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

All I'm hearing right now is that someone owes me a lot of sacrifices.

yeah i was alluding to creation though i admiyt that it may be abit hyperbolic to your taste.

But we do have the ability to create new species now.But only in the form of  single celled organisms

A tad less sexy than flying pigs, for sure. Hard to play like you are god with that.

Yes, incredible breakthroughs have happened. Does that mean other things will happen ? Yes. Does that mean all the incredible stuff you can think of will happen ? Nope.

I rather doubt it will be fully solved ever, in a theoretical sense.

But in a practical sense, engines will become so good that it may as well have been solved. The difference between one of the engines we can possibly make and one that could solve the entire game would be miniscule, maybe a difference of one game in a hundred.

In a technical sense, there is 2 raised to the power of 64 possiblitues for the first 4 moves. This means that there are more moves and variations than the number of know atoms in the universe.

Next time, just don't make up the numbers to avoid a post like this one.

1- Your 2^64 estimate is way off : taking the first two half-moves is 400 (20 possibilities for each player, the pieces do not interact), the second pair of half-moves has a different number of possibilities for each but a rough estimate of 30 moves pere player makes a total of 400*900 = 36 000 moves << 2^64 (roughly 2.10^18)

Taking the first eight half-moves by a similar reasoning of 50 possible half moves each time is 50^8 = 4.10^13 << 10^18 < 2^64.

2-The estimated number of atoms in the universe is much bigger than 2^64. From memory, it is around 10^80, but I have no source. The observable universe has around 10^23 stars (source wiki). Provided each of those stars is made up of more than one atom (!) it is already more than 2^64.

I will be able to remember it!

Once I get my bionic implants instaled in my brain, that is.

What about quantum computers? I remember when home computers became available they were only 16 kb of memory or less! Now it is not unusual for a home computer to have 16 gb! Quantum computers are now becoming available that are thousands of times more powerful than home computers! Maybe they--when I say "they" I mean whoever is responsible for the sudden upsurge of technology, "they" may be very smart humans or maybe even space aliens--will eventually come up with multi-dimensional quantum computers. Who can tell what they will be capable of! Keep in mind that Edgar Allen Poe once wrote an essay stating that "The Turk" which was a "chess playing" machine was a phoney since it is, of course, impossible for a machine to be able to play chess. Boy was he wrong!

Many of the strongest available computers are working 24/7 to generate the seven piece tablebases. This project should be completed in five to ten years.

chess problems have been solved..so, there is always a solution..in fact, chess games end in a win, lose or draw..the result is itself the solution..therefore, chess has been solved..lol..

Are the sevens not yet done?  I was under the impression they were.

It seems that my news is old. They were completed last August. http://chessok.com/?page_id=27966

I hope nobody loses any sleep over "the solution" below--

"So what have we found in the tablebases?

The most popular question would probably be about the longest mating position for 7 pieces. Well, we actually found the answer a couple of years ago, when we have just started developing the algorithm.

In this position, Black is to move, and he will be mated in (only) 545 moves!!  You can download the solution in .pgn and check it in your chess program. One can be sure that without the 7-piece endgame tablebases, no human player could win against a modern computer program in this position. And a chess program armed with them could probably win against any opponent for either side."

Nonetheless, each additional piece requires an order of magnitude more work and space, and we're a long way from 32.

I tried loading that pgn file in to Fritz 13,  and it stops after move 301.

Sounds like your assuming one universe. :)

I do know the growth rate of technology is logarithmic and not linear, per units of time.

Good quesion/proposition to ponder never-the-less...

Seriously, if we ever get to a point where we are consuming any and all resources in the universe to answer an almost intractably complex computational question, and this is the question we choose then we've utterly failed to live up to our potential as a technologically advanced species.

There is a theory out there that this universe is just a simulation being run in some other universe.  A problem such as chess would be trivial in such a case.  I know that there is not only no proof of such an idea, but also no evidence that it could possibly be true.  However, to say that a ground-breaking discovery of that magnitude will never happen is, imo, foolish.  And anyone saying that chess will flat-out never be solved is basically saying that.

It depends if people have the insentive to make computers look at every possible move set or not.

5-10 years may be optimistic for eight pieces. Imagine some of the 2-6 situations KQ vs KNNPPP