Chess will never be solved, here's why

Well you are going to have to start calculating a LOT better. Because right now you are just randomly guessing. Sort of like throwing darts at a dartboard. Blindfolded. With your back turned, over your shoulder. Using only one finger.

If it was in a pub, after a couple pints, and enough encouragement, it goes from possible to probable. 

Not really. Most brick walls have enough intelligence to keep their mouth shut when they've no idea what they're talking about.

@6841

"ICF players play better than Stockfish"
++ That is true, because ICCF players use Stockfish and other engines.
If you believe Stockfish plays better than ICCF players, then enter an ICCF tournament and play the moves Stockfish indicates. You will lose a lot. Those ICCF grandmasters became ICCF grandmasters because they play much better than John Doe + Stockfish.

@6842

"Well you are going to have to start calculating a LOT better."
++ I am the only one how calculates here,
and the only one who presents facts and figures and backs it up with references.

All others guess.
It is like 'I do not know what a square root, or a Poisson distribution is,
so it must be wrong, so I guess a billion years'
Or 'I do not want Chess to be solved, so it cannot be solved, so I guess a billion years.'
Or 'I am to lazy to read, or to stupid to understand, so it must be wrong,
so I guess a billion years.'

I feel so very menaced by tygxc. Yet I still like him. I must be some kind of codependent.

I'm actually probably just an instigator.

@6855

"No one knows the exact number of legal positions in chess. "
++ We do know that.
Tromp counted exactly
8726713169886222032347729969256422370854716254 positions.
Then he randomly sampled 1,000,000 of these and he found 56,011 of these legal.
Thus he arrived at (4.82 +- 0.03) * 10^44 legal positions.

@6856

"A score of 0.00 means they played as well or better then todays Stockfish."
++ No, that is not true. Centipawns mean nothing, only errors are meaningful. 

"And they did not have access to the Stockfish of today." ++ They do update while they play.

"My guess is all the best ICCF Grandmasters in the World Championship will play worse then just todays Stockfish." ++ You guess wrong.
Just play in an ICCF tournament, play Stockfish moves, and see how much you lose.

"And I will be using only 6 seconds a move"
++ you can never match 5 days / move with only 6 s / move.

"I have 136 games to analyze."
++ We know the outcome from statistics.
The 17 decisive games have 1 error, usually the last move.
The 119 draws are > 99% sure to be perfect games with 0 errors.
There is < 1% possibility that a game contains 2 errors that undo each other.

Even if chess is solved by a computer, it will be meaningless because 1) computer chess engines can already consistently defeat the best grandmasters, and 2) no human can learn "solved chess". A chess game between two humans involved unknown variable like personal preferences, level of memorization, what openings each player has studied the most, etc.

@6861

"talked to a ICCF Grandmaster Uri Blass" ++ What exactly did he say?

"ICCF Grandmaster do not play better then the chess computers they are using"
++ ICCF GM + engines > engine > ICCF GM

Your 0.01 figures only confirm: the drawn games are perfect games with optimal play from both sides and the decisive games contain 1 error.

@6862

"no human can learn solved chess"
++ A human can memorize 10,000 perfect games corresponding to a repertoire.
That would give him a huge edge.
Humans can also play by rules derived from solved chess.

@6866

"I used todays Stockfish at 6 seconds a move."
++ ICCF players use one or more engines at 5 days / move. That is no match.

"Stockfish + ICCF Grandmasters you claim played perfect chess."
++ Not always, they lose a game once in a while, usually by human error.

"Play the Stockfish moves when you are a ICCF player." ++ Then you lose. If you could match an ICCF grandmaster just playing Stockfish then everybody would be ICCF GM.

"This is directly from a ICCF Grandmaster." ++ What exactly did he say?

"This discussion happened on Ed Schroeder computer chess discussion page."
++ What did he say?

@6868

Well play an ICCF tournament and play Stockfish moves and see how much you lose.

@6870

Well, try yourself. Let us know when you get your ICCF GM title.

Incidentally, when are you going to stop pretending you haven't been invited to apply your "calculations" to that series of games, where the results can be checked against the tablebases?

Shannon did excellent work on the subject and never pretended any more of the quoted figure than I stated. It's the people that misquote him who should never mention the name.

It's perfectly obvious that under a pre-quantum theory of mechanics that a single atom can encode a 32 man tablebase. There are ב‎₁ possible positions of the atom's C of G along any line and only a finite number of entries in a 32 man tablebase. (Reading or writing the encoding could be hard in practical terms, but that's a different matter.) 

It looks like some people don’t understand what it means to “solve” chess. Solving is a mathematical term, it means you have a complete understanding of *every* move, and you know what to do for any move by your opponent.

for example, tic-tac-toe has been solved, it means that there is a chart, that tells me for every move my opponent makes, what to do, to get the best outcome(win or draw), and in tic tac toe, if both players play optimally, it is always a draw. This is not some engine that tells you if the position is “better” you know every move to a draw or win. In the same way, checkers has been solved, it is way more complicated, but it is possible, there is a chart that you can check, it tells you not what move will give you the best position, but what move will get you the best result. The problem with chess it that there are just too many positions and things you can do, so you can solve it in the same way, it will just take a computer larger than the earth longer than the universe has existed, so you just can’t solve it.

what computers like stockfish do is looking at what move gets you the best position, and that is why they can lose, and why they can be better. If anyone has seen a game between engines, they sometimes loose, and they don’t make the same moves in the same position, the game is NOT solved.

@6876

"It looks like some people don’t understand what it means to solve chess."
++ Solved can mean 3 different things.
Ultra-weakly solved means that the game-theoretic value of the initial position has been determined,
weakly solved means that for the initial position a strategy has been determined to achieve the game-theoretic value against any opposition,
and strongly solved is being used for a game for which such a strategy has been determined for all legal positions.

"The problem with chess it that there are just too many positions"
++ Chess has 10^44 legal positions, of which 10^17 are relevant to weakly solve chess.

"it will just take a computer larger than the earth longer than the universe has existed"
++ No, you confuse strongly solving with weakly solving.
It takes computers 5 years to weakly solve chess.

"what computers like stockfish do is looking at what move gets you the best position"
++ Computer engines like Stockfish can calculate from the opening towards the 7-men endgame table base if given enough time

Uri Blass got his title back in 2011, when engines were still weak at certain parts of the game, and a guy with strong hardware could get many wins. And he can only speculate what's happening in ICCF right now, as he has not played a single game since more than 7 years ago.

Today it is way harder to get rating points and eventually a title, as the engines have become much better in all parts of the game, but fortunately enough you still have the chance to beat players which are just replicating the computer moves...