Chess will never be solved, here's why

Occam's Razor.  Apply it.

Nobody has arrived at that (faulty) understanding except you.  There's no "we" on that front that I can see, but there have been numerous posters pointing out the clear difference between the two.

I do not expect you to understand what I'm talking about. That's reserved for brighter people than yourself. Incidentally, your comments proclaim your abilities (lack of) pretty loudly.

If only the world were actually the way you envision it ...

But you don't have enough time left for any major epiphanies to take hold, nor to walk any kind of path that would actually bring you to maturity...and that's (truly) regrettable.  Even moreso because you are not unintelligent and probably understand this at some level.

The world is very like how I imagine it. Anyway, I don't want to distract attention from my two main posts, because there will be people who are interested in what I've written. There's evidence ... that this conversation has been going nowhere and it's beset by pointless arguments, none of which are resolved or likely to be. The reason is that the entire set of assumptions being used here is faulty. I have the intelligence and clarity of mind to see what's happening and why it's happening. You'd do better to try to learn from it.

Which world is that?

You mean the world where you have mental powers that you have to hide from the public at large lest you be persecuted, have an IQ that fluctuates between 160 and 190 depending on your circadian rhythms, and routinely change people's lives for the better at first meeting or outright save their lives in restaurants on a regular basis?  The world without pesky Thermodynamics, where the Big Bang is impossible?  The world where you and your progeny are more brilliant and insightful than the entire worldwide scientific community and can speak authoritatively on areas that you've never even worked in?  The world where philosophy drives scientific understanding and data is irrelevant?  The world where incredibly hardy 70-year-olds that walk the hills and moors don't need to be vaccinated?  The world where everyone is jealous of your intellect and there is a complex web of accounts driving a deep rooted conspiracy to unseat you on a chess forum?

That world?

P.S. I do learn, and I have a pretty good memory as it turns out .

Nothing has really changed in this discussion.  People float ideas and they get shot down, and the reality remains:  there's a next to nothing chance of chess being solved in our lifetimes.  It's more likely that God would come down for the Rapture, or space aliens from Andromeda would arrive with their fleet in orbit and just hand us the solution than for humanity to prove it using any currently foreseeable technology advances.

Still, the discussion needs to continue...because it's a bad idea to let vague notions and half-baked ideas run unopposed.  That's how we end up with a majority (though I would not say a vast majority ...) of chess players thinking Kasparov has a 180 IQ...

You think you shoot people down but you have no idea what the words I wrote mean. You have no interest in understanding this subject. Just a big-mouthed troll. And why should I think people are jealous of my intellect? All that does is demonstrate the level you operate on. The level of a troll with pretensions.

Not only do I have lifelong interests in chess and computer technology, I have a background and degrees in software development and system design that actually have some bearing .  Yet still, I make less unilateral pronouncements and absolute claims than you do on the subject.

Pretensions are your bailiwick.  Trolling is often in the eye of the beholder, as some who have commiserated about your body of posts over the years have could attest...

You don't have the intellect to understand ANY of this.

Show, don't tell.  The day you actually manage to demonstrate any of your suppositions will be a big step in the right direction.  Try starting with telling everyone that disagrees with you how weak and strong solutions for chess are indistinguishable.  Don't just pronounce it.  Demonstrate it.

Having looked at the Wiki definitions of weak and strong solving, I do not think that it's possible to seperate them and therefore, distictions between them are invalid. That is, of course, because it is not known in advance which lines are mistakes and which are correct, so it's impossible to eliminate lines that have errors, in order to achieve a weak solution. It is only possible to distinguish between the so-called weak and strong solutions with 100% hindsight and, of course, that is unavailable UNTIL a "solution" is achieved. I should point out that in the context of the ideal of "perfect play", any move is a perfect move, if it maintains the balance of the position. That is, if it's a draw, given best play (by both sides) then it's still a draw. However, in the context of "solving" the game, a move which misses an easy and immediate forced win is an error. Unless you work within these definitions, you will not be able to think constructively, regarding this subject.

