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

Well, first you have to define stuff.

Even if some perfect sequences (ideal moves by both players) are found that wouldn't be relevant to human play as there would have to be a rule to stop that happening in tournament play so that it would be a properly competed contest.  I can understand using computers to find out ways to improve human play, but to use them to find a 'solution' to or kill chess I find pretty pointless.

Depends what one means. Does it mean that computers will be able to play perfectly or does it mean that humans will be able to play perfectly. Does it entail that draws are a sure thing? If that ever happens then surely you can switch to 960.

Stop babbling.  There is an established definition for "solving" games.  If you don't like it, this is not the thread for you.

I think comments in other threads and perhaps in this thread have taken an alarmist tone implying that once the game is "solved" nobody will want to play it. I can't remeber 20 some odd moves in esalished opening lines. How is the average player going to memorize multiple sequences when playing over the board? That's all I'm saying. Will it really affect 2 people who sit down to play?

Doesn't it have to do w/ the beginning board setup ? I mean, both sides are equal & opposite, right ? That in itself constitutes an insolvable draw. Okay....so, white has the 1st move. Great. It has a squeaky advantage - but not enuf to force a win. Black now counters and somewhat equates the board. And on & on & on we play. The same can be said w/ Chess960. Now, Antichess has been solved - but I dismiss that one.

But then, 'cuz it's so rich ?....I hold a 2% reservation. I mean, it's not tic tac toe....which is super simple - and a draw.

Not really. Even if we ignore the physical limitations that make a solution impossible, and say someone somehow totally alters the known laws of physics to do it, it would more or less be like having The One True Chess Engine. Instead of comparing people's play to Stockfish or whatever, they would compare it to The Solution. 

People can only memorize so much, so there is unlikely to be humans playing perfectly just as there are presently no humans playing as well as the best engines. The Solution would probably advance theory quite a bit, but it still would be a matter of trying to find positions you know more about than your opponent. 

Even if a computer decides that d4 is a win by white with perfect play, no human can memorize the entire decision tree covering black's possible responses. So black would be trying to steer the game off white's book without giving up too much. White might even try another opening move once in a while if he suspects black is lacking in e4 prep, or at least so the threat is there and his opponents can't spend all their time obsessing over d4 variations. Chess would still be played because humans are finite. 

But that's what my point was.  It doesn't.  Therefore it's all pretty useless in most circumstances except in so far as how it can help people play better.  Beyond that 'solving' a game may give mathematicians great excitement but for everybody else they won't really care.  Playing isn't about perfection it's more about learning/development, struggle, successes and loses.  About competition not predictability. 

Many would memorize the perfect game (or a perfect game if multiple lines deliver the same result). The irony in this would be that your strongest move against such a line would be a suboptimal move that deviates from your opponents memorized lines.

I think much would be learned in the journey as well. Opening lines might be demonstrated to be busted, new ideas would emerge in existing lines -- indeed this is already underway. The journey still has value even if the destination is ultimately unreachable; the true value is not in the destination after all....

Where two computers, both of whom can beat any human at any time, even every game, play each other only to a draw.  

Its a valid question you posed, and I should have been clearer.  

Each computer is so good, and sees every possible move and outcome, that they make the best or perfect move, one to the other, to a draw. 

Or...

That white wins EVERY time but only due to having the first move advantage!  

Then they reverse, and white wins.  

Would this "solve" chess?

I have another question:  Will we ever again see a Grandmaster beat a top chess computer system, alone, on his own strength?

Even that definition is a little too loose.

Where an algorithm can play, from the starting position (or, ideally, from any position) and never worsen its outcome no matter how strong the moves from its opponent. Two such algorithms pitted against each other, would play a perfect game and the result would tell us what the "solution" to chess is (win/lose/draw for white).

So far the only such algorithm that has been identified and discussed which can demonstrably meet these criteria is a full 32 man tablebase.

More precisely, the security of the transmission of one random chain of character (the key) is guaranteed. From that you encrypt the message using said chain and it is impossible to decipher the message without the (single-use, longer-than-message) key. The key cannot be intercepted climbing-up-the-telegraph-pole-style without being detected (and hence hinting to discard the key and refrain from transmission), but the emission/reception devices could still be vulnerable.

Methinks some Swiss bankers already had a prototype up and running?

By the way, we in the West are fairly lucky that this came before quantum computers hacked RSA (which, according to some definition of "hacked", they already did).

I beg to differ on this one. There is no need to alter the known laws of physics to solve chess. It is perfectly within the known laws of physics, the only thing is that it is extremely difficult in a practical sense.

If someone claimed that a memory can be built on Earth that has a storage capacity which exceeds the information content of the observable universe: now, this would be against the known laws of physics. But this is not necessary: the number of legal positions ( as I said ) in the worst case is on the order of the number of water molecules in all of Earth's oceans, which is pretty frightening, but storing all those positions on Earth has nothing against the known laws of physics.

The information content of the observable universe is estimated at a maximum of 10^123 bits based on the holographic principle:

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35920/maximum-possible-information-in-the-universe

Credible estimates put an upper bound on the number of legal chess positions at 10^46:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/138133/what-proportion-of-chess-positions-that-one-can-set-up-on-the-board-using-a-leg

I have a blog post in which I have tried to address the solvability of chess in terms of quantum computing:

http://www.chess.com/blog/watcha/limits-of-quantum-computing-in-solving-chess

Hehe, and I thought I was being overly sceptical in the global warming thread! I am convinced that chess is a draw in a similar way to how I can be basically certain that I can evaluate correctly any rook up endgame with pawns someone gives to me.

