Chess will never be solved, here's why

@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.

You didn't pick up on ANY of the points I brought up, which were far more relevant than your repeated spam. 44 moves average is irrelevant to possible games in a full solution, many of which will be over 200 moves.

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

No, you aren't.

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.

Just read my second comment in orange in #8622, where I explain why it isn't necessary to get bogged down in the (erroneous) belief that black may win by force, which is an outcome that so defies all our understanding of chess that it can be rightly said to be non-existent.

I explain why it simply isn't necessary to enter into that profitless conjecture. The solution where it is assumed that black cannot win by force is sufficient to stand alone as, potentially, the only relevant result.

"If we assume the game is a draw then we don't need to prove that white can force a draw. Maybe you meant "assuming we don't know that black cannot win by force". Basically, we don't need to do that at all. The result for black holding a draw stands alone and is an important result in itself. Some people would consider it solved at that point."

I certainly would consider it weakly solved at that point but, irrespective of that, it's a stand-alone result, important in itself. Many would agree with me that the result that shows white forcing a draw is of zero importance. For those who don't agree, they're welcome to carry out the completely useless analysis.

Hands up who can spot the most mistakes in this online description of the meaning of disambiguation.

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Disambiguation refers to the removal of ambiguity by making something clear. Disambiguation narrows down the meaning of words. This word makes sense if you break it down. Dis means "not," ambiguous means "unclear," and the ending -tion makes it a noun. So disambiguation is the act of making something clear.

Disambiguation - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms

     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.

You're missing the point that an analysis of ways for white to stop black winning isn't relevant, according to those, to whom the important aspect is whether white has a forced win or not. Many people are happy that black can't win by force. So the significant result is achieved without worrying about whether black has a forced win. Those who aren't satisfied with that could perform the other half of the operation (the unimportant half) if they wish. Most people won't be bothered.

Therefore the assumption that black can't win by force produces by far the most important part of the solution. It stands alone, as I pointed out. I did explain it perfectly clearly and, as expected, you didn't understand it.

      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 really about understanding arguments. I don't think there's much hope for people who can't even understand what people write, when they write in plain English, using simple words.

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.