Thus, the so-called "strong" solution is irrelevant to a full and proper solution of the game. So far, we've arrived at the understanding that weak and strong solving can't be distinguished from one-another wrt the practicalities of a real solution of chess and, in fact, it's redundant to talk in terms of a "solution" or "solving", except hypothetically. So why is this? What is so wrong with the way that the problem has been approached, hitherto, or at least, in this thread?

The answer to this lies in the idea of the "strong solution" and it is this which has plagued the entire enterprise. The reason is that a strong solution considers only all the logical possibilities within chess, regarding positions which may be reached. Unfortunately, that completely ignores the contraints which apply to the game, which are not to lose and to try to win, with either colour. So it can be seen that the majority of potential positions within the strong solution are useless, since they arise from random move permutations.

Solving chess actually means that both sides play sequences of moves that are designed not to lose and, hopefully, to win. Yet we cannot know exactly which sequences will do this until they're analysed and assessed. This means that there must be a considerable latitude allowed, to include moves that may be viable. The best method would be to work within rather tight constraints at first and do subsequent runs as and when advances are made in speed and assessment accuracy, which will allow broader search patterns to be used. This is because a full, so called "strong" analysis may take millions of years, even allowing for the reduction in eliminating serious mistakes, for which seperate, positional assessment engines are run in parallel with the main search.

This necessity of including sequences which may contain obvious mistakes means that in practice, there's no such thing as a weak solution. It simply doesn't exist in practice. What is necessary, within the contraints of these terms, is a semi-strong process. Or semi-weak: same thing. It's also best to talk in terms of processes rather than solutions because, after all, we have no idea whether we're going to arrive at a solution.

The main criticism of the discussion so far is that there has been no appreciation of the fact that the definitions of strong and weak are hypothetical and that, although we have the idea of a strong solution, which contains all possible continuations that are within the laws of chess, these are no use for deciding which of these lines are best wrt not losing and hopefully winning. The authors of the definitions have made a weak attempt to apply their "weak solution" to a "strong solution", which is actually completely different in type and quality, because it contains no assessments at all. So they're mixing paradigms and that is the crunch: people here have been discussing this, without any regard to the necessary processes of positional assessment that must be used. They just seem to assume that positional assessments will appear magically, somehow.

The reality is that the discussions so far in this thread and in others have been largely unproductive and have resulted in interminable squabbles. I wanted to try to find the reason for this ... whether in fact it was due to any outside influence, affecting how people are trying to think about it. And that is indeed the case. People here may imagine that others know best when they define terms and set the agenda; and so they tend to follow that agenda and use the unproductive definitions without thought.
 

Once again, weak and strong solutions are labels that refer to the utility of the results, not to the method used to obtain them.  In fact, once could try to theorize some game where the creation of a weak solution would be harder than creating the strong solution...but once the results are in, the definitions would still hold true:  the strong solution would prove win/lose/draw from any possible position, and the weak solution would only prove win/lose/draw from a single position (the starting one, assumedly, but that is not a requirement ...).

You dismiss these as being indistinguishable based on your assertion that the only way to reach a solution must be algorithmic (in which case, you will have a strong solution to chess, because how could you understand 100% of the game and codify and correctly prioritize all it's principles and then only have a weak solution?).  That assertion is not valid, however.

The discussion for chess has always centered around a weak solution, because there's no progress or even serious speculations about actually solving chess by simply understanding the values of each factor involved in a position.  Let's be clear here...chess engines have only just recently started bootstrapping their own valuations for pieces, positional considerations, etc.  Five years go, engines were calculating based on human opening books, human derived valuations of pieces and things like whether it was justified to move a knight to the rim of the board, etc., and then using tablebases in the endgame.  The tablebases and reaching a forced mate calculation represent the only reliable portion of those calculations (especially true in terms of actually solving chess). 

