Chess will never be solved, here's why

computers will likely solve chess in 10 years

solving  by meaning it will play the game perfectly from start to finish

the game will never stop being played though .. that statement is more correct

Yeah well 200 years ago going to space and driving a car was too..

First railway line was 1825.

It's a matter of what you call a railway. I recall learning about the first railways at school (one of the few things from history that stuck) - the Stockton and Darlington railway, in Victorian times. I did have to look up the date. That referred to mechanically powered, public railways, as most people imagine them. Horses pulling trolleys on rails are not really the same thing.

Wikipedia answers the question you were considering: "The oldest known, man/animal-hauled railways date back to the 6th century BC in Corinth, Greece."

I have to say that from my limited experience of Greek railways in the late 20th century, they probably got less efficient over the intervening period. Being several hours late was the norm.

     The "railroad" in ancient Corinth was a limestone road across the Isthmus of Corinth. Ships were floated onto wagon beds and hauled to the other side, making the trip from western Greece or Italy much faster than sailing around the Peloponnesus. Grooves were cut into the stone to keep the vehicles "on track". The exact method used in the hauling (teams of animals? of men? series of pulleys?) is not known. 

     Built circa 600 BCE, it was busy until the Romans sacked Corinth in 146 BCE--about the same time they destroyed Carthage, ridding themselves of their two greatest commercial rivals. It seems to have been used for another two or three centuries after that, and parts of it can still be seen today. 

     Railroads and their primitive precursors are likely not what PrimitiveMover meant when he said "driving a car".

@6612

"computers will likely solve chess in 10 years"
++ Chess can be weakly solved in 5 years, but it depends on the funding of about $ 3 million.
There are 10^17 relevant positions for weakly solving chess and modern computers guided by humans can exhaust those in 5 years.

Just preface all of Tygxc's posts with "I really would like to believe that..." and you will have a much more accurate picture of objective reality.

     I believe that PowerfulMover used the word "car" in post #6617 in the common American meaning of an automobile--a self-powered vehicle not needing tracks that can be driven wherever the operator wishes.

Back on topic after the trolls have been spamming off-topic about railways.

Weakly solved means that for the initial position a strategy has been determined
to achieve the game-theoretic value against any opposition. [1] 
The game-theoretic value of a game is the outcome when all participants play optimally. [1]

Optimal play is play without errors.
An error (?) is a move that changes a game from drawn to lost, or from won to drawn. [2]
A blunder or double error (??) changes a game from won to lost.

A strategy can be moves like Checkers [3], or rules like Connect Four [4], or a combination.
It is beneficial to incorporate knowledge into game solving programs. [1]
Chess knowledge can be acquired from the Laws of Chess only. [5]
Example: ‘Other things being equal, any material gain, no matter how small, means success.’ [7]

The objective of Chess is to checkmate the opponent. [6]
A direct attack on the king can succeed only if the opponent does not play optimally.
Queening a pawn is more feasible to achieve checkmate.
We know from gambits that 3 tempi in the initial position are worth 1 pawn. [7]
1 tempo in the initial position is not enough to win: a pawn can queen, a tempo not.

Millions of human & engine games confirm that Chess is a draw.
In the last 10 ICCF world championship finals: 1469 games = 1177 draws + 292 decisive. [8]
Of the 1177 draws 1140 are perfect games with optimal play from both sides. 
This follows from fitting a Poisson distribution of the errors per game.

Starting from the 10^44 legal positions [9], none of the 56,011 legal positions in a sample of 1 million can result from optimal play by both sides.
The 3 random samples displayed have 3 or more rooks and/or bishops per side.

Gourion’s 10^37 [10] is a better estimate, but in a sample of 10,000 [11] none can result from optimal play either. That leaves 10^37 / 10000 = 10^33 positions. 
Multiply by 10 to include positions with 3 or 4 queens: 10^33 * 10 = 10^34.

