True or False Chess is a Draw with Best Play from Both Sides

So would you mind explain what you mean by :

"The fact that a chess machine can win from the best human has no bearing on the question.  Remember humans are allowed to use their own knowledge plus the chess machine."

I think you should focus on explaining why the misquote is a misquote rather than just saying it is a misquote. I everybody does this, we will never have any constructive discussion.

Tronchenblais

You took from those two sentences that I was saying machine and human together equals perfect play.  The sentences do not say that at all.

What they say is the best chess we have right now is machine and human together.  

I am also saying why go into how human chess players make mistakes etc when we can do better by teaming up with a chess engine.

I am also saying that those very difficult chess positions that were found for which humans could not figure out--those positions were solved by humans together wiht a 6 or 7 piece table base and it was humans who invented the tablebase.

Nowhere in all this did I say or even imply that humans when they use machines play perfect chess.  They do play very strong chess but very strong chess is not always perfect chess.

Ok, then I must be getting something wrong, because if machine together with human do not play perfect chess, but very strong chess, then they have no bearing on the question either. What we are discussing is perfect play, not very strong play. Do you agree with this ?

(very strong is highly subjective by the way, but it's indeed stronger than anything else we can do)

False,

Chess by design is an unequal game i.e. no matter what or how good or symmetrical moves are made the chances for one side are not the same as the other. This inequality is what makes chess so complex and fascinating.

There is no such thing as "If both the players are of same strenght and play equally well every game will be a draw"

The main proof in human games is a result (not draw) within the first 20-30 moves at the highest level. This holds true for even for the most played and well analysed openings such as Ruy Lopez or King's Indian.

Same holds true for Computer programs. Even 3200+ ELO rates programs win and lose games against their equally stong opponents. Just check the latest on TCEC for more. 

So no matter how well does one play he can always lose thanks to the complexity of chess and that's what makes it so fascinating.

its true.white gets a small adventeg but if black plays 100% precise its a draw

Tronchenbials  Yes, that is what I was trying to say when someone found those quite rare endgames.  There is no direct bearing on the question "is chess a draw with best play"

The only thing relevant is while not 100% perfect in analysis a strong human with the aid of a strong chess machine can look at various chess positions and in the vast majority [more than 95%] can determine if the position leads to a win or loss or draw.

Being able to evaluate games and positions very well helps with one of the many evidences which point to chess is a draw.

But, again that is just one of many evidences...

I think the major problem with this argument is that we are not looking at all positions when answering the question "is chess a draw". Ultimately we are only interested in one position : the strating position. The fact is the starting position is definately not part of the vast majority of positions we can analyse (even with the aid of the strongest computers). It 's in the less than 5% of positions we cannot analyse.

Given this I don't clearly understand how the fact we can analyse a lot of position correctly is evidence that chess is a draw.

Just saying (this is not related to the debate) but stating an argument and asking your opponent to disprove it ("PROVE THE CONTRARY"), is anything but correct reasonment. God exists, prove the contrary !

To answer you, it is very likely that the cited endgames occur rarely because players do their best to avoid them (because they are to complicated). In the end, this has nothing to do with perfect play, this just shows that what we think is a draw today might not really be a draw.

Well, the percentage of draws in centaur chess is dependent on the way you approach the game.

I've been playing centaur chess for the last one year and a half at LSS (formerly IECG). I have played opponents of all ratings, and my results show that draws are not THAT frequent, unless you blindly trust the engine recommendations.

Right now (rated 2393) I am at +27 =24 -1 as white (that loss came from a fingerslip as early as move twelve!), and +20 =28 -0 as Black.

Honestly, I do think that the draw percentage at OTB GM chess is much higher.

How true. His French defence books were real classics, but the fourth revision, issued recently, is plain bad.

The way GOOD opening books are written has changed dramatically.

Yekatrinas I really start to believe you are trolling. You make irruptions in this thread periodically, blame people for lacking culture and stuff, and when they start showing you their arguments you disappear and come back a few pages later to do exactly the same.