Everything else is imperfect, and unreliable for a proof, which is why the idea that we can use opening books and Stockfish to just reach out and try to grasp onto a tablebase ending doesn't work.  It's like building a bridge made of concrete and steel on one end and dried mud and reeds on the other end.  We don't see the Stockfish end as mud and reeds, because all we know and can understand ourselves *is* the mud and reeds...like cavemen.

To make the strong solution you are proposing requires that the cavemen understand concrete and steel and physics and engineering.  So, is it better to discuss a solution that can be built with mud and reeds no matter how great an undertaking it is, or better to imagine that we can invent concreate and steel at a time when nobody has demonstrated anything remotely like progress towards such things?

The process you described in your post has already taken place...that's how we got Stockfish .  But that's not a solution/proof, all we have done up until AlphaZero is make a machine that plays chess better than the best humans by virtue of faster calculation, perfect recall, and zero fatigue/loss of focus.  The current leap to engines that derive their own valuations has some potential to move in the direction of uncovering the principles required for a strong solution *if* you keep a pure playing pool, but that's not really being pursued currently.  Leela and other machine learning engines are being placed against opponents that play the same human-derived valuations and principles of chess, and they are learning to beat *that* flawed body of knowledge, and that will hamper/slow down the process significantly.  

But let's say Google decided to let AlphaZero run games against itself and self train for...10 years solid.  What do we get at the end of that?  We get a chess engine that can outplay anything we have seen to a remarkable degree, but that we cannot understand, and the engines as they currently sit are not designed to "articulate" their learnings *at all*.  Nor is it a foregone conclusion that we can even translate the gazillion factors that led to a given position in terms a human player could *ever* follow accurately.  When AlphaZero came out with games that were such a surprise to the chess world, it changed things, and GMs marveled over how A0 could lock down the opponent entirely with a perfectly placed bishop, etc., and those moves were poured over and explained in hindsight...

But those moves were a surprise, and understanding the brilliance of the end result of the bishop lockdown is not remotely good enough.  We would have to understand the countless prioritized decisions that went into building that position from scratch, and A0 cannot explain itself.  We don't understand, nor do we have any realistic path laid out for even starting to do so.

A while back you were in a discussion about various multiverse theories, etc.  The same principle applies here.  If you are talking about building a solution that solves chess like a bunch of Geometry theorems build on top of each other, then you need some hooks to get started...and absent those hooks or building blocks to get started, talking about your solution is like talking about multiverse solutions while we lack the ability to even detect/perceive anything outside our universe.  Thus, the discussions center around brute force technology building a weak solution.

The definitions for solving games are not hypothetical, they are solid and apply to all "games".  The fact that. say, a poster misuses the terms and definitions, or attempts to redefine them, does not change that.  Better to challenge the flawed interpretations.

P.S. Next challenge...prove based on my post above that I don't have the intellect to understand anything in this thread.

Let's be a bit more direct. The correct response by @Optimissed to not understanding the difference between a weak and strong solution is to recognise his understanding is not complete and to try to find out how they differ.

For this purpose, this example may suffice. Let's define a game exactly like chess except that the starting position is that diagrammed below, with white to move: A strong solution of this game entails knowing how to play accurately in every position with the same material on the board (because all such positions can be reached from this one.

A weak solution of this game is a little easier: it is to exhibit a winning strategy for white (left to reader).

If you try to define the processes in terms of the utility of results and not the method used to obtain them, you are dealing in ideal hypotheses which have no basis in practice. You seem to assume that the results will magically arise and proclaim themselves, perhaps as weak or strong.

The entire process we're trying to discuss is based on obtaining the results and of course, obtaining results demands a method to obtain them. I have described pretty clearly why it is not possible to define them in terms of utility .... what they may be useful for .... if you cannot produce them in the first place.

Nothing in your sermon furthers the project. You also seem to think I'm proposing a strong solution, That is, of course, a strong process. You should read and try to understand what I wrote above. I'm actually describing what I think is the only possible process to arrive at any solution whatever. Weak and strong cannot in practice be distinguished from one-another, except by hindsight. Try to understand why, before you write anything else. I don't recall a discussion about the multiverse. I think I may have explained what I think the multiverse idea is good for and why it's different from "Many Worlds" although the two are very often conflated. You shouldn't conflate such a discussion with this discussion either. You'll confuse yourself even more.

