Chess will never be solved, here's why

That could be regarded to be tunnel vision and obstinacy as opposed to arrogance.
Unlike that other person - tygxc never tries to say or pretend he is 'superior' or better than anybody.
@Elroch - this is meant as a little joke:
Can you see tygxc someday saying?
'Oh I get it now. The square root argument is invalid - 'nodes per second' is ridiculous - 106 draws was contrived in a special context - and simply concluding and pruning out opening moves that don't lose is shallow and invalid too.'
We wouldn't believe him.
Right?

I've made it simpler for him. If he is honest, he can answer the very precise question in my (edited) post above.

pls answer

Thanks Lola. Note the the 2 x -1 you gathered for your altruistic efforts, which means at least two anti-social misfits plague this thread.

It's been looked at in detail at various points but you're quite right to raise the questions again. Personally I don't think that creating a machine to solve chess by the method of tracing every possible line is in any way useful. There is simply so much of it that, in practice, there would be no way to prove that a mistake hadn't been made, in programming, in retrieval, in data analysis etc. Such a machine couldn't advance the cause of solving chess in a deductive way. All it would do is provide some more evidence.

I believe it's necessary to approach the problem heuristically, which places me firmly opposed to some of the more innocent contributors here.

@12279

"how long can a chess game go until someone gets an advantage and how long can the opponent prolong not getting checkmated?"
++ The ongoing ICCF World Championship Finals now has 110 draws out of 110 games and they end in draws in average 39 moves. https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104

"How many calculations would it need for that to be "solved"?" 
++ Weakly solving chess needs to consider 10^17 positions = Sqrt (10^37*10 / 10,000).
The 17 ICCF World Championship finalists looked at 1.9*10^17 positions = 90*10^6 positions/s/server * 2 servers/finalist * 17 finalists * 3600 s/h * 24 h/d * 365.25 d/a * 2 a

"chess games do have a max possible move count with the 50 move rule" 
++ The 50-moves rule plays no role at all. 
Games end in draws in average 39 moves, long before the 50-moves rule can trigger.

Referring to my previous post, in my opinion. if such a course were taken, using present computing speeds it would take billions of years on the fastest computer we have, so that even using a million computers in parallel wouldn't help much. I do think, however, that in order to curtail the amount of unnecessary calculation, it would be absolutely necessary to impose some kind of limit on numbers of moves with no pawn advance or piece exchange. However, how would we know what such a limit SHOULD be without already solving chess? This is just one of the many important objections to the brute force method of solving, which is unfortunately supported by some here.

@12277

'Oh I get it now. In 1000 years computers will find that 1 e4 e5 2 Ba6 is a forced checkmate in 580 moves for white and 1 d4 g5 is a forced checkmate for black in 398 moves.'
Then you would have reason not to believe me.

Actually, in 1324 years.

I don't think I'm in any way conceited. It isn't conceit to know I'm cleverer, for instance, than you. It's realism. "Conceit" may better apply to some others here. Talking to people such as yourself, who are incapable of understanding logically based ideas, does tend to bring about a degree of arrogance but that's only natural. When you've proven, time upon time, that you have no understanding of complex points, not because I find them complex but because people like you find them too complex to follow, it's only natural that your opinions and those of people like you should be ignored.

get the sw running first. then do a doughboy (smooshy) solve. then straighten the kinx as one goes. let go a the book theory...for now. cant jump from abc to xyz. needta make some words outta the middle 20 letters. well completely describe it later. and elroch ?...quit tryn sooo hard. let stuff come to u.

Games end in draws in average 39 moves, long before the 50-moves rule can trigger.

wha-what ?? 50move rule (2-ply) is when no piece captured AND no pawn moved right ? now what does that hafta do w/ a 39move game again ?

btw...using the 50move (100ply) rule what it the longest possible game ? they say its 5898.5 moves.

brute force method

BFM is abt to become yesterday.

That's what engines used to think about the Greek gift sacrifice, until their horizons improved considerably.

And that's the whole point...humans and engines are not good enough to determine what moves have no compensation. Tygxc freely admits this when he says that engine evaluations don't matter, only reaching the tablebase...

The problem is, if you are using evaluations that are not correct enough to matter, then the engine(s) is/are pruning imperfectly, and reaching the tablebase that way is meaningless and proves nothing.

This is pretty obvious and not hard to understand. Tygxc proposes to make a decent guess by today's standard of play and then just call it a scientific proof. That's like toasting a pop tart and calling it a pizza. It's square and tastes nothing like pizza, but you can slice it up and try to give it to people anyway...

" I want to incorporate chess knowledge into weakly solving chess, as is beneficial according to this "

but you arent, you are using general chess knowledge to justify objectively incorrect reasoning.

""advantage of 0.2" ++ Again: computer evaluations like +0.20 make no sense.
The only objective, absolute evaluation is win / draw / loss."

then why do you use those artificial evaluations to justify that e4 is better than a4?

""if tygxc wants projects"
++ There is no need for a project with good assistants and modern computers: the 17 ICCF WC finalists and their 2 servers each of 90 million positions per second do it for free."

not 90 million positions per second, 5 days per move. you keep interchanging nodes and full positional evaluations. even assuming perfect pruning (which is the opposite from the truth) a weak solve requires a full positional evaluation of each of the 10&17 +

"Weakly solving chess needs to consider 10^17 positions"

false statement. this assumes that no moves besides perfect moves on one side are considered, but in order to find the perfect move, you have to consider non perfect moves.

why arent you addressing this fact?

idc about arrogance, but tygxc is definitely more intellectually dishonest than anyone else here.

(all need to be resolved)

didju write this Dodo Due ??...so then ur elroch right ?

That's not ny username, nor is Elroch as it turns out...

This reveals how confused @tygxc really is. A perfect analogy is the following:

A: here is a lottery ticket. Is there a chance of it winning?

T: no, there is no chance of it winning.

A: are you sure? When you calculate it, there is a very small probability of it winning, but not zero

T: no it's zero. I am absolutely certain it won't win. (Jeering) I suppose you are going to come back next week and say it's won.

The point is that there is a big difference between something that is known to be true and something that is strongly believed. This includes something that is very likely. The difference is in the JUSTIFIABLE STATE OF BELIEF. A truth is something with a probability of 1. Nothing else is known for certain (delusions of doing so are not the same!)

@tygxc, do you understand the question in my earlier post? Otherwise not answering it is plain intellectual dishonesty. If you don't understand it, we can just add that to the list. But I think you should be able to have a go. Click on the link.

I don't believe it's necessarily intellectual dishonesty. There are some points where he refuses to accept the validity of quite good criticism, by just ignoring it. Yet many of tygxc's comments outside this thread are very good and dedicated to helping players improve, which seems to be something he understands. People who use the extremely childish downvoting, kindly provided by our hosts for us to antagonise others with, are extremely childish themselves, especially when they down vote ALL someone's comments, which more or less proclaims that they are intellectually dim or are trolling. It's going on on two threads at least and several are the candidates for such behaviour. Yet I find it hard to believe that tygxc is a troll in that sense. If he were capable of that then it would be very extreme and given his honest help to chess learners, I don't think he IS a troll. Perhaps there are other, more obvious candidates who enjoy stoking the fires of discontent.

So I don't think tygxc is intellectually dishonest although he might be capable of a better input, if he were willing to accept that not all of his beliefs re. solving chess are correct. Just my take on it.