True or false? Chess will never be solved! why?

If all supercomputers linked together, how long will it take still at today's hardware?

Good luck with that.

Thanks for at least copping to 10^43 instead of the inflated 10^123 ;).

The 99.9% is not nearly a high enough level of culling, though; I would venture to say that every Chess position played in human history falls...well...far short of your 10^40 number :).  It is fairly telling that even with all the analysis accomplished thus far, there are pretty much *no* indications of some giant untapped reservoir of brilliant strategies and tactics out there that can be unlocked with brute force calculation.  There's no major "contributions" that Chess computers are making to fundamentally change the middle game, or shift conventional wisdom about position play, etc.  

Now a lot of that is because we hamstring our computers with our own biases (our opening books, our scoring algorithms in terms of piece values, etc.), but still, you would think by now that computers would have done something more substantial than just busting some known variations.  They haven't though. 

The rules of Chess do allow for a staggering number of moves, but the mechanics of the pieces also make for a very narrow range of truly viable moves.  We just have not applied a lot of thought or effort to quantifying what constitutes a viable move.  We've only really taken two tacks so far...teaching a computer to play like we do as best we can, but really quickly and precisely ;)...or by doing brute force calculations without any real rules or judgements involved at all...and not much in between those two extremes.  Our current methods involve seeding our computers with openings and various predetermined knowledge, and then asking them to apply brute force down certain promising branches.

What we have not done, is back our way into this by using the growing amount of played games stored to start analyzing new values for pieces and positions (kind of like the growing "effective" valuation of a passed pawn has been analyzed, though that would be a horribly simplified example), thus determining some hard numbers for the "guiding principles" chessplayers agree on, and then using that data to start determining what can or can not be culled from the full tree of moves.

If all of human chessplaying history has already culled the number of viable moves far, far, far more than 10^40, and brute force applied to various positions has not produced any wild breakthroughs (how many Chess books out there have some grandmaster saying "playing this computer over time taught me something completely new about Chess that I had never even conceived of being possible, or as a factor of consideration, before"?), it stands to reason that 10^40 is not the number of moves we need to be perusing to determine "best play".  It's a much smaller number, and where brute force calculation can really help us is in determining the exact set of criteria that allow us to cull the tree way, way down.

What a staggering amount of BS, after only 4 days on the site.  Give it a rest, please.

You're even worse.  At least @BTickler can compose a sentence.

Give it a rest, please.

Nobody is forcing you to read my posts ;).  You are free to skip them, or stop reading this thread entirely, if it really bothers you that much.

I will take your resorting to attacking the speaker rather than the argument as a compliment on my "BS".  

You're persuasive, in a cuddly sort of way.

Wrong end of the horse.

That "only difference" is a staggering chasm in terms of complexity.

Again, I don't think you truly appreciate this.

My last contribution to this, because obviously some posters here have a much better developped "output" organ than the "input" one.

Unlike what TheGrobe said or implied a couple of pages ago, there is a way to prune the tree of possibilities that does not include withcraft to determine which moves not to calculate. It's called alpha beta pruning (I strongly recommend the German wikipedia article for those who can read German, but the English version already gives a good overview). Most of the current tricks used in game playing software (Killer moves, negascout, etc.) are just made to improve the probability of such cut-offs.

This being said, it still does not change the order of magnitude of the calculation to do, which is not big, not huge, not extremely huge, but an immense deal of a lot very more superdoubleplushuge.

I threw out that reducing by a factor 1000 could be possible and a poster answered "yep, difference between 1 year and 1000 year". Nope, it's rather the difference between one billion times the current age of universe and " " "only" " " one million times it.

Alpha Beta pruning still leaves uncertainty, though, so can't be used to prop up a proof.  This is why engines have the horizon problem.

chess is solved, the topic is obsolete

my comment was an ironic insider joke, Luckyslevinsky ... but anyway, thanks for your answer

oh sorry

;-)

All of them

3800

No, yesterday I won 69 games of tic tac toe against a computer!

A computer that is programmed to play tic-tac-toe imperfectly ;)...

It's a game.The purpose is to entertain the chessplayer.

It seems that the human mind, has always to think about his next move.

And that"s why we play chess.

What's the solution ? Should it be that the first move always win? That is impossible. There are two players. If one move is responded on the "right" way, there is a "game". And there are almost endless ways of chess set.

The human mind is absolutely not prepared to oversee it.

If, a computer says there is a solution,there is stil a game.

 But I think it would always end in a way of draw.