It's a fact that these discussions regarding "solving" have led nowhere, except to interminable, circular arguments. You bear just as much blame for that as the others. If you can't actually visualise the processes involved but merely try to parrot the ideas of so-called experts, you and others are not helping anyone. Read what I wrote in #923 and this time try to understand it.

Part 2:

Of course how different a weak solution and a strong solution are for chess is less clear than the toy game above. The best that one might hope is the reduction of the complexity by something like a square root, but it is likely in practice a lesser gain. However, it is entirely safe to conclude that there is _some_ saving available in a weak solution.

A rough argument for this is based on the irreversibility of pawn moves. If there is an optimal strategy where the first pawn to be moved is the e-pawn, then white never needs to be concerned about any positions where one of the other 7 pawns has been moved and the e-pawn has not.  Now if black has an optimal strategy that meets this strategy where his c-pawn is moved first, black never needs consider a position where he has moved another pawn before the c-pawn. Combining the two leads to a class of positions that never needs to be considered in either strategy.

The generalisation of this concept leads to my idea of classifying all positions into equivalence classes based on whether they can be reached from each other in a specific direction.  What happened to the classes of positions with another pawn moved before the e-pawn above can happen to vast numbers of equivalence classes of positions that are avoided in the two optimal strategies, thus simplifying the solution by reducing the effective complexity. (On reflection, it is probably easiest just to think of reducing the complexity of each strategy separately, since combining them is a trivial factor of around 2).

Yes, you've got it the right way round this time and explained it more clearly. It's correct.

In practice it's unlikely, isn't it, that black has an optimal move to meet each move by white? I should say that more than likely, the optimal move to meet 1.e4 is 1. ...c5 but that applies to games between humans and we don't know yet if strong machines will differ, No, I'm going to go further. I'm going to insist that any assessment of an optimal reply to 1. e4 is in iteself equivalent to a full solution of chess. The reason should be obvious.

You still don't understand...the solutions don't need to proclaim themselves as "weak" or "strong" which you still seem to be using as fuzzy rankings of...something.  They either fit the criteria, or they don't.  

If I followed your logic, then how could anyone do any kind of science experiment with documented results?  I might as well just poke an object with sticks until it magically reveals its inner workings, *then* define the stick poking process that already occurred.

Weak and strong solutions are exactly distinguishable from each other, by their definitions.  Hindsight is not really applicable in this context...but if it were, there would still be a significant and easily documentable difference between the various methodologies that could be used to go after weak and strong solutions.  If you want to discuss methodology, then discuss methodology and stop mixing up your terms.  Stop arguing that the beakers are mislabeled or that two beakers are the same beaker and propose which liquids you're going to pour in them to get a chemical reaction.

I'm not the one who is easily confused by simple analogies or definitions (clearly).  I have no trouble at all visualizing the processes involved.  It's the scope of what's involved that is the problem.  I know how to go after solving chess, and could tackle either type of methodology (brute force or *attempting* to build a prioritized lexicon of chess principles with absolute valuations for every possible position) but if all of humanity combined does not have the resources to bring to bear to achieve either (because proving those principles will still require brute force as well), then it doesn't really matter.

Meanwhile, there's a good deal of "the emperor has no clothes" going on here.  You pretend that you have greater understanding, but can produce nothing but complaints about everyone else's understanding . 

You equate the interminable semantic and other repetitive arguments that have taken place in this and other threads on this subject with a great understanding and meanwhile, all you can do is attack me for telling people that they aren't getting anywhere and I know why. You build quite an edifice with your words, very often, but there's very little meaning in them and understanding displayed by them. I would much rather talk with someone who can manage a productive input. You turn everything into a battle with other people. As well as being a DELETED.