We know SF isn't much good: at least most of us do. ...
And we also know it's better than just about anything else that has ever played chess.
So not much point in asking questions like, "Is chess a theoretical draw?", and expecting a sensible answer from chess players. They're all not much good.
@7415
"that is NOT how checkers was solved"
++ That IS how Checkers has been weakly solved.
See Figure 2
https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dprecup/courses/AI/Materials/checkers_is_solved.pdf
You don't understand that article. Note that the valid solution required about more than the 2/3 power of the total number of legal checkers positions. This is a clue how badly wrong you are.
The key point every peer-reviewed researcher would agree on is that a strategy has to address ALL legal responses. It is blatantly obvious to those of us who do have a clue that you it is ARBITRARY, SUBJECTIVE, and INADEQUATE to say "this position looks bad, let's ignore it".
It's not even consistently wrong. It's wrong in a different way for every engine you might use to guide doing it wrong.
@7423
"a strategy has to address ALL legal responses"
++ No. If ways for black to draw against the best moves are found,
then it is trivial to find a draw or even a win against the worst moves.
That is the best first heuristic, as decribed in peer-reviewed litterature.
Once one way is established to draw against 1 e4 and 1 d4, it is trivial to do the same for 1 a4.
Once one way is established to draw against 1 Nf3, it is trivial to do the same for 1 Na3.
@7423
"a strategy has to address ALL legal responses"
++ No. If ways for black to draw against the best moves are found,
then it is trivial to find a draw or even a win against the worst moves.
"worst moves" according to an unreliable evaluator that you know to be entirely wrong sometimes (i.e. the move it thinks is best is a losing blunder). This is easy for most people to understand.
That is the best first heuristic, as decribed in peer-reviewed litterature.
With all due respect, why are do you say something so idiotic? You have been told multiple times that THE HEURISTIC IS USED TO FIND GOOD CANDIDATE MOVES FOR THE PROPONENT OF A STRATEGY, NOT THE OPPONENT. While it won't work first time for every move, it saves time in the construction of the strategy. It reduces the number of hypothetical games looked at by very roughly a square root.
As a good analogy, you can use a heuristic to select the moves for white in a checkmate problem. You cannot use a heuristic to ignore defensive moves by black. If you do so, you certainly can't guarantee being right. In fact sometimes you will be wrong.
Many Americans do indeed consider their own culture and nation as the finest in history and demand an unrealistic degree of respect from "lesser" peoples. The same seems to be true of nearly every other society. Perhaps we can learn from England, adopting the philosophy that "the wogs begin at Calais" and resigning ourselves to the necessity to "take up the white man's burden".
Holy damn this conversation is a year old
Yes, and if keeps going until chess is truly "solved" it will outlive all of us.
@7423
"a strategy has to address ALL legal responses"
++ No. If ways for black to draw against the best moves are found,
then it is trivial to find a draw or even a win against the worst moves.
"worst moves" according to an unreliable evaluator that you know to be entirely wrong sometimes (i.e. the move it thinks is best is a losing blunder). This is easy for most people to understand.
That is the best first heuristic, as decribed in peer-reviewed litterature.
With all due respect, why are do you say something so idiotic? You have been told multiple times that THE HEURISTIC IS USED TO FIND GOOD CANDIDATE MOVES FOR THE PROPONENT OF A STRATEGY, NOT THE OPPONENT. While it won't work first time for every move, it saves time in the construction of the strategy. It reduces the number of hypothetical games looked at by very roughly a square root.
As a good analogy, you can use a heuristic to select the moves for white in a checkmate problem. You cannot use a heuristic to ignore defensive moves by black. If you do so, you certainly can't guarantee being right. In fact sometimes you will be wrong.
If you were to stop talking about a strategy simply because others before you have talked about a strategy, it might help because it would make it simpler and easier to understand. The fact that others have obfuscated In the past is no good reason to obfuscate. Finding moves to counter an opponent's moves is not a strategy, except in the broadest sense in that it is the meta-strategy strategy of all turn based games. The alternative is to deliberately find bad moves or not to select good moves and to lose.
