Kh1 is forced; There is no choice. White has a vast number of choices. I would never consider a game that ends in stalemate to be “perfect.” It’s kind of not perfect.
We aren't talking aesthetics here. Tic tac toe with perfect (optimal) play is a draw no matter what the first move is. Yet by any account totally solved.
Does anyone know if an 8 piece tablebase is currently being worked on? 6 piece was completed in 2005, 7 piece in 2012 so 7 years to add 1 piece. With each additional piece the work to complete must grow exponentially. I guess it would be safe to assume that if work was started on an 8 piece tablebase in 2012 that at some point in the next decade or 2 it should be completed. And so on and so forth right up until 32 pieces in hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years time if the future Nalimov's et al have the time and inclination. Plus if supercomputers continue to become more powerful and are able to be used for the purpose.
I wrote up a short scenario for this in the "Will computers solve chess?" thread, let me see if I can find it. It's based on the best supercomputer from the time, maybe 2015-ish?
Edit: Here it is...
100 PetaFLOPS is 10^17 floating point operations/sec. Evaluating a chess position is not 1 operation, mind you, nor is it 10, so let's be kind and say it falls in the 100s order of magnitude, which knocks 10^17 back down to 10^15 positions/second, which is 8.64^19 positions/day, 3.15^22 positions/year.
At that processing rate (assuming infinite memory/storage and ignoring all the issues thereof already laid out) you would solve chess in...3.175^24 years. I guess you could amortize a loan for the duration on the $273 million for the supercomputer...
Adding in storage, you solve chess...never (in this scenario).
Which I expanded upon later:
The fastest supercomputer could solve checkers in a matter of seconds (10^17 FLOPS vs. calculating 10^14 positions), but it will take 3.175^24 years to solve chess. If you spend the entire wealth of the planet (approx. $80 Trillion in currency) to build an array of these supercomputers, approx. 290,000 of them, and use them all for solving chess leaving the human race to starve and die (so we'll also leave as aside the question of who would run the giant computer array), it still would take 3.8 million years to get your answer.
If Moore's law still held true then every 20 years would see a thousand-fold increase in speed/power, and waiting until 2180 would allow a single supercomputer to solve it in less than four years. I kind of doubt that Moore's law would be effective for 80 two-year cycles but if your willing to defer serious expenditures until the time of your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids then maybe the issue could be usefully addressed.
But hasn't Moore's law already broken down for a decade or so? Neven's law looks more promising, but you have to say it's early days.
The funny part is that the argument here is whether the entire universe can hold the solution, never mind the fact that it's just as impossible whether it takes the whole universe's particles or just our own solar system's particles...it ain't happening, not by humanity's hand before, oh, the year 10,000? 
I think 10,000 is not a bad number to posit...10,000 years ago we were using stones and sticks, and today's technology would not have been remotely conceivable, and that is about the gap we need to bridge to solve chess from where we are now.
Interesting stuff. I certainly think that the entire resources of the planet should be dedicated to the pursuit of this pressing question 😆 On the subject of predicting the future the best anyone can do is make an educated guess...things which are commonplace today would have seemed impossible only 50 years ago, such as the very fact that this discussion is taking place on a shared interface between people from all over the world. Going back further, say 1000 years, the changes have been mind boggling. So in the year 3000 it is likely that human activity and the tools in use will be other-worldly compared to today. Perhaps folks will be able to get the answers to such enormous calculations instantly at the click of a button from their armchair whilst watching the Martian sunset.
Even if this made sense (it doesn't) you don't start at the beginning, you start at the end.
Which is exactly what endgame tablebases have already done.
I’m glad you are catching up. Measured with a ruler from either end, Chess will never be solved. The table bases will never reach the setup point, just like the fact that there is no set start point; Therefore, there can be no single solution.
You keep saying that. I don't want to quote Princess Bride or anything, but...
The funny part is that the argument here is whether the entire universe can hold the solution
Of course it can, didn't you already say the number of positions is on the order of 10^50?
Game tree complexity is only relevant when we're talking about computing the solution, not storing the final product.
64C32 * 64! is an easy ceiling for the solution, and it's roughly 10^50 as you said in the beginning of this topic.
Missing the point...