I would say this sort of inference becomes much easier with chess experience and knowledge, although that may commit me to be more trusting of the scientists too :p

I don't feel a need to dig stuff up just to convince a person, but regarding what GMs say I've heard a lot of assured comments on topics including this, and they seem pretty damn certain. And if there was instead a bet of say 10000 dollars that I wouldn't find a specific quote, now I would be much more motivated to find a quote because I am extremely confident I would find one :) But that in itself is not such a huge proof of anything -- titled players are probably overly sure of themselves a lot of times.

In my view, the chances of chess being a draw are over 99%. Unfortunately I can only justify this abductively (maybe inductively) -- and doing so would be a large tangent I don't momentarily want to get into. But I think there are some things out there that are able to convey what they are on the surface (perhaps provided the perceiver is knowledgeable in some specific way, though not necessarily) -- for example a person acting really insane very consistently, I am bound to think (confidently) there is something wrong with their brain even if I can't see an in-depth brain scan. It would be a waste to not exploit such instances simply because it would be more precise to tie everything to a specific neuron(s) in their head.

I, as someone who has seen some of my posts might guess, am very sympathetic to the idea that things that look obvious can be wrong. And I post pretty much any view only after considering that sceptical perspective.

I think this is the way a layperson should grasp the intuition behind the limits of computation:

1) Information is energy

2) Energy is gravity

3) Gravity is black holes

Information is energy: this thought already occured to von Neumann in the beginning of the information age. Neumann's speculation was that If you erase a bit of information heat must be released. What an ingenious insight! And it turns out to be true: physicists by now have actually measured the heat released when erasing a single bit of information. This insight has led to the research in reversible gates, which do not erase information ( Toffoli gates ). While in classical computing you have the luxury of using irreversible gates and lose information and therefore heat, it turns out that quantum computation can only be done in a reversible way. Think about that. No information can be lost in quantum mechanics.

Energy is gravity. This should be trivial by now ( it was not trivial before Einstein ). Since Einstein every child knows that 'E' is equal to 'm' times 'c' squared ( where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light ). But even 'c' squared is unnecessary: if you count in natural units where the speed of light is 1, the equation reads: E = m. Simple as that. Even Newton knew that mass has gravity. If mass is equal to energy than energy has gravity also.

Gravity is black holes. This is a consequence of Einstein's theory which Einstein himself did not like. Nevertheless it follows from his equations and he admitted this. If you keep packing mass and energy in a limited amount of space sooner or later the whole thing will collapse into a black hole. No surprise that the ultimate information content that can be contained in a finite amount of space has come from the study of black holes ( black hole thermodynamics, to be precise ).

Since information is energy, energy is gravity, gravity is black holes, storage of information has ultimate limits due to black holes.

But not only that: also the speed of processing of information has limits due to energy. In order to perform computation you need a system which can alter its state to represent the change in the state of computation ( all computation can be viewed as a series of states of a Turing machine in which state transitions are dictated by a certain fixed rule ). It turns out that in quantum mechanics the speed at which you can develop a system from one state to an other clearly distinguishable state depends on the average energy of the system. The faster transitions you need the higher the average energy of the system should be. There is a limit to computational speed per unit energy ( Margolus-Levitin theorem ). Again, you can't build a system of arbitrarily high computational power because it will have so much energy that it would collapse into a black hole.

I think chess is solved in the fact that it is unsolved.

To remind everyone of a very suitable quote:

"When an old, distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is very likely right. When the same old, distinguished scientist says something is impossible, he is on the other hand very likely wrong."

Like 20 years ago: there was a serious debate whether computers would ever be able to beat humans in chess. There was a small but vocal minority who went against common sense and the majority opinion by claiming that one day computers eventually might beat even the best human players...

Chess will be solved.

The point made by LongIslandMark is an important one. Does chess have a structure ( topological or otherwise )?

Topology is a fascinating subject. Since string theory - which is the only real hope to unify the theory of gravity and quantum mechanics - relies heavily on topology, this subject is attaining real physical importance nowadays. It turns out that many things in physics and mathematics are dictated by simple topological facts. A very simple example is Platonic solids: you might think that the fact that there are only five Platonic solids is a consequence of some complicated trigonometrical relations in connection with how the faces and edges of such solids are laid out in space. The surprising insight is that it has nothing to do with trigonometry. The number of Platonic solids is a consequence of simple topological facts. You can distort these solids as much as you want, you can draw them on the surface of a balloon. As far as they have the same number of edges on each face, and all the faces meat an other face along all edges, there are only five ways you can do this topologically.

The way I would put whether chess has a structure is this:

Is chess computationally reducible?

Computational reducibility is a phrase used by Stephen Wolfram in his book A New Kind of Science ( https://www.wolframscience.com/ ).

A like this concept because it is a very powerful one. Wolfram calls a system computationally reducible if you can predict its future behaviour without playing out its evolution step by step. There is some formula in which you can plug in the state of the system now and it will spit out the state of the system later, and the computation required by the formula takes less effort than playing out the evolution of the system step by step.

In the case of chess computational reducibility would mean plugging in the position of the pieces into a formula which spits out the outcome of the game from this posititon.

In fact chess engines make an attempt at such a formula ( which is called the evaluation function ). The problem with this formula that it is just a heuristic: it works 99 % of the time, but there is always this 1 % when it fails, when a deeper brute search could have found a move which leads to a better position. There are mates in several hundred moves which no engine can find and their evaluation function is no help to them in those cases.

So I have no other choice but to be skeptical about chess being computationally reducible until proven otherwise.

Ed Witten, leading string theorist ( a physicist ), who was never trained as a mathematician, has won Fields Medal ( International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics ) for his work in topology.

Food for thought.