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

It is certain that chess can be solved in the weak sense practically and it is very likely that this will happen.

However the weak solution is not of too much interest ( it is almost certain that the starting position is a draw ). Only a strong solution can answer interesting questions about the merits of certain openings and endgames.

If it turns out for example that the king's gambit accepted is a win for black: now, this would be a non trivial result.

I'm also interested in questions like whether white can make a move on the first move which loses ( does 1. f3 lose by force for example ).

Some creativity:

Put a disk like object into space that orbits the Sun with the same period as Earth and always shows one face towards the Sun and the other face towards outer space. The temperature of outer space is that of the cosmic microwave radiation: 2.7 K ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space ). Use this side to store information. This can be done two orders of magnitude more efficiently than on Earth because Landauer's limit depends on the temperature. Use the other side towards then Sun to collect the energy needed for storage.

Filter out illegal positions and account for basic symmetries. At least 3 orders of magnitude.

You are already have improved 5 orders of magnitude.

If on Earth it takes a year to store bits on the order of the upper bound of the number of legal chess positions, then if you improve upon this by 5 orders of magnitude and store them on a space device described above, the radius of the device should be ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+Earth%29%2F%282*10%5E5*pi%29%29 ):

28 km

It can be organized that the device is not too far away from Earth all year, so the speed of communication with the device is not limited by the light barrier in any significant way.

Is it not possible to built a 28 km radius space device? It is hard, but is it impossible?

"Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that ... mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

John F. Kennedy, commencement address at the American University, Washington D.C., June 10, 1963

What do we mean by "solved" ? Tic-tac-toe is already solved because it is comparatively simple , the variations and strategies are very very limited. For chess, only a limited subsets of situations can really be solved - exhaustively analysed and a definite result can be reached.

I, personally, think I#t's impossible to have your rooks, queen, bishops in the middle of the boeard when you have all your pawns still ont he 2nd rank.

If we achieve quantum computing, then yes. Otherwise probably not. Google D-Wave to see one of the leaders in this area.

D-Wave is an adiabatic quantum computer. It can be used to solve minimization problems, and chess is not really a minimization problem.

It is interesting that you can in most of the cases tell whether a position is legal or not just by looking at it, but there can be positions which are illegal for very subtle reasons, so telling how many legal positions there are exactly is indeed a very difficult problem.

Finding proof games or the lack thereof in case of arbitrary positions is a highly non trivial.

The kind of stuff we can do with a supercomputer that big should be more than just solving a game.  We could potentially make great strides in astronomy and physics with a machine like that.  Maybe even find a way to create artificial black holes and harness them as a clean source of energy (though Hawking Radiation may be a problem worth working out)

As for solving chess I believe there are at least dozens of correct solutions that would lead to a draw by force.  The Petrov, Berlin Defence, Najdorf, Paulsen, 4...Qb6!? Sicilian, 2.a3!? gambit, Smith-Morra, 2.c3 Sicilian, Cambridge Springs, Orthodox Defence, Queen's Indian, King's Indian, Bogo-Indian, Nimzo-Indian, QGA,QGD, Giuoco Piano, English (all kinds), Reti, Moscow Variation, Neo-Archangelsk, Trompowsky, Veresov, and many, many others should lead to a draw by force.

An example of why the legality of a position can be non trivial.

Can you tell by just looking at these positions, which is legal, which is not:

Position 1	Position 2

Position two is legal, position 1 is impossible :O

Both are impossible. How can black have doubled pawns but the adjacent pawns are still on 2nd/7th rank!?

You may know the solution to this particular puzzle, but this does not change the fact that it is difficult to have a general method which tells whether a position is legal or not. An average player will not be able to tell which is legal and for what reason, within a minute, this is for certain.

You are wrong. And there is nothing wrong about this. I also failed to solve this puzzle together with many others.

This just shows that telling whether a position is legal or not just by looking at it is not possible.

...h7-h6xg5xf4xe3

If you are interested this is the thread discussing the puzzle:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/more-puzzles/which-of-these-is-legal-2a?page=1

Gosh. When I try to be intelligent, someone has beaten me by 50 years. Thanks for the pointer.

The quotation marks around "refute [thermodynamics]" come from the fact that the second principle is, precisely, a principle. Entropy is bound to increase with a very high probability under some random-driven phenomena and there are some mathematical reasons for that; but it does not ban Maxwell demons (MD, ie operators that decrease entropy by acting on the microscopic level without creating more by their power supply).

IMO the second principle is merely a statement that the Maxwell demon is nowhere to be found - it is an hypothesis, not a proof. If we create our MD then the hypothesis can be thrown out for the physics of this part of the world, which does not mean the laws of physics have changed one bit.

I think that if you have found it out by yourself that storing bits is related to the Maxwell demon, then you deserve thumbs up:

I knew that when you destroy information, heat is released, but had no clue about the connection to the second law.

Once I thought that I have found an interesting link between topology and differential forms. I turned out that Poincaré exactly described this connection more than 100 years ago... So I can be beautiful but clever not.

How, in the world, do we know that ?!

Black king is in check by both rook and bishop.