's a little too imaginative for me right now though heh. Maybe some sort of true randomness formulation where logic exists but is irrelevant.

I'm just saying that a universe needs space/distance and distinct/discrete entities for regular math as we know it to apply.  If you have a universe where everything is one entity and exists in a singularity, then numbers other than 1 would not exist inside such a universe...you would have to know about other universes for such math to apply.

This would logically be the only exception...because math of multiples can use base 2 for base 1000 to express equations.  But base 1 math would be the norm in a singularity.  You can still argue that the math works though, in a fashion.  It's just that all the inputs and outputs are 1, so it would not be useful.

I guess you could also call the absence of a universe nothing, and claim that it uses base 0 math .

Sure, and not all math applies to our universe either.

Then you start wondering about what fraction of total possible universes allow for conscious creatures or intelligent creatures. And then you start thinking about boltzmann brains and what not.

How does a caveman do math?

"One.  Two.  Ummm..."

"Many."

Yeah, I'm way too tired for this conversation

But it's a fun topic.

And sure, I see what you mean. Math exists but may not be practical, and even then it may be difficult to discover.

This is probably not worth saying, but just in case...

For the record, the caveman math joke is from my childhood and seemed applicable given the discussion...in no way was I referring to your tiredness .

     Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

And you wouldn't be there anyway, at least not with both your legs intact.

true, the thing about the game against alpha go was that it was the first real attempt at creating an ai for go, think deep blue vs kasparov. Alphazero was actually able to play go, chess, and shogi but people only really talk about its chess. the alphago that lee beat that time was beaten 100 to 0 by alphago master and that gets dominated by alphago zero which is slightly worse at go than the same alphazero that we chess fans talk about all the time. apparently deepminds mu:zero was better than alphazero at all 3 games while being better than any human at over 40 atari games but they never released any of its chess footage.

I see.  So you can heal people with your mind, but multiple universes are out of the question .

Nah, I didn't take it as a jab.

Also is it really a joke? Because I heard a story about teaching some forgotten tribe basic skills. The children were able to learn to count, but the adults struggled... because in their language and culture, it truly was  "one, two, many" heh.

Yes, we know all about your fame and fortune on Facebook.  Thanks for not mentioning you are the top debater Facebook has ever known, that was considerate of you.