Weakly solving Chess calls for a strategy, i.e. one strategy only. [1]
Many here fail to understand that and confuse weakly solved with strongly solved.
On w white moves not w black responses each, but 1 black response only.
w * 1 = Sqrt (w * w)
Thus Sqrt (10^34) = 10^17 positions are relevant to weakly solving Chess.

Losing Chess has been weakly solved with 10^9 positions. [12] Checkers has been weakly solved with 10^14 positions, only 19 of the 300 openings: 200 transpositions and 81 pruned. [3]

Cloud engines calculate a billion nodes / s. [13] Thus 3 such engines calculate in 5 years:
10^9 nodes/s/ engine * 3 engines * 3600 s/h * 24 h/d * 365.25 d/a * 5 a = 4.4 * 10^17 nodes
A diagram is the location of the men on the board.
A position is a diagram + side to move + castling rights + en passant flag. [6]
A node is a position + evaluation + history. [13]

Thus 3 engines exhaust in 5 years all 10^17 relevant positions to weakly solve Chess.
This costs 3 million $ to hire 3 grandmasters and rent 3 engines.

GM Sveshnikov was right: 'Give me five years, good assistants and the latest computers
- I will bring all openings to technical endgames and solve chess.' [14]

References:

[1] Van den Herik, 2002, Games solved: Now and in the future, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370201001527 

[2] Hübner, 1996, Twenty-five Annotated Games, Berlin, pp. 7–8.

[3] Schaeffer, 2007, Checkers Is Solved, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1144079 

[4] Allis, 1988, A Knowledge-based Approach of Connect-Four The Game is Solved: White Wins  http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~fernau/DSL0607/Masterthesis-Viergewinnt.pdf 

[5] McGrath et. al., 2022, Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf 

[6] FIDE, 2018, Laws of Chess https://handbook.fide.com/chapter/E012018 

[7] Capablanca, 1935, A Primer of Chess https://archive.org/details/aprimerofchess/page/n47/mode/2up 

[8] ICCF, 2022, World Championship Finals https://www.iccf.com/tables 

[9] Tromp, 2022, Chess Position Ranking, https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking 

[10] Gourion, 2021, An upper bound for the number of chess diagrams without promotion, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.09386.pdf 

[11] Tromp, 2022, Sample 10k random positions with no promotions, https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking/blob/noproms/sortedRnd10kFENs 

[12] Watkins, Losing Chess: 1. e3 wins for White, https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/~watkins/LOSING_CHESS/LCsolved.pdf 

[13] NPS - What are the "Nodes per Second" in Chess Engine Analysis
https://chessify.me/blog/nps-what-are-the-nodes-per-second-in-chess-engine-analysis 

[14] Sveshnikov, 2007, Give me five years, and I will solve chess, Interview with Eldar Mukhametov https://e3e5.com/article.php?id=1467 

No. What weak chess players call "relevant" has no place in weakly solving chess, as indicated by it having no place in the academic literature. (Check for yourself).

What does it indicate when a student makes an error and the teacher points it out and then the student makes the same error and the cycle is repeated a dozen times?  (Other than wasted patience by the teacher).

Are you saying you can square root the positions because we're assuming we can ignore all non-optimal play by black?

How do you discard non-optimal moves without analyzing them?

His meaning of "relevant" is blatantly wrong because of the (relatively) tiny quoted number of positions, which corresponds to a mere 57 binary choices.

lol, when you put it like that it certainly seems absurd.

That's a nice sanity check.

No matter how eloquently you argue for the 10^17 reduction, after realizing this you have to go back and figure out how it's wrong.

This seems like a chat for smart people I'm not one of them so I'm going to leave

Sounds smart.

As you point out, @llama36, only the choices of one side contribute to the number.

Empirically there are not only a lot of legal moves for the defender, there are very often several reasonable moves (the number 4 is one conservative estimate for a typical number of non-blunders in positions in empirical chess).

Interesting