Is Chess on the verge of being solved?

Explain. I can't be more off than Kasparov was.

Chuck Norris has solved chess, but we are not Chuck Norris. Theoretically, chess is already solved. It's awhile before computers and us can make the perfect move.

Chess is FAR from being solved!!!

Pretty crazy.  Comparing the search tree complexity to number of possible positions, is comparing apples to oranges.  It is clear that the number of positions in checkers is smaller than 5^32 (two types men x 2 colors and empty square; and 32 squares)  This search tree for checkers is much smaller (than the search tree for chess) because of forced moves, and more limited moves.  With the use of hash tables which could be shared with different computers working on the problem, you would be crazy   to say that checkers couldn't be solved. 

The number of possible chess games vastly outnumbers the number of atoms in the known universe by many magnitudes, a tablebase of all possible chessgames would require every atom in this universe plus another 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 universes equal in size to store,

chess will never be solved

We don't really care about the number of possible games when it comes to solving a game, just the number of legally reachable positions.

Even if chess is solved by computers, it doesnt ruin the game.  Humans dont have the capability to solve the game.

What computers must work out to solve chess, is simply an accurate evaluation for each of those 10^43 positions. Inasmuch as each can be reached by some other in the database, the computer need only connect them all to one another.

Certainly, many are rubbish, and so the evaluation is simple. Many others--usually several in the course of every GM tournament--are incorrectly assessed by our best current computers.

It is likely that the universe itself contains enough atoms to store this data. However, we're not gonna be able to access the whole hard drive any time in the next 30 years. At least that's my tentative prediction.

Yeah, if you could break them into sets and then solve each set that would work.  You may never have a 32 man tablebase but it doesn't seem like it would be required to have it all stored at once.

The only way to avoid brute force calculation of all possible chess games is to reduce calculation depth (from game length) and use positional evaluation at the end of the variations. That's the way chess computers work. But a chess engine can't come up with its own positional evaluation algorithm, because it requires reasoning which is beyond its capabilities. It can only be given to it by a human by means of programming. That's why different chess engines play chess differently - because they evaluate positions differently, according to how they have been programmed, in turn according to their creators' chess strategy understanding implementation.

This is not objective reasoning though. If you had watched the whole video, you could have found another part where Kasparov says how he can guess which engine he's playing against after playing 15-20 games - exactly because of being able to recognize those subjective features.

I believe Kasparov is well aware of that fact, as any other player who takes chess seriously. That's why he's an authority - because he's spent enough time to consider what he's speaking, because he has had great success, and because almost all (if not completely all) the rest of the chess world has come to the same conclusions. Along with programmers and mathematicians. "The raw numbers" and "concepts" have been known for long and are available to anyone who's interested in them, be it to support or disregard them, but after getting acquainted with them.

You should come up with a better refutation of their opinions than just dislike, or search for a way to deal with your "hate".

GIex said it well!

BTW, thanks for the link to the video.

Well, he has been known to focus it on women, so there's that.

a game cannot "be solved" if it involves the ability to make error.

if you mean is it possible for a computer to play every possible game in the world and then win each possible game then, yes, yes, it can be "solved"...

but no human every playing the game can do this and all humans have more or less ability and either make errors from ego, physical tiredness, age, stupidity, bad judgement, lack of knowledge, etc.

no, no, chess is not about to be solved !

The game will be solved and  from there more and more sophisticated

human training methods and medical chess chip implants will eventually become

available.

Any game will eventually be solved  so why bother to fight it- just play it and love it!

a "medical chip implant" is just to computize the skull...so my point remains the same....the game is solved if you solve it with computers but it is not solved if you use real people.

The problem with brute force solving is that it will require immense improvement in computer technologies in order a chess engine to be able to go through all possible game variations to the end while spending a reasonable time for that task - say, a time that it can function uninterrupted - several years with good maintainance maybe. After all, if it needs a time to calculate long enough that it is likely to simply crash or wear out at some moment, what to do then?

With the current capabilities of chess engines, solving chess is therefore impossible. There are many researches of the speed that computers' performance develops with time though, such as the Moore's Law and others, and also many researches about the ammount of information that has to be processed (the Shannon Number tends to give a good picture of the scale of that ammount, and those estimations have been going on, complemented and refined since the very beginning of computer chess and they continue now too).

But even the most optimistic of scenarios of computer improvement related to chess solving result in time estimations that are way beyond what's reasonable to rely on. Chess is, fortunately or unfortunately, not going to be solved, at least not in a similar way.

ok, i have been found out.

yes, chess is entirely solveable.

i wrote the manuscript and it is in my desk but fide threatened my life if it was published.