10^35 or 10^50 in this context makes little difference to us at this current stage of human development. Both are well out of reach.
As for storing the solution, as I said before, you have to store the results for all positions (not intermediate calculations, but searchable "results" on 10^46 positions is still impossible). There's no point in solving it if you don't keep the data. First, people will challenge the proof and you need the data, but also people would just want to be able to choose a position and have the forced win spit right out just as tablebases do today.
It's the mark of a true mad scientist to solve something and then not be able to impart the answer to anyone else in a useful format .
Get a Dyson sphere to power the thing for example.
Heh, I was about to say that your premise is on the Dyson-sphere-esque level of technology, which makes my year 10,000 estimate seem all the more plausible. I am assuming post-quantum computing and sub-atomic storage in that case.
Going to go look for a Star Trek thread.
That's the technology level solving chess is probably at. 
Going to go look for a Star Trek thread.
That's the technology level solving chess is probably at.
It's all very well solving our simple version of chess, but can this be solved?
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.
You can't discount "bad" openings at all. The problem is that engines, up until super recently, have gotten all their valuations from humans, ala pawn = 1, minor piece = 3, etc. Human beings play flawed chess based on biases...we see a mate moving a queen forwards/towards the opposing king faster than we see a mate retreating the queen away to deliver check...we prefer various aesthetically pleasing patterns, we find attacking easier and preferable to defending...on and on. These tiny but ubiquitous biases are baked right into traditional engine's evaluations. Machine learning engines that *do not pollute their play pool by facing human opposition constantly in their learning process* (I'm looking at you in your early days, Leela) can get around this obstacle. That's why Alpha Zero's play was shocking to GMs. If Alpha Zero had played GMs. and not itself only during it's training, it would have "learned" how to best beat human chess players with all the biases thereof, and it would not have evolved to where it did.
Maybe the way for white to force a win is open with e4 and sac the LSB on f7, every game. You would have discounted that as a "bad opening" and discarded it. Roughly the same way that GMs for decades discarded the Berlin as being bad for black, because they assumed that exchanging queens and losing castling rights was "bad"...and then they stopped analyzing based on an assumption.
In any case, the solution that tablebases are building will continue to be built backwards, so pruning openings doesn't do much of anything...it's like snipping the last millimeter of Rapunzel's hair.
Since the conversation seems to be moving toward data storage, are we assuming that bytes (and bits) are the only data storage possible? Because it seems that bits will likely become a thing of the past.
I found this article an interesting read, regarding data storage alternatives that might come to fruition in the (far) future.
WIRED - What if Quantum Computers Used Hard Drives Made of DNA?
It might also be worth noting that some researchers are already looking past Quantum computing toward "Quark" computing, which involves computing at the Planck scale (a billion billion billion times smaller than modern tech).
After Quantum Computers, Quark-Scale Computers
Perhaps data will eventually be stored at the quark level, below even the subatomic scale. Who knows?
Since the conversation seems to be moving toward data storage, are we assuming that bytes (and bits) are the only data storage possible? Because it seems that bits will likely become a thing of the past.
I found this article an interesting read, regarding data storage alternatives that might come to fruition in the (far) future.
WIRED - What if Quantum Computers Used Hard Drives Made of DNA?
It might also be worth noting that some researchers are already looking past Quantum computing toward "Quark" computing, which involves computing at the Planck scale (a billion billion billion times smaller than modern tech).
After Quantum Computers, Quark-Scale Computers
Perhaps data will eventually be stored at the quark level, below even the subatomic scale. Who knows?
Quark scale computing is just a made up buzzword for web hits.
"Quantum computing" as a term already covers anything and everything sub-atomic in size. But sure, the smaller the particles and the more states we can store using each gets humanity closer to its ultimate goal: solving chess.
Bits and bytes (and binary in general) are used by computers because transistors are on or off, it's that simple. If we successfully move to other forms of computing that allow for more storage states than two, we will undoubtedly use them .
Even 3 states would be cool...
on/off/null (never set/defined)
or
yes/no/maybe so
The number of particles thing is just an illustration of just how amazingly absurd the numbers are, but all the particles in the universe including photons aren't even close to the shannon number. It is past innovation; we'd have to be profoundly wrong about our entire understanding of reality. Sort of like discovering pi is a rational number or something like that.
