perfect play = draw??

Can perdect play ever be achieved?  The number of possible moves so great that I do not think a human can acieve "perfect play".

Like I said before, humans make mistakes, and no one is perfect.

There can be no perfect play, because everyone makes mistakes.

Of course it can't be proven, but it can be assumed that it's a draw, as in opening study white's advantage is there but it's only slight.

If I had to bet my life over it for some crazy reason, I wouldn't be even slightly worried: It's a draw, and I wouldn't take any other opinoin seriously on this subject. Just observe some high level chess games, have a shallow look into opening theory, play around with Rybka for a while and it will become obvious.

a perfect play is impossible, but should result in a draw. also you can test this out yourself by having 2 same engines play each other. it should result in a draw

What he meant was that when completely equal forces fight, being white doesn't help.

However, that is actually not the case, when an engine plays a match with itself, white still scores slightly higher and that is simply because they aren't playing perfect chess right now.

The more relevant statistic that engines could provide is that the draw percentage goes higher and higher as the engines' level of play gets stonger, in terms of hardware, software and the time control of the game. I.E when Rybka 3 and Naum 4 plays on 2 octats with 120', the drawing percentage is higher than when the king plays with fritz 7 on 1 processor with 5'.

In my opinion though, the human intellect shouldn't even need engine based evidence to reach such conclusion about the game. It's been studied for centuries now.

Amnesiac is correct. I cannot fathom that anybody here actually BELIEVES that they know the answer to the question of perfect play, or that they even have any evidence at all. Let's examine some other solved games involving perfect information and an equal playing field, shall we?

In tic-tac-toe, it's a draw. In chopsticks, the second player wins. In connect four, the first player wins. In checkers, it's a draw. In 6x6 Othello, the second player wins. In 5x5 Go, the first player wins. Shall I go on? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game#Solved_games

Even 3x3 chess is extraordinarily complicated: there are 304,545,552 legal positions! Depending on the starting configuration, it can take 16 moves to force a checkmate. http://kirr.homeunix.org/chess/3x3-chess/

Here's the bottom line. With perfect play, chess will end in one of three ways: either white will force a win, black will force a win, or it will be a draw. There is absolutely, 100%, no way to tell what the outcome truly is. It hasn't been solved yet!

That is only restating the facts. It's obvious that humans have gone wrong many times in many areas, and that the game of chess isn't solved yet. We know all that, but it is still obvious though, that the starting position of the game of chess is a draw.

If you honestly believe that there's the slightest chance that black has a forced win in the starting position, then in fact you are with the group that once believed earth was the center of the universe, not ones who believe it's an obvious draw. This is because there's an enormous, serious and consistent "study" that has been made about this over the centuries, and you're just ignoring all the results, trying to clinge on to possibilities. No different than people who still believe on the possibility that earth could be positioned on the horn of a bull.

Global recession, the case of jupiter and astronomical assumptions of the past are all specific and different cases. Just like they won't hold you back from not believing in the maya calender, they shouldn't hold you back from believing that the initial position of the game of chess is a drawn position.  

Let me put it this way:

if you're insisting on the possibility of a forced win in the starting position, you could propose no reasonable argument that the world is not going to come to an end in 2012. Science cannot prove it won't come to an end, just like computers haven't proved (yet) there's no forced win.

If this were a philosophical discussion, I could perhaps recognize that possibility you're claiming, but we should stay in the practical side of the discussion since we're talking about a game that humans, including me and you and everyone on the site (almost) have been playing.

Engines play nowhere near perfectly.

philidor_position is apparently ignorant in science and mathematics. It is nowhere even NEAR obvious. In fact, deciding that the "obvious" answer must be the right one leads to some of the greatest blunders in all of history. Let me give you an example:

31 is prime

331 is prime

3331 is prime

33331 is prime

333331 is prime

3333331 is prime

33333331 is prime

What's the obvious conclusion to be drawn here? Any number of the form 333...1 is a prime number. For a long time it was thought this was true, but, well, guess what? This is WRONG! 333333331 = 17*19607843 just as one example. [1]

You cannot assume that chess is a draw with perfect play just because of your "feelings" or "intuition", or even because of the insubstantial, elementary, barely-scratching-the-surface analysis that has been done in chess so far using computers.

Oh, and here's a good analogy. The amount of computer analysis that's been done on chess compared to the actual complexity of the game is roughly akin to the amount of space exploration that's been done compared to the size of the universe. What philidor_position is saying, is that since we've performed substantial study on our own solar system and found no life besides our own, obviously there are no aliens anywhere in the universe.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_%28number%29

OK. Do you apply the same reasoning about the world not coming to an end in 2012?

Tell me how you could distinguish the below argument from the one you've presented above:

1)Someone claims that the world won't come to an end in 2012 because of the Maya calenders.

2)you come and represent the above information, calling that person ignorant because humans have been wrong so many times and you can't be sure.

If you're just trying to be articulate or argumentative or something, let me know and I won't waste any more of my time.

Wait... he shows, by example, that you can't assume something is true for all cases when you know it to be true for some finite number, to show that you can't assume chess is a draw just because most opening analysis we've done so far ends up at equal positions.

How on earth do you possibly connect that with the 2012 crap? Is there anyone on either side of that making that particular logical fallacy?

2012 will be over in three years. Given such a short period of time, the correct analogy would be, "Is there a forced checkmate in the first 10 moves of the game?" This question we can answer: no. With perfect play it is doubtful that there is a forced checkmate in the first 10 moves. Based on the analysis that we've done on opening theory, surely someone would have figured it out by now.

The world ending is very similar. Based on scientific analysis, the sun isn't going to explode anytime soon, the earth won't explode anytime soon, etc.

Your question should be rephrased as, "What will happen to the Milky Way galaxy 15 billion years from now?" Such a question is more in line with the scope of the complexity of the game of chess, and whatever answer seems reasonable from a scientific standpoint is much less "certain".

Are you serious? that example could be valid if all human chess games&analysis had stopped before move 4.

He's pointing out a logical fallacy. Doing that by giving an example exactly as complicated as the thing under discussion would defeat the point.

No, that question is way out of league in complexity, compared to the topic's original question. Humans have come a long, long way of establishing a fairly accurate understanding of the game, and you guys, I don't know why, are treating such huge "study" like mutterings of monkeys over the subject of rocket science.

We have our brains to assess things and come to conclusions, and you're just refusing our right to use them.

From that point of view, I guess we'd never know if the Hammerschlag isn't the best opening for white... Us poor humans will have to wait until everything is "solved".

I'm also a bit curious as to why philidor_position is so convinced that it's a draw given all the evidence that white is slightly better out of the opening?

 ^^^  Smart man who said that. 

Amnesiac wins the understatement of the day :-)