Will Chess ever be "solved"?

Ermm, no...that one's already done and gone.

The British may arguably have done it better (though they also caused more damage and did less good), but as any good Diplomacy player will tell you, the advantage of having an island as the seat of your empire cannot be overstated.  And one with natural cliffs for walls and a narrow channel as a natural moat to boot.

I remember a game called diplomacy and may have played it once or twice. Can't remember much about it. Round about 1974 I played a lot of Risk! Even made my own board with an extra continent.

This is the version I have:

The elevation key is funny because it has absolutely zero effect on gameplay.

You would remember. The game feature of Diplomacy is that the only way to win is to cooperate, but there can only be a single winner.

You must stab your teammates in the back or else. 

My advice on both Diplomacy and Risk. If you are playing for the first time with a group of people you will be playing again and again, do not win. If you do, and they are any good, you will never win again.

Yes.

Everything is solved.

Just remains to be discovered.

Naturally, something’s may forever remain beyond known boundary. Suggest a better question is can rather than will chess be solved.

Chess is limited by an 8X8 board. There simply is the possibility of a supercomputer being able to solve chess given the fact that it is limited.

Checkers took 16 years to solve with 200 processors from 1989 to 2005.
To solve chess in the same time the estimated 3.8 million years need to be reduced by 10^6 only.
The paper cited mentions quantum computing to be 10^14 faster than a supercomputer.
So solving chess is within reach once quantum computing matures.
In TCEC already now you can see how many times the engines hit their 7 men table base.
With more powerful engines and table bases of more men the table base hits only go up.

Nobody claims chess can be solved right now: the technology to do that is not yet sufficiently advanced. The expectation is, that chess can be solved this century.
There are already quantum desktop computers commercially available.
Here is an update on the progress on 8 men table bases

http://arves.org/arves/index.php/en/latestnews/latest-news/2-ongecategoriseerd/1509-8-men-tablebase-first-explorations 

Even 8 men is not yet sufficient for a full forward calculation towards it.

The 3.8 million years was assuming 290,000 supercomputers running at 17 PetaFLOPS each, at a cost of $80 trillion dollars .  The less ridiculous estimate of somebody tossing a $273 million dollar supercomputer at the problem requires over 3^24 years to do it.

Quantum computers are faster for certain applications only.  There are many things they cannot process at all as things stand.

Where did you see this expectation that chess can be solved this century?

I really don’t think people get big numbers. 10^10 vs 10^20 vs doesn’t look like a huge difference to most of the little hamster brains running around the forum, but that’s zeroes being added to the end, not doubling. The difference between 10^67 vs 10^78 might not look big to a little pea brain, but it’s (with generous rounding) the difference between number of atoms in our Milky Way galaxy vs number of atoms in the whole frickin observable universe and it’s 225 billion or so galaxies.

Every time you add one to the tablebase, you are adding two or three zeroes to the end of the number of the number of positions.

The numbers just get ridiculous. And do you think that any entity is going to waste valuable computer time calculating any of this when they could be solving real problems or making actual money? Don’t be ridiculous. Ain’t gonna happen. I’d be shocked if we get to even a double digit tablebase before I’m approaching retirement age.

The difference between 10^67 and 10^78 is 10^11. The paper I quoted #90 states a quantum computer to be 10^14 times faster than a supercomputer.

It is absolutely unnecessary to look at all 10^47 positions. The 2-prong approach eliminates most of that. See the figure at the bottom of the paper I quoted #51.

FLOPS are irrelevant. Solving chess involves boolean operations, no floating point operations. Boolean operations are much faster.

Supercomputer time is now expended on searching for Mersenne Primes or digits of pi. After a supercomputer is built it needs testing and work on such a problem is a good way to test it.

Of course present day supercomputers are too expensive to cluster them to solve chess. But ENIACs were in 1940 likewise too expensive to cluster them to solve checkers.

Quantum desktop computers are already available commercially, but they are just toys, like the first microprocessors were around 1980.

Because women don’t know math? What wrong with you?

Ummm...your profile is just as fake.  Joined in March, from Zimbabwe, a self disparaging tagline and a purposefully goofy avatar designed to make a certain type of person look dumb (heinous, by the way)...vocabulary/colloquialisms mismatch, narrative vs. displayed knowledge mismatch...

Maybe you thought you were being subtle?

The Rubiks cube is solved, but has it lost popularity? No, people try to solve it faster. So, my guess is, if the computers manage to "solve" chess, which I'm not sure will happen, bullet chess will become more popular, so it will only have an effect on the popularity of the time controls, and not the game itself. P.S - it will be close to impossible to study all the lines that the computer gives, because there will be more than a thousand.

#113
The popularity of Connect Four, Nine Men's Morris, and checkers faded away after they were solved.

Well, I sure hope chess won't suffer the same fate.

#115
Chess will probably await the same fate after it is solved. If it is known for sure that e.g. the Berlin and the Grünfeld guarantee a draw then most of the appeal will be gone.

I don't think anyone expects the Berlin or Grunfeld to be anything else but a draw. I fail to see how that would change anything. However, sidelines and variations that are theoretically uncertain would be affected. Some would be vindicated and some would be killed.

@btickler

...What? Hahahahaha are you insinuating that the use of my profile picture is racist? It's a popular meme of an NBA player (you literally don't even know who it is, so hilarious) making a confused face, and I'm using it because it's personally funny to me for opponents to see whether they win or lose after a blunder. This is how you know you're out of touch, old man... And no one cares about what flag people use, Zimbabwe is simply my favorite country, excluding my own. To suggest that one is a "fake profile" because they put a random flag and profile picture is just incredible to behold, not to mention your abhorrent use of buzzwords to sound smart. Stick to your lane, bud. You made an absolute fool of yourself butting in, not even talking about the original topic at hand trying to white knight a random dude posing as a woman. Cringe!