Chess will never be solved, here's why

No, we are not.

Solving a game is not science. It is basically a maths problem associated with the theory of combinatorial games. It is of course of very minor interest to the theoretical subject which concerns itself with general results, but is of interest because of the historical status of the game itself (and as a motivation to develop efficient procedures to do such things). 

By contrast, the four colour theorem is natural and fundamental, involving no arbitrary set of parameters (such as the rules of chess), and the same is true of many general theorems of combinatorial game theory.

The task that can be achieved by a "scientific" approach (i.e. inductive reasoning from empirical information) is a different one. Specifically, you can arrive at results that are uncertain (eg according to model M, there is a high probability that the optimal result is R) and approximate (eg strategy S probably loses very rarely), by contrast with a type of mathematical proposition that is certain and precise, achieved by rigorous deduction.

No, 6 individually inadequate pieces of evidence leave no doubt in the mind of someone unequipped to deal with uncertainty correctly. Such as you.

They entirely fail to do this for anyone who knows what solving a game is.

Good point. Another one for the dictionary.  

@5633
"Solving a game is not science."
Uhh?
Solving a game < game theory < mathematics < science

No. Mathematics is not part of science.

Mathematics consists entirely of deductive reasoning about abstract objects with defined properties.

Science consists entirely of inductive reasoning from empirical information with nothing given.

The key relationship of mathematics to science is that it provides models that encapsulate general behaviour (often known to be approximate, never known to be precise). This provides a sort of black box service, where information relating to the real world is passed to a mathematical model which produces other information which says something about the real world (usually - to be pedantic, always - statistical).

Solving a game in your sense is less than pretty well anything, but your assumption that mathematics is less than science is questionable.

Incidentally, no show yet for your calculation of the theoretical result and error rates in my games here. Are you still working on it?

Once you've done that we can stop discussing your proposal.

It doesn't work.

You don't have to wait for my KRPPvKRP runs. Your calculation should work for any material.

Mathematics is not "less than" science. It is incomparable to science (not a value judgement).

Their domains are entirely separate (even though mathematics provides a valuable service to science, and there is some practical benefit in the opposite direction).

I can say this with some authority, based on two mathematical degrees and 14 years working on applied physical science, mainly on mathematical and computational modelling.

That's why I said it was questionable.

I would say the statement that their domains are entirely separate is also open to question, but that's a different topic.

I always thought of science as "What humans know about the physical universe" and mathematics as the "Language we have devised to describe that knowledge".  And to me, they are two very different things, even though they are closely related.

That's probably a very crude way of looking at it, and likely I'll be corrected....but go easy. I'm old. 

It's open to question, but a lifetime of relevant specialism means that I have been aware of the answer for the long time, while not everyone has been.

You say, " The key relationship of mathematics to science is that it provides models ... information relating to the real world is passed to a mathematical model which produces other information which says something about the real world."

I think in some cases the two overlap.

So, if Newton says two bodies attract each other, that's a scientific statement. He refers to a mathematical model when he uses the word "attract", but refers to the concept directly when he says "two".

Mathematics analyses the concept "two" but the analysis is only a clarification of what is already understood by the term. And what the analysis says about the real world is not - to be pedantic - statistical.

Analyzes or just gives it a name?

No, analyses. See e.g. https://www.academia.edu/15092554/Whitehead_Russell_Principia_Mathematica_Volume_I (Part II, but you'll need to read at least the preceding text.)

In fact 2 by any other name etc.

It goes beyond that though. The fun thing about math is it could still be done even if this universe didn't exist. If nothing we know of existed, we couldn't talk about color or shape or time, etc. But all the math we know right now would still exist.

Yes.
[post moved to further below, due to heavy editing]

...Ponz, is that you?  Ponz also had the "I gave many arguments, and quantity = certainty" mindset.

That's a good way to say it... science (well, non-theoretical science) is completely dependent on empirical information while math is completely independent.

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!