I once solved chess using an abacas, t-square, bubble level, micrometer, hammer, ice tongs, miner's lamp, catcher's mask and a rubik's cube; but I lost my notes on how I did it, and I lost my t-square.
This guy down the street from me had some spare time during a backyard barbeque and showed very elegantly that the micrometer is redundant. Or was it the ice tongs? He didn't write it down.
Not only will chess not be solved in the foreseeable future, this thread will not be completed in the foreseeable future.
Amen to that..
Yep. And God help us until then.
The matter is that it's not up to the computer or the human player's skills. It's up to their time management efficiency. If the programmer has enough time to go through all the variations that the computer does, to apply the evaluation algorithms that the computer applies, and so on, the result would be the same. But since he's not able to do so, he would assign those duties to the computer, and he will concentrate on creating the algorithms' instead - what the computer can't do, no matter how much time it is given. Simply because a computer does nothing it is not designed to do (except for crashing). Which is the reason computers will never be better than humans at chess understanding.
That's why human players concentrate on thinking about principles and strategy - to save time. This way they needn't go through all the possible variations a move will lead them to if they know that the move will lead to a better position. As Fischer put it, "Don't worry about finding the best move. Just try to find a good move." The player's task is not to predict the future, but to make sure what he plays is consistent. That's why chess, in addition to not going to be solved soon, needn't be solved soon, at least not for the purpose of playing it in a better way.