Chess will never be solved, here's why

 ...a personal opinion that will never bear fruit.

As some trolls obscure the discussion with a personal 'definition' and as Wikipedia misquotes the reference it lists itself, here are the official definitions, with references.

Chess is the game as described by the Laws of Chess.

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. Van den Herik, 2002, Games Solved now and in the Future
A strategy can be a set of moves like Checkers, a set of rules like Connect Four, or a combination.
The game-theoretic value of a game is the outcome when all participants play optimally.
Optimal play is play without errors.
An error (?) is a move that turns a draw into a loss, or a win into a draw. (Hübner 1996)
A blunder or double error (??) is a move that turns a win into a loss.
A diagram is the location of all men on the board.
A position is a diagram plus side to move, castling rights, and en passant flag. (Laws of Chess)
A node is a position plus evaluation and history. Nodes per second

@7612

"a personal opinion"
++ Expert opinion by GM Sveshnikov,
corroborated by calculations based on peer reviewed litterature.

Obfuscation is your specialty, not mine.  It's been a couple of years now.  Progress on your premise?  Zero.

no thats actually the official stuff, I have known that since before this discussion

No such thing as the game described in the Laws of Chess.

If you assert something of the thing satisfying some condition, then you simultaneously assert the existence and uniqueness of a thing that satisfies the condition. (See peer reviwed publication  Whitehead & Russell Principia Mathematica Volume I *14 p173.)

The Laws of chess describe multiple distinct games, so your definition fails the uniqueness criterion. According to the authors, your statement, "Chess is the game as described by the Laws of Chess" is simply false (though others have argued it's strictly meaningless).

As I've previously argued, none of the games in the (FIDE) Laws of Chess you link to are soluble because FIDE fail to ensure a well defined yield for each player. If both players resign at the same time, the laws say the game terminates and both players win. If instead White checkmates without any simultaneous event occurring the game terminates and only White wins. The laws do not say which is the better yield for White.

The fact that the games can't be solved is a relatively minor matter, because it's simple to produce games that can be solved based on the FIDE games and we can discuss those if everyone agrees. But it should be done. I think the best thing, since there are numerous threads on the same topic would be for me to start a new thread with a selection of candidate rules where we can first decide by vote what games we want to talk about.

More important is that with multiple games come different solutions and differences in things referred to by other terms (e.g. "position", "legal position", "dead position", "distance to mate", "perfect move", "accurate move", "blunder", "game node", "winning position" etc. etc.). I should probably start threads for each of the terms in contention too along the same lines.  

This is absolutely not a 90° angle.

A perfect move is exactly what you say.

Perfect moves are not necessarily good moves in practical play with a practical understanding of good. 

The above position is a win for White under both basic and competition rules. Nothing that plays legal moves as Black can blunder unless you, playing White, make a blunder first.

Nevertheless you would not count all perfect responses as "good".

Try playing the position as White first against Stockfish and then against Syzygy.

Which would you say is making good moves?

That's why we don't want to use ill defined terms like "good" when talking about solving chess, because the discussion is only sensible if the terms are well defined. Also why using your own different meanings for terms that are well defined is unproductive.

Where did the definition come from? It doesn't specify the outcome of what.

I would say game state at any point in a game is the set of possible legal continuations (meaning that the same game state can be arrived at by different routes) and the outcome is the outcome of the game state is the outcome of continuations with perfect play (not necessarily just perfect moves). 

You haven't given a definition of "best" play so that comes in the same category as "good" moves.

What you are saying is that by a "good" move you mean what we have defined as a "perfect" move. That's the purpose of the definitions. It's not just jargon designed to confuse @Optimissed,

If you use the terms that are already defined to denote the definiens it saves filling up the thread with pointless posts like the last few. 

You still didn't say from where the definition of "game state" came. 

Try again. 

In English does Syzygy make good moves in the example I posted?

It's no good making up your own meanings for terms that denote concepts that are already agreed on. If you do that then can be no sensible discussion.

How am I supposed to know, when you say, "Terms like "strategy, perfect move etc" can be seen as pretentious and as part of the ethos of excluding those who don't like the specialised nomenclature,", that you don't actually mean, "This canal is full of alligators, I wouldn't stand too close if I were you."?

We haven't read about @Optimissed matching any of the impressive results in the field of chess that have emerged from game theorists in the previous decades.

Could that be because your own jargon is third rate, or your thinking perhaps? 

@DesperateKingWalk re post #7644

More or less exactly what I was talking about.

Some points:

The are no good moves in a position. Only bad moves that changes the Balance of the Position. 

You also have given no definition of "good" and "bad" moves, so your statement can be understood only in an informal sense.

Here are two games from the position I posted for @Optimissed. In both cases White is Arena/Rybka 2.3.2a at 10 sec. fixed think time on my desktop.

The first game is against SF15 with the same time control. The second against the top moves on the Syzygy site, which I entered manually,

In an informal sense I would describe the moves from Syzygy as bad (compared with those by SF15, or in fact compared with those of anyone but a total beginner - I got mate in 8 when I tried it). I'd describe them as bad compared with SF15 becase Rybka comes out a half point better off against them.

I'd also describe Syzygy's moves as perfect. That's because I have a definition of "perfect" and it applies to the moves. So in the context of solving chess that is correct.

That is the problem with trying to make exact statements such as the one above with undefined and consequently ambiguous terms. The point I was trying to make to @Optimissed (obviously with zero success).

You can only make the position worst with perfect play. 

No. In fact with perfect play the best game-theoretic result is achieved. You can say that unequivocally, because we have a definition of perfect play and that's what it says. 

You could make a position worse or better in some informal senses by making a perfect move, but not by perfect play.

But with a perfect solved solution of the game of chess. This information is nice to know, and is known. 

A solution of chess does not necessarily tell you what moves are accurate, though some do.

Nice

So how come I've spent so much time fruitlessly trying to convince you that in terms of solving chess you don't start off with a slight advantage that gradually evaporates. You kept posting that you'd proved chess was a draw by that argument on ponz's thread. (Without any supercomputers or maids with mops.)

My point is that if you have been provided with second rate jargon it's a good idea to use it,

The are no good moves in a position.

doesn't mean anything definite without a definition of "good".

People would not normally call Syzygy's moves in my example "good". I wouldn't. But I would call them "perfect" because I like to use second rate jargon which all relevant people discussing solving chess will understand.

@DesperateKingsWalk

Yes, apologies. I played SF and Rybka wrong way round in Arena at first and it was quicker to do Rybka/Syzygy than redo it right way round.

I think it's Ok now.

Oh, I see what you mean. When it says martin that's actually me transferring the moves from the Syzygy site. I'll edit it again.