Chess will never be solved, here's why

You're trying to make the other 99% of the posts look worthwhile by comparison?

This is an interesting empirical phenomenon I have noticed for a long time. It is much the same as in human games. What it amounts to is exploration of the possibilities on the board in a position where thorough calculation is too hard. Having explored a branch and reached a repetition, there are a lot more positions that have a provisional or solid evaluation that can guide further exploration (away from now excluded regions).

Hmm

@8604

"The number of calculations involved was 10^14, which were done over a period of 18 years."
++ Schaeffer spent most of his time on his 10-men endgame table base.
For chess the 7-men endgame table base is already there.
Chess with 10^17 positions relevant to weakly solve it is 1,000 times more complicated than Checkers.

"The process involved from 200 desktop computers at its peak down to around 50."
++ I propose 3 cloud engines, that is the equivalent of 3,000 desktops.
Present day desktops are more powerful than desktops in 2007.

"As of January 2023, the longest forced mating sequence was discovered for the 8-man tablebase (also ignoring the 50-move rule), which was discovered in mid-2022 by developer, computer chess enthusiast, and physicist Marc Bourzutschky. The 8-man tablebase is currently incomplete, though, so it is not guaranteed that this is the absolute limit for the 8-man tablebase."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess#Endgame_tablebases

Mandela effect is real I'm not usually this pretty today

@8611

"chess is only 1000 times more complex to solve then checkers"
++ Chess with 10^17 relevant positions is 1,000 times more complex to weakly solve than Checkers that has been weakly solved with 10^14 relevant positions.

"only a subset of the game-tree would require evaluation to confirm"
++ That applies Chess is a draw

"no mathematical basis to say that a forced win by either side would have any relation to this game length"
++ There is no forced win: Chess is a draw.
There is a relation to game length. If there are w choices per move that do not transpose then game length d leads to w^(2d) positions at most. As we know the number of legal positions (10^44), reasonable positions (10^38 - 10^34) that limits the game length.
ICCF WC Finals games end in 44 moves average.

I'm perfectly aware of that. I just like having bizarre conversations. I could be the only person who's ever had Jehovah's Witnesses turn up at the front door and finish up pleading to leave.  Each to his own.

bebe1099

I think it might be possible to solve chess if people wanted it badly enough.

To prove that black can force a draw (which would be half way to a weak solution) you would need to find one correct black move for every possible white move. There are typically about 30 possible white moves on each turn. However most of the possible moves are bad ones.The vast majority of games in the solution tree would be ones in which white made a series of random nonsense moves and was rapidly defeated by black's perfect play.If you make random moves against a chess engine the game is usually over in about 10 to 15 moves.

With an average game length of 15 moves and 30 options per move, the total number of games would be 30^15 = 1.43e22

Of course, since chess hasn't been solved yet, we won't always know the correct move for black. But we can have a good guess.A good engine would maybe get it right about 9 times out of 10. So to find the best move by trial and error you would have to try an average of 1.1 black moves. So the total number of games would be (1.1*30)^15 =6e22. The number of positions would only be slightly more than this.

Assuming the game is a draw, you would also have to prove that white can force a draw.As it is presumably easier for white to force a draw than black, you would need slightly less than double the time. 

So to solve chess you would need to calculate about 10^23 engine moves.

The Deep Blue computer which famously beat Gary Kasparov in 1997 had a speed of 11 GigaFLOPS and was able to play at classical time control, i,e. 40 moves in 90 minutes or 135 seconds per move.The fastest modern supercomputer has a speed of 10^18 FLOPS - 90 million times as fast - and would be able to do 674000 moves per second. In fact you could get significantly faster than that, because (1) modern engines are smarter and more efficient, and (2) it's much easier to find a correct move when playing against a random mover than against Kasparov.

So it might be possible to do a billion moves per second.So the time needed to solve chess would be  10^23 /10^9 = 10^14 seconds, or 3.2 million years.That's with just one supercomputer.If you had a large number of supercomputers working together, the time could be reduced to a few thousand years.

This would make it technically possible to solve chess, but it would be too expensive and too slow for it to happen any time soon. But that could change if computers keep getting faster and cheaper.Or if someone very rich and very powerful got very interested in solving chess. Or if some aliens pointed a death ray at the earth and said "solve chess or we'll blow your planet up"

     The use of assumptions and best guesses to guide the search and prune the tree risks overlooking any solution that doesn't conform to received wisdom. This is the problem with the "quick and easy" solutions posited here. Limiting the search to find "a correct move" that demonstrates a preconceived notion that the game is inherently drawn leaves open the chance that "the best move" in any line, one that actually wins, may not prove out as quickly as the "correct" move we accept as closing off that line of enquiry. 