Possible? Only in the broadest sense.
The funny part is that the argument here is whether the entire universe can hold the solution, never mind the fact that it's just as impossible whether it takes the whole universe's particles or just our own solar system's particles...it ain't happening, not by humanity's hand before, oh, the year 10,000?
I think 10,000 is not a bad number to posit...10,000 years ago we were using stones and sticks, and today's technology would not have been remotely conceivable, and that is about the gap we need to bridge to solve chess form where we are now.
We discussed this before, buried in the "War and Ponz" saga.
post #3522 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=177
But if you'd followed the posts, the question was put to bed by @Thee_Ghostess_Lola in posts #3699 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=185 and #3701 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=186 where she showed that the 32 man tablebases could easily be accommodated on something the size of a postage stamp using 1960's technology.
In post #3523 on the first linked page, @pfren says "Even using the false assumption that each of these 10^46 positions can be stored at just one atom ...".
In classical mechanics terms (I don't understand quantum mechanics) an atom has numerous independent attributes. Position, velocity, acceleration, rate of change of acceleration etc., 𝔁, 𝔂, 𝔃, 𝔁´, 𝔂´, 𝔃´, 𝔁´´, 𝔂´´, 𝔃´´, 𝔁´´´, 𝔂´´´, 𝔃´´´, ... Direction of spin axis, angular change of spin axis , angular acceleration of spin axis etc. θ, φ, θ´, φ´, θ´´, φ´´, ... Angular velocity, acceleration about the spin axis etc. ω, ω´, ω´´, ...
If possibly plausible future technology could set and read, say, 1000 values for each of twenty of of these then a single atom could easily encode all the 2-32 man tablebases (at least if each distance metric were replaced by a single optimal move).
with 10 to the 120 power possible chess games recent advances in quantum computing may not even solve it: https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5823/will-quantum-computers-be-able-to-solve-the-game-of-chess BUT MAYBE? https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6147/will-quantum-computers-solve-chess
with 10 to the 120 power possible chess games recent advances in quantum computing may not even solve it: https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5823/will-quantum-computers-be-able-to-solve-the-game-of-chess BUT MAYBE? https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/6147/will-quantum-computers-solve-chess
I think that's Shannon's estimate based on an average 40 move game between players. Doesn't come remotely close to the number of possible games. In fact if chess is a win that could be less than the number of subgames in the tree of moves for one winning line.
The funny part is that the argument here is whether the entire universe can hold the solution, never mind the fact that it's just as impossible whether it takes the whole universe's particles or just our own solar system's particles...it ain't happening, not by humanity's hand before, oh, the year 10,000?
I think 10,000 is not a bad number to posit...10,000 years ago we were using stones and sticks, and today's technology would not have been remotely conceivable, and that is about the gap we need to bridge to solve chess form where we are now.
We discussed this before, buried in the "War and Ponz" saga.
post #3522 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=177
But if you'd followed the posts, the question was put to bed by @Thee_Ghostess_Lola in posts #3699 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=185 and #3701 https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/true-or-false-chess-is-a-draw-with-best-play-from-both-sides?page=186 where she showed that the 32 man tablebases could easily be accommodated on something the size of a postage stamp using 1960's technology.
In post #3523 on the first linked page, @pfren says "Even using the false assumption that each of these 10^46 positions can be stored at just one atom ...".
In classical mechanics terms (I don't understand quantum mechanics) an atom has numerous independent attributes. Position, velocity, acceleration, rate of change of acceleration etc., 𝔁, 𝔂, 𝔃, 𝔁´, 𝔂´, 𝔃´, 𝔁´´, 𝔂´´, 𝔃´´, 𝔁´´´, 𝔂´´´, 𝔃´´´, ... Direction of spin axis, angular change of spin axis , angular acceleration of spin axis etc. θ, φ, θ´, φ´, θ´´, φ´´, ... Angular velocity, acceleration about the spin axis etc. ω, ω´, ω´´, ...
If possibly plausible future technology could set and read, say, 1000 values for each of twenty of of these then a single atom could easily encode all the 2-32 man tablebases (at least if each distance metric were replaced by a single optimal move).
Lol. Lola didn't put anything to bed, she's full of crap on storing entire tablebases using QR codes.
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.