Chess will never be solved, here's why

It might just be an American experience. Sometimes people recall their earlier days as being more challenging than what people experience today.

So often people will reflect on walking to school (not having the luxury of a school bus or even motorized vehicles). And the weather? It was always in deep snow, even when it was warm out. And uphill too. Both ways. 

"So there might exist a line that, unexpectedly, leads to a win for Black and we cannot rule out this possibility"
correct - although the 'we' there is inappropriate ... better would have been 'cannot be objectively ruled out' 
plus - the other 'material' surrounding the key and quoted phrase is superfluous.

If none knows how to win the game, the game will end in a 0.5 on average, with a bonus for White because he moves first. That does not mean that we know the theoretical value of the game, and that's why we cannot cut down entire openings to weakly solve chess. That's the point.

@Optimissed: I have edited the last part of post #1434

As for the chess problem I had in mind - the moves didn't copy properly.
And whoever can always just quickly put it in an engine and claim 'the eye'.  Or has seen it before.  
I'll find another example.

Somebody could stumble on the win by accident.
But I don't want to split hairs.
Anyway - the whole business of solving can be better discussed - with how it pertains not only to accuracy - but to invalid dismissals -
and how 'gestalt' enters the picture too.  Or Is the picture.

'we' again.  I guess there'll be a lot of 'we'.

I don't know whether you saw it before or not.  Nor whether you put it in an engine.  Nor do I care.  Nor do I care whether you guessed or not.
The point concerned that 71% of attempts by players on it failed.
Possibly or probably because Nh5 isn't considered or isn't examined - because of dismissal.
Nor did I say whether I solved it or not.
As usual though - you can't refrain from personalizing.
And it was only a week that you couldn't refrain from namecalling too.  
So  now there's an answer as to the previously stated 'let's see how long you can go.'
Most people easily refrain.  Almost everyone here.

    Old American comic cliche: Grandfather tells children complaining about riding the school bus "In my day we didn't have busses so I had to walk three miles to school through a blizzard and three miles back--uphill both ways."

     To quote Warner Brothers cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn: "That's a joke, son, I say, that's a joke". (Most people don't know the character was taken from comedian Kenny Dalmar's radio and film character Senator Claghorn, who originated many of Forghorn's witticisms.)

Computers are getting better.  Faster.  And software is improving too.
But not fast enough.
Supercomputers have been around quite a while.
They can't solve chess.
Too many possible positions.  
Even with just 7 pieces on the board - they still couldn't completely solve (that's why they had to skip castling and en passant on that - even though its still possible in some (but a very low percentage) of 7-piece situations.)

Does anybody care?
Some do - somehow - because otherwise why would there be those huge paid computer projects on the subject ?

Plus - it connects to chess.  Why?  How?
Because that's one of the things chessplayers do ...
Constantly.
They try to 'solve' many of the positions in front of them.
Not all of them.  Much of the time its just - make a reasonable move.
Or try to find an apparently 'best move'.
But there's also 'solve'.
Whether in chess puzzles or in games.  

Solve:  candidate definition -
Find a checkmate. 
 That's the shortest one.  But its not comprehensive enough.

     I know you didn't realize it was a bit of a joke. The joke is that the older generation feels that, as life has improved so greatly over the years, children today have things so much better than they did and so will greatly exaggerate the tribulations of their youth to impress upon the younger generation how grateful they should be.

     Of course real life is never so simple, and some things are gained in the passage of time while other things are lost.

Where did you hear that tablebases did not deal with e.p.? It would be a relatively small addition to a 7 piece tablebase to include all positions with e.p. and castling rights. It is also rather important in a large class of positions with a pawn on the 2nd rank and an opposing pawn in a nearby file. All analysis of such positions would be unreliable without e.p.

Anyhow, here is a position with e.p. being analysed in the Syzygy 7-piece tablebase.

https://syzygy-tables.info/?fen=4k3/p7/P7/P7/3pP3/8/8/4K3_b_-_e3_0_1

It's this one (black to move) , so you can check it gets it right. 

@Elroch - its in the Wiki article about the tablebases.
If in fact there are other tablebases that are better and castling and en passant have in fact been 'covered' - then that would be different.
But only slightly so.
Because even there - 7 pieces would be a miniscule percentage of the total 236,196 possible 'material situations' where each of such situations then each have the massive number of possible possible positions to be further factored in.
Further qualifying 'miniscule percentage' - the 7-piece would include all of its own possible 'material situations' and if all the 'material situations' of its precursors (6-piece down to the two kings) then including all of those into that total too - with the 7-piece is hardly going to be a pinprick in the 236,196 total possible situations.

