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

kennyDurant  to answer your question only about 3. But that is not where I got my information.  For example I know we traveled to the moon and back but I have not asked very many people if we traveled to the moon and back. [I have asked some]  

Your question seems to imply that you do not think the vast majority of grandmasters believe chess is a draw.  Is that your point?

FirebrandX  So you are saying in centaur cc Black can always force a draw?

So, if centaur chess has advanced this far what does this have to say for correspondence chess where chess engines are allowed?

Also do you agree that the fact that Black can always force a draw is a very strong indication that chess is a draw with best play but not a 100% proof?

I think this is an NP problem and therefore unsolvable. 

But but P vs. NP conjecture has not purrrroven NP to be solvable or not solvable yet.  You can win a million dollars if you purrrove one way or another.

Not that I know anything, my mommy's a math furrrreak and I'm just her kitty >^.^< <3's

What is an "NP problem" and what do you mean by "solvable"  ?

All NP problems are solvable (irregardless of whether P=NP or not).

Besides, we know chess is solvable simply because there exists an algorithm to solve it (e.g. exhaustively traverse the game tree).  Whether it is "practically" solvable is a different question.

two_dollars  Is there a way to solve chess without exhaustively transversing the game tree? 

It is my understanding that to completely transverse the game tree could not be done in the next many billions of years and our sun will explode and the stars turned to dust and still no complete transverse of the game tree.

Am I correct or not? Is a 32 piece table base in our future?

Quite possibly.  For example, the game of Hex has been solved as a win for the first player, and the proof does not require a complete Hex tablebase nor a full exploration of the game tree.  It is possible that Chess could similarly be solved in some other way - it is just that nobody has figured out how to do so.

P = polynomial, NP = non-polynomial.

When you take a problem whose complexity depends on a number n and an algorithm to solve it, you can define some order of magnitude of the time of calculation needed to do so.

For instance, taking "create a n-piece tablebase" with a brute-force approach makes it NP, ie the time you will spend will be proportional to exp(n) (which is much bigger than any polynomial for large values of n). Whereas "sort out a n-element list" can easily be done in a time of order n^2, ie polynomial - for instance, just run along the list, switch any two elements that are not ordered, and repeat until the list is ordered.

As far as I remember (I might be wrong about the vocabulary), the fact that a problem is said to be "NP" does not mean there is no way to solve it in polynomial time, it means such a way has not been found yet. Similar example in the case of sorting the list : some clever way to do it allows to decrease from n^2 operations to n log(n), so it's not really n^2. A couple of years ago, people found a deterministic (ie with no error possible) test of primality (ie some algorithm to test if a huge number is prime) in n^12 instead of exponential before.

There is some conjecture around, "P=NP", which says that all NP problems can actually be solved in polynomial time. As far as I know, none is seriously believing this could be true. There are also a few NP problems known for being "NP-complete" which means that if you can solve one of them in polynomial time then you can adapt the solution for any other NP problem.

Disclaimer : my math courses are far away, I might have got some details wrong.

I believe someday there will be "Doomday for Chess".

It will proved that Chess is either a draw or not a draw.

The good news is it is 2 centuries away, that is at leat 4 generation. Don't worry, you can still play chess now and spend a lot of time.

It is not proved chess is a draw but that does not matter to the vast majority of grandmasters who believe chess is a draw. Their practical play is affected by their assumption that chess is a draw so that information [they assume chess is a draw] is valuable to them.

One of the things that makes a grandmaster better than most of us is his accumulation of knowledge. To give an example how to win with rook and king vs king is one bit of knowledge. The average class A player may have 2000 [this is only a guess] bits of knowledge.  A master, maybe 5000 such bits of knowledge  [such as what to do in this very particular type of position] and a grand master could have 10,000 or more such little bits of knowledge. So his knowledge/belief that you cannot really force a win from the starting position is valuable to him as when he is playing another grandmaster he will not recklessly play for a win except under unusal circumstances. This is one reason in the recent USCF US Open there were so many draws in the last round and many tied for first place.

"We went to the moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times?" Charlie Duke

Brilliant documentary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9d9-pHZzIE

The standard formulation of P vs NP is either (1) P is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a deterministic Turing machine (roughly, an idealized computer that runs its program serially, one step after the other), while NP is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a non-deterministic Turing machine (roughly, an idealized computer that can run various parts of its program in parallel); (2) P is the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time on a deterministic machine, while NP is the class of problems such that solutions can be verified in polynomial time on a deterministic Turing machine. These are actually equivalent formulations, which is not obvious at first glance.

Irontiger is correct in saying that a problem being in NP doesn't mean that it's not in P. P is a subset of NP, but it's not known whether it's a proper subset or not (i.e., not known whether there are some problems in NP that aren't in P), which is what the whole P=NP question is about.

It's not true that nobody seriously believes that P=NP could be true. The wikipedia article on P vs NP states that in a poll of 100 researchers in 2002, 9 believed that P=NP will turn out to be true. I'm quite surprised that there were that many, but the article above gives some opinions of researchers on why they are less confident than others that P!=NP.

tl;dr: the P=NP problem is the question of whether solvable problems of a certain difficulty which we can "quickly" verify the answer to can also always be solved quickly in principle (even if we can't figure out how to do so). Most experts believe that P does not equal NP, but some believe they are equal. Scott Aronson has a nice friendly blog overview of the P vs. NP problem.

Now I want to write a Sci-Fi short story about this involving the death of our sun. 

Please do!

Computing power wise yes I believe Chess will be solved sooner than later. So we might see more computer programmers becoming second to GM's pretty soon. When that happens some Openings might be banned in some tournaments.