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

This is a simple position:

Would you believe that not only it is a mate in 261, but there is only one winning move and all other moves draw.

These kind of secrets are unreachable through usual human reasoning ( and even engines fail to find the winning move ). Only exhaustive tree search can bring such hidden secrets to the surface.

Ignorance and arrogance is a horrible combination.

Maybe not XX Man, but we hafta prove otherwise - and we haven't....yet. So, we haven't. A person's Intuition should tell one chess is a theoretical draw. We're still trying to make it a law - we're having trouble and pinning our hopes on a brain box. Yes, white may get an advantage....but not enuf to register a +1.

How many games did they play?

What we have going for us everyone ** is we can be pretty certain that chess has a finite # of moves available. Which will help the brute force of our toodlie tower - in tyme. It may be (Avagadro's #)^3....but I think it's out there....somewhere in lala land. 

An engine that cannot beat itself cannot find its own flaws, so either it cannot solve chess or is already perfect and has solved chess. Trophy anyone ?

This is very phylosphic. I'm out.

I think chess is much like lotthery.

U always lose.

I recommend falling out of the other side of the bed tomorrow morning, Benz!

To put this more simply: a serious effort that gets close to solving chess will cause the world to collapse upon itself and suck everything nearby into the abyss.

I have seen Rybka beat itself, especialy in semi-closed positions.  Of course exisiting engines can beat themselves!  Even the mighty Stockfish beats itself.

Since engines don't play perfectly in complex positions (i.e., the vast majority of positions), they must by definition sometimes play objectively inferior moves.  This type of failure will always be a possibility unless a tablebase position is reached before the engine reaches it's calculation horizon.

Looks like chess will never be solved, total bummer. Still, life is awesome nonetheless.

We have a seven men tablebase now and we have not collapsed upon ourselves.

May be we can risk building an eight men tablebase without going into the abyss.

No opening book, 5-piece Nalimov TB, fixed depth of 14 ply.

Engines don't perform exhaustive tree search. What you see displayed as 'depth' is that of an imperfect search. No exhaustive search deeper than 12-14 plies can be performed by today's engines which is nothing.

In an average chess position there are 35 legal moves. If you want to apply the minimax/negamax algorythm to the tree of chess you need the following time as a function of depth ( measured in plies ):

On my laptop Houdini 3 runs at an analysis speed of 3500 kN/s, Deep Blue analyzed at a speed of 200 MN/s which even by today's standards is a high speed since at TCEC, the site where top engines compete for the unofficial word championship title running on high end commercially available hardware the typical analysis speed is around 50 MN/s.

It can be seen from the table that the realistic ( that is: which can be achieved in a couple of minutes ) depth that can be reached by minimax/negamax is 6 plies on a laptop and 7 plies on Deep Blue.

Minimax/negamax analyzes every single position which can arise in a given number of plies therefore all positions will have correct value within the tree. However this is not necessary since you can apply a trick. If a move is refuted minimax/negamax will still search on to find out whether it can be refuted even more. However you can stop the search of the refuted move immediately without examining further the possible responses to this move. In this way you can cut branches of the tree. You can do the same thing at every level recursively. This algorythm is called alphabeta. With correct ordering of the moves ( using evaluations of shallow searches for ordering in deeper searches ) enough cuts can be made to reach twice the depth by alphabeta that can be achieved by minimax/negamax. Since alphabeta does not lose relevant information there is no risk that you cut a meaningful branch of the tree. Alphabeta will always find the same best move which would have been found by minimax/negamax.

By applying alphabeta you can reach a search depth of 12 plies on a laptop and 14 plies on Deep Blue. This means that by today's standards a perfect search can only be performed to a depth of 12 - 14 plies depending on the hardware. Any search deeper than this runs the risk of cutting meaningful branches off the tree. Since today's engines can reach a depth of at least 20 plies in a couple of minutes it is evident that these searches can not be perfect. Any move which yields visible results beyond 12 - 14 plies can fall victim to pruning.

None of this thread really matters anyway. In a couple of hundred years, a giant asteroid will smash into the Earth and split the planet apart.

But all too common.

By that time human colonies on Mars will have a 20 men endgame tablebase.

OK, next year then.

Venus watcha, Venus........