By "the starting point" most people mean the one at the beginning.
In this case, I believe the goal would be to find a starting point to a repeatable forced series of moves that ends in mate. I see a virtually unlimited number of starting points.
You're right, that's why tablebases are built going backwards from mate.
Chess is solvable, but it's a near certainty it would take a quantum computer (or some even more advanced computer not yet invented) and holographic memory to brute force every possible position allowed in chess, including variations in which en passant and castling is or is not allowed.
This is the set start point
That is the setup. What is the first move? Let’s just start with a3 for example. Black has 10 possible responses. White has 11 possible responses to those 10. How many moves will be made before reaching a forced series of moves that culminates in mate? Every one of those moves is a start point.
I make it 20 and at least 19 to each of those 20.
By "the starting point" most people mean the one at the beginning.
In this case, I believe the goal would be to find a starting point to a repeatable forced series of moves that ends in mate. I see a virtually unlimited number of starting points.
I can give you a host of "starting points" that satisfy your goal, but if you're to solve chess it has to be the one I posted (but it doesn't necessarily have to end in mate).
Noughts and crosses (tick tock toe in American) is considered solved. There is no forced win.
Solved in the context of games just means you can predict the outcome given perfect play, win or draw.
Theoretically possible. Practically impossible.
Philosophically pointless w/r/t chess itself as it is an engineering problem that will have zero effect on how chess is played because to a human it would be an infinitesimal improvement on even today's engines.
To the last 3 posters...
I'm fine with people trying to inject a little humor, and I'm fine with people stopping by to read the topic to say *once* they find the content less than worthwhile or exciting. I created this topic so people interested in discussing the possibility of solving chess without a bunch of dubious claims and all caps would have someplace to go. I actually do not believe it is remotely possible that chess will be solved in any of our lifetimes, so it's merely a speculative question to ponder.
I am also interested in more realistic future advancements, like asteroid mining, which will work a whole better with space elevators and monofilament wire to get the materials back down to earth without dealing with current more dangerous forms of re-entry. Somebody should probably start a thread on that.
But...this is a chess site, so the topic here is whether chess can ever be solved, and how to possibly go about it.
Understood and thank you, OP.
Since there is no forcing move possible from the setup position in Chess, and all first moves require choice, there can be no single solution to Chess.
How do you know there is no forcing move possible from the setup position?
There is definitely a single answer to the question, "Is there (a) a forced win for White, (b) a forced win for Black or (c) a forced win for neither side?". It is very unlikely indeed that unique moves are required from both sides for the remainder of any game to maintain the status.
Since there is no forcing move possible from the setup position in Chess, and all first moves require choice, there can be no single solution to Chess.
You don't actually know that, though. When you are playing a chess game against an engine and walk into a tablebase's "mate in 153", you don't know yet that there's a forcing sequence of 153 moves that will result in you losing, but it's there. The same is true when extending the tablebase all the way back to the starting position, it just hasn't been done yet.
"All first moves require choice" is ultimately irrelevant. When you are in a losing position, there's a forced sequence of moves that will produce the fastest win for your opponent even with perfect play form that point forward on your part, whether either of you realize it or not...and you do have a choice, to make a move that loses faster (and your opponent also has the opportunity to misplay and release you from the 153 move mate) 
. The only question is whether the opening position is losing for either side, or drawn.
Most chess players lean towards drawn, mainly because it is possible for one player to be up by 2 minor pieces in material and still not have the ability to mate.
A draw can be perfect play from a position. So can a loss. Neither is relevant to the issue of whether chess can be mathematically solved. Solving it for all possible first moves is a requirement for a solution.
It could be that chess is always a draw for every possible first move. In that case, the lack of an optimal first move does not mean that chess wouldn't be solved.
Grab a board and set it up. How many moves must a person make with each piece before forcing moves come into play? How many moves on each side? There are possible positions where a lot of moves can be made before any forcing moves come into play. All of those positions have to be considered as starting points. Everyone can learn the least number of moves to Checkmate, but nobody knows the most. In reality, perpetual movements had to be ruled out. Would a game ending with the 50 move rule be considered perfect? I don’t believe so.
If a handheld computer had been made prior to the big bang that was fed the initial state of the universe, and it had been programmed with perfect knowledge of physics, particle dynamics, etc. and it had infinite memory and instant computations, it would be able to tell you everything you are ever going to do in your life, and could track an eternity of movement for every particle in the universe. Because there's isn't any choice, only a lack of knowledge that approximates choice and random occurrences. The same is true in the logical sandbox of chess, just on a much smaller scale.