Do you think the argument that there will soon be something much better than today's centaur chess players and hence their drawing percentage is not that significant is so stupid it would be a waste of time to answer it ?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Maybe there's hope for the forums afterall!  But, probably not.

The percentage of draws at the highest levels IS increasing even if some of you want to stick their heads in the sand and say "I don't know this".

In addition to Centaur Chess just look at the World Championship matches for the last 100 years.  

It is plain logical that human plus computer can do better than computer alone.  Do you not all see the logic here?  If not I can explain it to you.

The fact is there are some very infrequent positions where formerly humans could not solve as to win or loss or draw.  The fact is also that now humans have solved those positions.

The fact is also that if you take random generated postions the material advantage for one side or the other would show it is an obvious win or loss or draw even by a class A player.

If you believe something is true it is good to make a hypothesis of what would happen if it is true and what would happen if it is not true.

I made a hypothesis and so far it has worked. 

According to WIkipedia citing Fundamental Chess Endings by Muller and Lamprecht, 0.09% of games have Q+P vs Q.

@George_Jet, you've been on this site for about 1 day.

Why such a heavy hand in this forum thread?  Are you a sock puppet?

You keep insisting that Math (and various heuristics) have a privileged postion in this discussion, that one can never know what will be found "over the next hill," and that your smartphone's ability to beat the WCC renders null and void what anyone might assert about the tendency of chess to be drawish from the starting position.

Your metaphorical reference to "evidence" in the legal and courtroom sense might begin to touch on what's at stake here.

But since any solution to chess is way far over those many, many, hills before us, no reasonable conclusion or expectation is possible.  That's my reading of your posts.

Much as I appreciate your (sometimes) thoughtful prose, they strike me as nihilistic, and perhaps even trolling.

@SmyslovFan, @Ponz111, and IM @Pfren all spoke from experience, and for many people, their arguments are persuasive.  That's a personal choice.  But...

If White cannot force a win from the starting position, why shouldn't we reasonably presume (in the lawyerly evidence sense) that chess is a draw until proven otherwise?

@george_jetson5: I appreciate the arguments that you've put forth, which have caused me to decrease my estimate of the likelihood of chess being drawn. I do still believe that this is by far the more likely outcome, but I'm much less confident as a result of thinking about the possibility of there being no way for one side to avoid reaching a middlegame or endgame position that might look drawn to us but end up as a forced win for the other player in some ridiculously large number of moves that we would never have a clue about if not for retrograde analysis (which might for practical reasons never get far enough back in the tree to find such positions).

In order for chess to be drawn, it's obvious that both players have to be able to prevent the occurrence of every possible seemingly-drawn-but-actually-losing position, and the original position might be one of those. I don't see how one could reasonably fail to have some non-trivial amount of doubt that there might be lots more of those types of positions deeper in the tree than we currently think there are, and that it might not be possible to avoid all of them from the starting position.

Is "no idea" to be interpreted to mean that you would be no more surprised if it turned out to be a forced win than if it turned out to be drawn, or that one would be less (much less in my case) surprising than the other but there's still reason for significant doubt?

ponz111 If I understand you correctly, you mean that If both players would know every possible outcome for every move and play thereafter it would result in a draw? Because this is the only way you could spot all "mistakes".

This is completely unknown and will likely remain so for the rest of time. Chess history is simply not very good evidence as only a minute fraction of the total chess tree has been explored and the heuristics we use are only approximate.

@George_Jet, in post # 1481, you assert the following propositions with an almost religious fervor.  All are direct quotes.

• The fact is that chess is a completely axiomatic system.
• The question about whether it is a draw is fundamentally a mathematical question.
• ...the statement that chess is a draw with perfect play is a mathematical assertion the truth of which is not known. 

Why do you presume these are "facts," and moreover, blindingly obviously true?

If you now reveal that your subjective probabilities are 70 percent / 30 percent for draw versus win for white, then perhaps the only thing @Ponz111 did in his thread was exaggerate his confidence in a draw, just a bit.  

P.S. String Theorists make the same kind of assertions about the nature of the Universe.  Some would say their thinking is "all tied up in knots."