Will Chess ever be "solved"?

Magnus Carlsen can teach a computer analysis?

chess will never be solved because of novelties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess

"These limitations imply, for example, that no computer, however constructed, will ever be able to examine the entire tree of possible move sequences of the game of chess."

[consulted on 2019-07-10]

Yes, a computer will be someday be able to "solve" chess.

But it will not have any impact on the popularity of the game. Why would it? Most people will not be playing against that supercomputer. 

Old men in coffee shops around the world will still spend hours hunched over chess sets.

That teenaged girl in Chicago or Cleveland will still become nervous at the thought of playing second board for her high school for the first time.

Kids in Zambia or the Philippines or Bolivia will still read books about Tal and Alekhine and Lasker and try to emulate them on the chessboard.

Chess will go on. 

For me, chess playing computers are only an intellectual curiosity. I play against my little Radio Shack chess computer, but its just a fun way to sharpen my game.

Quantum computing 

@blueemu and @Ghostqiuyu have covered the basics of the problem.

The answer seems to be no. At least not in the foreseeable future.

Interesting that AlphaZero has rediscovered Mikhail Tal's style of chess. Tal beat Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960. Botvinnik was an electrical engineer with an interest in developing chess playing algorithms.

Yes, the power of 120 variations is a brute force uninformed view. 

The solution to chess is based on the 'perfect play' strategy, but this hasn't been found explicitly (compiled programs like stockfish) or implicitly (neural networks - alpha0, leela, mu0 etc)

It hasn't been done yet, but by March 2021 man should have found it along with a CURE (not vaccine) for Corona.

Its just a numbers game.

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That is not say you can apply the same misguided brute force mentality to solve for the perfectly play strategy.

The two concepts that are of any value in chess are 1. Tension 2. Tempo.

Successful opening, middle and endgame position plays either use tempo (a turn) to create an insurmountable attacking tension among varying pieces that has no winning response (regardless of variation explored) or an accumulation of tempo that when released (at tempo holders discretion / or 'forced' by opponent i.e. blunder relative to perfect play - imperfect response) will result in at worst a draw.

Perfect play can be assumed/perceived to be played by an engine that beats (or at worst draws with) all others, And can never beat itself - a forced draw is a necessity.

Those are some guidelines of what to expect of the solution to chess should it come in the form of a chess engine.

Perfect play may come in the form a mathematical theorem, if so, why did it take all you nerds so long to crack it?

Moor's law is dead

That just means a computer won't be able to store all the positions at the same time.

In principle, it should still be possible a quantum computer to "solve" chess in the sense of determining whether it is a win for white, a draw, or a win for black.  Whether we'll ever get practical quantum computers is a different issue.

The popularity loss already happened when Kasparov lost to IBM's program.  Nobody who plays chess these days cares that they aren't the best in the world.

We can't know if Chess will ever be "solved", anyway just in case I 've created a considerable upgrading of the game, called GrandChess.

It works with the same rules as Chess, but on three dimensions instead of two. The playing field is made of 512 boxes instead of 64 squares and each player has 128 grandpieces instead of 16 pieces. In Chess you can reach 400 different positions after White and Black's first move. In GrandChess the positions are 40,000 only after first move. 

This is my gift for free to all Chess enthusiasts. So if Chess will ever be solved you can go on playing GrandChess while the engines are going to have indeed a hard time solving this one too.

Here are some explanatory videos, but the rules are the same as Chess.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOeIXNTxzW_IC1T1Mlxolew/videos

Waiting for good programmers who can make it onto online platforms and maybe we will play it on Chess.com too.

Computers will laugh at us like when we see someone do the wrong tic tac toe move.

I don't know.

Maybe if machines become super intelligent and take control of the world.

Then there will last no popularity for chess.

Yes. At least I hope

If a computer could detect whether a move was absolutely losing, and stop calculating it, it would probably reduce the number of possible positions to calculate by a lot. In addition, some positions can repeat (eg first nf3 then ng2 would have the same position as nc3 then nb2)

A mathematical proof can quickly eliminate 1/2 of all possible moves. Candidate moves only need exploring. The tree becomes greatly reduced- but staggering numbers remain. Modern comps or those for seen in the near will not posses enough computing power. 20 years from now - nobody can say for certain . Neural programs learn from information. The Black side receives information 1st when White moves. An advantage. Perhaps it is Black with the advantage.

Yes

Chess will probably be solved being a draw before the end of this century. Just the same way as the simpler checkers was solved to be a draw. First there will be a table base with a sufficient number of men. We now have 7 men table bases. Per decade 1 man is added. Computers get faster and clustered, memory gets larger and distributed. Then a calculation from the initial position towards the table base solves the game.