@8620

"it might be possible to solve chess if people wanted it badly enough" ++ It costs $ 3,000,000

"To prove that black can force a draw (which would be half way to a weak solution) you would need to find one correct black move for every possible white move."
++ You can limit that to reasonable white moves. 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6? can be discarded.

"There are typically about 30 possible white moves on each turn."
++ No, far less. Starting there are 20 possible white moves, of which 4 oppose most to the draw.

"With an average game length of 15 moves and 30 options per move, the total number of games would be 30^15 = 1.43e22"
++ It is rather an average game length of 42 moves and 4 options per move.
Chess is a game with many transpositions.

"A good engine would maybe get it right about 9 times out of 10."
++ A cloud engine of 10^9 nodes/s running for 17 s has it right 99,999 times out of 100,000.

"you would also have to prove that white can force a draw"
++ That is already known. There is no need to burn computer time on that. 

"So to solve chess you would need to calculate about 10^23 engine moves."
++ I calculated 10^17 positions.

"674000 moves per second" ++ Present cloud engine calculate 1,000,000,000 nodes / s. FLOPS Floating Point Operations per Second play no role at all, as solving Chess only requires boolean operations and not a single floating point operation.

     The comment you mentioned clearly says that the impossibility of chess being won for black is your assumption. Assumption: something you accept as true without question or proof (Cambridge English Dictionary). You are free to believe any unproven premise you wish. If you wish to convince those who do not subscribe to your beliefs you'll have to do better than "don't bother to look for proof, just take my word for it".

     I repeat: "The use of assumptions and best guesses to guide the search and prune the tree risks overlooking any solution that doesn't conform to received wisdom."

You wouldn't have to assume that the result was a draw.The plan would be for the computer to play against itself until it reached a result, and then start working backwards, assuming that black was playing for a draw.Eventually you would either find a winning white move for every possible black move (and thus prove that chess was a win for white) or a winning/drawing black move for every possible white move (proving that black could force a draw).

I just gave the forced draw as an example because most people seem to think that's more likely.

The assumption that a computer played draw is a proven draw result is false, and if you instead play all positions exhaustively eschewing the imperfect evaluation scores, you are back to millions and millions of years.  Computers are imperfect chess players and are still improving every several weeks.  Computer evaluations do not mean anything in terms of solving chess.  

This is why Tygxc's premise fails.  He claims that engine evaluations are close to error-free. but the judgment of "error free" is circular, as it comes from the imperfect evaluations themselves.

      I understand that you think you can ignore whatever possibilities you choose and still claim to "solve" the question. Assumptions are not facts. There is a chance that there are many things about chess that neither human players or the engines they have programmed understand fully.

This is where you falter.  Communication and understanding requires that both communicator and listener are performing and evaluating optimally.  If your words communicate nothing of value, but are correctly constructed, the fault lies with you, not those who do not "understand".  So, when discarding or making up terminology on the fly, or making concrete pronouncements about one's own fuzzy musings, or declaring personal expertise and knowledge (that others do not acknowledge and even refute) as proofs, the mark can be entirely missed. 

I have commented far longer and more cogently on all the various solving chess threads over the years.  You have little to no understanding of the software/technology involved, and base your entire premise on your human understanding of chess, just like Ponz did.  And you are dead wrong, just like Ponz was (and like Tygxc is now).  You pretend that your arguments have some weight behind them, but you are ponzificating(tm) using circular and subjective garbage with nary a fact or data point to be found, as he did.  The characterizations of your arguments as assumptions is dead on, and will continue to be dead on in perpetuity, since you can no longer do more than skim material and cast aspersions ala your stance on the terminology/definitions of solving games.  It is you that lack understanding, and your definition dodging is quite transparent in that regard.

It is true that it is sometimes worth picking a proposition whose value is unknown and dividing a proof into two parts - one assuming it is true and one assuming it is false. However, it is worth noting that this was not done for checkers. Rather a strategy which drew for white and a strategy which drew for black were exhibited with no assumptions.

[I recall that there is a significant mathematical theorem which was difficult to prove, but which was found possible to prove based on each of two assumptions - that the Riemann Hypothesis was true and that the Riemann Hypothesis was false! Of course the two conditional results proved the result, even though it remains unknown if the Riemann Hypothesis is true].