It gets even more lopsided when its considered that the 8-piece and more each would have disproportionately more positional placements of their pieces - and disproportionately more possibilities for solving purposes. 
 Including of move depth also. 

Some positions could be instantly identified (solved)  as 'illegal' or 'checkmate' - but as to the others identified otherwise as to having a forced route to checkmate or alternatives to checkmate - or not - such linkage would remain to be performed ....

Point:  the up to 7-piece tablebases hardly make a dent in the task.

     Another American comic cliche: the old-timer who thinks everything was wonderful when they are young and "kids today have no respect". The old fogie complains that in their day people were more polite, there wasn't so much sex and violence in mass entertainment, everyone was patriotic, you didn't have to lock your door when you left home, there weren't so many bums on the street, etc. and is punctuated by the old man yelling "Get off my lawn" while the kids roll their eyes.

     Life is change, both in society and personally, some for the better and some for the worse, as I said. In our youth, we didn't have instant worldwide communication at our fingertips, the vast amount of knowledge within easy access, awareness of different cultures, efficient global travel at affordable prices and more. Seventeen years ago my life was saved by medical technology that didn't exist when I was a young man.

     Still, there are things I miss about the good old days. There is a more brazen criminality today, more pollution, maddening mazes of computer garwar to navigate to get to customer service, and in the US baseball has been replaced as the national sport by American football, an extremely violent game that may as well be played by robots for all you can see of the actual people involved.

Doesn't follow. 
And there are other errors in the quoted passage.
Black might have a win against any white first move but however unlikely - it hasn't been proven he doesn't.  
I think its very unlikely black would have a forced win - if only because of the divergence of the 20 white possibilities.
But proving is different from asserting.
Regarding black 'having at least one way to force a draw' against the (supposedly) best white first moves of the 20 - proof of having a 'forced draw option' would require proving it for all 20 possible first white moves.
Error #3 pertains to what white's 'best' first moves are.  And proving what those are has never been done.
Are these errors knowingly been posted as 'clickbait' ?
Very possibly. 
But that's okay.

'Proof is defined any way somebody wants to define it'.
But chess is related enough to mathematics - that there's ways many would agree on a definition of 'proof' in some instances.
Checkmate is very clear.  So are stalemate and hopelessly drawn positions where you can't even hypothetically set up a checkmate.
In math - there's an extremely neat proof there's no greatest prime number.

There's a thing called solipsism.
Can anything at all be proven to anybody who elects and has the means to counter any or all proofs with solipsism ?
Solipsism is apparently a tactical thing though. 
As opposed to a 'condition'. 
If somebody is being 'honest' in their solipsism (or thinks he is) 
he can be asked - "Are you experiencing something? You've been  acknowledging communications - so how can you honestly deny your experiences exist?"

I knew somebody who loved arguing.  Would argue with almost anything.
When I confronted him with something he couldn't argue with -
he was Furious. 
And I was surprised.  It hadn't occurred to me that he would find it difficult to accept a particular thing that others might or would - without the intense stupidity of his emotional reaction. 

Its a long time since I ever even considered tic tac toe ...
but regarding those two 'not a sure' statements -
I agree. 
And 'sure' anything might never be proven for white nor for black regarding white's 20 opening options because computers and software/programming might never be strong enough.

It also just occurred to me - that if computers eventually did affirm any kind of 'sure' from white's very first move - would humans even be able to understand whatever the computer 'proof' would be ? ...  Maybe.  .  But is it 'sure' ?  That would have to be proven too maybe.  If it could be.

#1434
"We have to establish exactly what "weakly solved" means"
weakly solved = providing an ideal game with proof that all moves are optimal

"We don't know which is this game-theoretic value in chess"
++ We know chess is a draw, it is not yet proven. We also know the Riemann Hypothesis and the Goldbach Conjecture are true but not yet proven.

"The fact that White has an expected score sligthly higher than 0.5 does not prove that Black can only draw, with perfect play."
++ That is right, but does not matter. Drawing is easier than winning. So first try to draw as black and try to win as white. If white cannot win, then it is either a draw or a win for black. Besides the expected score is not the only indicator: white is a tempo up so white has an advantage, but most probably insufficient to win. If chess were a win for black, then white would play to lose a tempo: moving the same piece twice.

"To understand how hazardous this kind of assumption is, think about how many positions we have seen, where one colour is a rook or a queen down: more than 95% of the times, the position is lost for that colour, but we know that there exist positions where a tactical combination, or a particular positional situation, subverts the expected result."
++ That is right and it is the reason why solving chess should not rely on some evaluation function however sophisticated. Solving chess can only rely on calculation from the opening towards the 7-men endgame table base. That is also the way Sveshnikov indicated.