Perfect in this context means making optimal decisions. There is no reason optimal decisions can not lead to a draw. There is also no reason that there can be multiple decisions that are perfect.
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"Forced" means that only one perfect move exists. This does not have to be the case. The choice of first move for white could very well be meaningless in that they all lead to draws with best play.
Perfect in this context means making optimal decisions. There is no reason optimal decisions can not lead to a draw. There is also no reason that there can be multiple decisions that are perfect.
This is my own point of view.
With no supporting evidence at all, I believe (call it "faith", if you like) that with perfect play chess is a draw, and that the path to that draw is fairly broad... in the sense that the draw can be reached by a multitude of different lines, not just a single unique continuation.
@ExploringWA
What do you mean by a forcing move? The following position is won for White.
If Black plays 1...Kh1 then in order to keep the win White is forced to play one of the moves 2.Ra1(a3-a8,b2-f2) or 2.Kd1(d2-f2). Would you then say Black's 1...Kh1 is a forcing move?
A draw under the 50 move rule would certainly be considered perfect play from any position where neither side had a forced win and that was the case for all positions up to the draw claim.
That would include play from the starting position if the starting position is a position where neither side has a forced win (but I don't know whether it is).
I'm not as technically aware as many of the posters in this thread, but I think a few things should be considered:
1) Since chess is already partially solved, with 8-piece tablebase(s) likely to arrive in the near future ...
2) ... One can, for practical reasons, discount "bad" or inferior openings, if we're only in the hunt for solving chess at the "best play" level. There are some openings that regularly lose at the engine level, when our current top engines play against each other. We can reasonably assume that, if that trend continues, that it "proves" that those openings are lost with best play.
1. e4 d5, for example, seems to, time and again, lose for Black, at the engine level. Unless this somehow changes in the future, it's probably safe to say that any move possibility after 1. e4 d5 is likely a forced loss for Black.
So, for practical reasons, we could scratch 1...d5 off the list of positions needed to be "solved", along with every possible move combination after it, to save whatever computing power is needed.
This kind of selective pruning could be done more and more, as engines begin demonstrating, more and more, which openings predictably do worse at the engine level.
And the games don't need to reach completion, either ... they just need to reach a tablebase ending. Soon it will be 8-pieces. Perhaps 9 pieces won't be far behind.
Less and less of the game needs to be solved, if we're pruning from both ends. Eventually we'll just be trying to solve middlegame positions from only the most promising openings.
On technological advances:
I don't know much about quantum computing, but Neven's Law predicts that quantum supremacy is fast approaching.
And it's not unreasonable to expect that technology would, eventually, advance even past quantum computing, to something that makes even quantum computing seem primitive.
With such (admittedly hypothetical) advances, it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that solving chess isn't as out of reach as we currently think. It just likely won't happen anytime in our lives.
The problem with pruning is that it assumes without proof. To prove something loses it has to be completely analyzed. There could be some super deep variation on the bongcloud that is a win for white that engines just aren't powerful enough to see.
Computing power is only one practical problem. Storage is also an issue. Calling them problems is minimizing it. We'd have to be profoundly wrong about our knowledge of the universe to get past these problems.
I suspect the interest around this is the idea that a full solution makes chess pointless. All it would do is create a reference slightly more accurate than today's engines.
If the game ends in stalemate or draw, somebody didn’t play a perfect game ... oooooh ... Now there’s a problem.
If you mean "from the initial position" then this is a completely unsupported statement.
Also (IMO) a false one.
Also, a pawnlocked position is a draw, along the same lines as insufficient material, because checkmate has become impossible.
Correct. Rule 9.6
9.6 The game is drawn when a position is reached from which a checkmate cannot occur by
any possible series of legal moves. This immediately ends the game, provided that the
move producing this position was legal.
Which would then mean that in a position like this, white cannot legally play Kxa8 because the game is over. And in a rated blitz event, he could theoretically lose the game by playing Kxa8
Once the game is over that means the game is over and anything done on the board after that is irrelevant. So White would not lose by playing the irrelevant Kxa8.
This is the set start point
That is the setup. What is the first move? Let’s just start with a3 for example. Black has 10 possible responses. White has 11 possible responses to those 10. How many moves will be made before reaching a forced series of moves that culminates in mate? Every one of those moves is a start point.
I make it 20 and at least 19 to each of those 20.
By "the starting point" most people mean the one at the beginning.