You really shouldn't come onto tygxc in the way that you do, by telling him that something has been pointed out to him already, because you don't adjust your thinking when you make mistakes that are pointed out to you. Continually calling the selection of moves a "strategy" isn't a major error. But it is obscurantist and is part of the reason why so many people are so confused.
A further criticism is that it is very much a matter of opinion whether algorithms can and should be used, to cut down the number of bad moves that are analysed. Without an algorithmic assessment of lines, there is no possible way to tell winning lines from drawing and losing lines. It all gets lost. I pointed that out several years ago. You don't listen, so you really shouldn't accuse others of not listening.
Many Americans do indeed consider their own culture and nation as the finest in history and demand an unrealistic degree of respect from "lesser" peoples. The same seems to be true of nearly every other society. Perhaps we can learn from England, adopting the philosophy that "the wogs begin at Calais" and resigning ourselves to the necessity to "take up the white man's burden".
"Many Americans" must be exceptionally ignorant, then. You said it! But a failure to learn from the mistakes of others is a far worse error than making such mistakes in the first place, especially when we have the capability, in the light of present day knowledge, to see those mistakes made in the past for what they are. England has learned from those mistakes and moved on but the USA wants to repeat them all and more besides. You repeat the point about "taking up the white man's burden" but England has never been a particularly racist society. However, I was talking about free speech and hypocrisy! 
The English learned from their civil war and from the Reformation. That's why its parliament's army and not the king's. Americans never experienced anything so bad as the Thirty Years War losing over a third of its population like the Germans did. Americans are naive. We haven't even assimilated the lessons of our own civil war. We're still fighting it.
The English learned from their civil war and from the Reformation. That's why its parliament's army and not the king's. Americans never experienced anything so bad as the Thirty Years War losing over a third of its population like the Germans did. Americans are naive. We haven't even assimilated the lessons of our own civil war. We're still fighting it.
That's a good point. As a nation, we learned that extremes tend to be bad. Cromwell was a reformer and many Parliamentarians were extremists. After 20 years of not being allowed to sing or dance people naturally became completely fed up of them and the monarchy was restored. But also we'd learned the lesson that a king by divine right is also an extreme viewpoint which can lead to despotism. Anything can lead to despotism if it's thought to exist by divine right. So the World, as in the English nation centred on London, turned back the clock somewhat, which led to a period of stability and happiness for a while.
Meanwhile, there were a lot of people who were intolerant of the restoration of the monarchy and all it entailed. They tended to be the people who went to America on the Mayflower, so they could continue to make the lives of others a misery. Of all the colonies founded, only one in America was based on tolerance. All the others were at least to some degree despotic and governed by bigots.
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the eveneing dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His day is marching on.
A hundred circling camps! We didn't learn a thing. We are destined to repeat our own history.
"How much computation was done in the
proof? Roughly speaking, there are 10^7 positions
in the stored proof tree, each representing a
search of 10^7 positions (relatively small because
of the extensive disk operations). Hence, 10^14 is a
good ballpark estimate of the forward search
effort "- the cited article.
Legal checkers positions: 5*10^20
I would say that's a lot less than 2/3, although feel free to correct me.
for some games, it's actually possible to 'solve' the game without considering any more than a couple positions. Chomp is a great example (look it up on wiki). the first player always has a winning position, but yet no winning moves are explained.
That's a good point. As a nation, we learned that extremes tend to be bad. Cromwell was a reformer and many Parliamentarians were extremists. After 20 years of not being allowed to sing or dance people naturally became completely fed up of them and the monarchy was restored. But also we'd learned the lesson that a king by divine right is also an extreme viewpoint which can lead to despotism. Anything can lead to despotism if it's thought to exist by divine right. So the World, as in the English nation centred on London, turned back the clock somewhat, which led to a period of stability and happiness for a while.
Meanwhile, there were a lot of people who were intolerant of the restoration of the monarchy and all it entailed. They tended to be the people who went to America on the Mayflower, so they could continue to make the lives of others a misery. Of all the colonies founded, only one in America was based on tolerance. All the others were at least to some degree despotic and governed by bigots.
What an amazing view of history.
- Seat of military might...yes...seat of civilization and "center of the world"...no.
- Discovered democracy and/or championed power for the people...no...missed that one by more than a millennium. Cromwell was a local lesson, and not a new one, merely a reminder of a lesson already learned many times. A pop-quiz question for the rest of the planet, usually involving the term roundheads.
- American colonists emigrating to form despotic nations rather than being persecuted for religious beliefs...no...nobody planned to have a revolution until good old George decided to turn the thumbscrews farther than he could handle.
"So the World, as in the English nation centred on London" is a viewpoint that fits oh-so-well with your worldview and your outlook on your own personal importance to the planet. So not only are you head and shoulders above your fellow man by superior intellect and divine gift of paranormal ability...you trod upon the hills at the very seat of the ancient world like a Cumbrian Colossus pondering the plight of man...a demi-god, almost. Maybe more like a Prometheus, since you bridle against authority, knowing better as you always do. It's a wonder you have not woven Stonehenge into your narrative somehow...think of it...3,000BC and the mystery of the druids and yourself a conduit of power, guided by benevolent brilliance...but then, it's not in Cumbria. Pity.
@7426
"worst moves according to an unreliable evaluator that you know to be entirely wrong sometimes (i.e. the move it thinks is best is a losing blunder)."
++ I have even quantified the error rate: 1 error in 10^5 positions for a 10^9 nodes/s engine calculating 17 s/move. Thus 1 case in 10^20 positions where the table base exact move is not among the top 4 moves of the 10^9 nodes/s engine running 17 s/move.
As only 10^17 positions are relevant to weakly solving Chess,
that means 0.001 error in the solution, i.e. not a single error at all.
The peer reviewed paper 'Games solved: Now and in the future' by Prof van den Herik states:
'it is often beneficial to incorporate knowledge-based methods in game-solving programs'
The peer-reviewed paper 'Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero' has 'knowledge' in its title. It leads to things we know, not things we guess, believe, or think.
It has only the Laws of Chess i.e. axioms as input and performs only boolean operations i.e. logic to acquire knowledge i.e. theorems.
This paper ranks the first moves in figures 5 and 31:
d4 > e4 > Nf3 > c4 > e3 > g3 > Nc3 > c3 > b3 > a3 >
h3 > d3 > a4 > f4 > b4 > Nh3 > h4 > Na3 > f3 > g4.
Once black has one path (there may exist several) to the 7-men endgame table base draw against the 4 best moves that oppose most to the draw,
then it is trivial to find such path to a draw or even a win for the 16 worst moves.
You could object it is not complete, but you cannot object it is not valid.
In general a chess engine cannot correctly evaluate a chess position,
only the 7-men endgame table base can.
However, some positions with > 7 men are clear wins or draws and need no further calculation.
1 e4 e5 2 Ba6? is an example of a clear loss for white. Stockfish says -8.1.
A full bishop up with all the rest being equal is more than a pawn up and is thus enough to win.
I have even demonstrated it is a forced checkmate in 72.
The final position of this game is an example of a clear draw with 12 men.
https://www.iccf.com/game?id=1164259
wow!
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the eveneing dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His day is marching on.
A hundred circling camps! We didn't learn a thing. We are destined to repeat our own history.
When you have a nation where the dominant ethos is self-confidence and economic prosperity and yet such a high proportion of that population is ignorant, the result is the equivalent of a third world country with too much power. When you import masses of the poorest people from some of the most backward nations, leave them with their prejudices and don't try to educate them except in the basics, that is going to happen. I think that prejudices are so deep-rooted that it will take another 50 years to reach a level where people can participate usefully in things like elections but I also think there's evidence that the process is starting. When you have too much self-confidence, it's very destructive when things go wrong.
More like 200 years. The prejudices are a deep seated inherent problem. We also get wealthy diasporas. Like the Shah of Iran's emigres. The Armenians and on and on. Pretty much anybody wealthy enough to flee their situation bring us their money. The poor that come work very hard. They have a superhuman work ethic. It is the consequence of empire. The consequence of America's original sin.
We know SF isn't much good: at least most of us do. Anyway, talk among yourselves, men.