Will computers ever solve chess?

I went to page 60 and this is what you said:
"As if you had anything to impart...okay, well, I guess I will stop trying to convince any of the 'ignorance is bliss' crowd. You'll have the whole rest of your lives to realize you are wrong, since chess won't be solved ".

and this:

"He's proven it before, which you may or may not know, suspiciously Tuna-like poster...in any case, if you find the thread entertaining, perhaps you should read all 60 pages so you can post some kind of informed opinion. Unless you genuinely prefer w**king in the corner watching".

Not much there, not much here.😕

So you interpret a range of 60-80 as simply 60.  I guess that is par for the course.

Try page 70.  That post is not at all the sum of the numbers I have put in front of you that you can't answer, but it's a good one.  The reason I said 60-80 is because a good chunk of posts are in there with hard numbers.  However, there are also similar posts back in the 20s, etc.

P.S. I brought up your prime number back on page 58 .  You're welcome for the info you are trying to use erroneously against me.

Your posts on page 70 were also refuted. If you believe you have such a landmark conclusion that chess can never be solved, I suggest you post your findings at a math or computer science forum (such as here), don't be rude to your would-be colleagues, and don't add unnecessary hyperbole.

It will be interesting to see if you can have a worthwhile discussion among people who talk math.🤠

If those numbers were already refuted here, then where would I find that, pray tell?

There are zero threads with any significant info on solving chess on the forum you linked, and I don't plan on joining any more forums to go digging, thanks.  You can do your own homework.  I know you Google around and read a bunch of stuff...but again, you don't understand any of it so it's pointless.  As for a landmark conclusion for the scientific community, I never claimed such.  What I did claim is that your posts and some others' posts on this thread are complete garbage.  The funny part is that normally someone like you would actually Google up an answer and try to refute me...but in your case you're not even capable of recognizing a refutation even if you saw it.  Ergo, you point me over there.

If you never made a meaningful statement, then what is there to refute?😛

lol!😻

Quantum computers don't work like that.  They check all permutations at the same time.  A quantum computer with enough power solves chess instantly.  The problem is, "enough power" (meaning enough quantum bits, properly organized and powered) is still on the same order as has already been discussed.  If you could convert a really substantial chunk of the whole moon into one, you'd be in the right ballpark.  I say "no way, ever."  But I don't mean impossible in the mathematical sense.  And maybe in 10,000 years, when humans have expanded across the galaxy, and quantum computers the size of the moon can be set up in alternate-universe-as-a-service server farms--it might be done after all.

If it takes a scientific paper  with a landmark conclusion to have meaning for you, then every post you've ever made is worthless.  I already knew that, but now you've confirmed it for yourself.  Bravo.

You're free to leave anytime.  Saves me the trouble of exposing your crackpot revelations every few weeks when you forget what you've posted before and muse about something inane.

Chess is a finite game consisting of only 32 pieces with defined movements on 64 squares with defined relationships.  Therefore, the entire tree of possible positions is subject to being mapped.  Therefore, the game can be solved.  That's a proof.  There probably are better ones.

I believe the request for proof that the game can't be solved is a rhetorical one.  It was intended as a statement of the opposite.  It can be done.

However, not by who we are now.  And I continue to think not by who we will become.

Do the machines even want to solve chess?

Your claim that a game cannot be solved unless the entire area is traversed is false, and an easy way to see that it is false is the fact that there are a number of solved games for which traversing the entire game tree is completely unfeasible.  For example, checkers.

How big is the game tree of checkers?  Well, it's infinite, since theoretically you can keep moving pieces back and forth indefinitely.  Even if we bound the length of the game, like Shannon did for chess, we still get around 10^60 for a game of 80 plies or less.  This is a completely unfeasible number, both for storage and number of computations.  Yet checkers was solved back in 2007!

How did they do it?  Well, first of all it is the number of positions that is the relevant number for the difficulty of brute-forcing the game, not the size of the game tree.  But even then, there are about 5*10^20 positions in the game of checkers - still too many to have brute forced in 2007.  What they in fact did was search about 10^14 positions, with a storage requirement of 10^7 per computer.

Here's why you don't have to actually search every position.  To prove that checkers is a draw, you need two things: a strategy for the first player that always leads to a draw or a win, and a strategy for the second player that always leads to a draw or a win.  This proves that neither player can force a win against the opposing strategy.  Now, the strategy for the first player requires that you examine every possible play by the second player; but it does _not_ require that you examine every possible play by the first player! You only need to find one move at each step.

Theoretically, this could lead to a best-case scenario of about the square root of the number of positions as the required number of positions to be searched; in practice, things are likely to be a little worse.  But, the Schaeffer team was still able to reduce the number to about 10^14, which was a significant improvement.

Assuming an analogous reduction for chess, we could speculate that the approximately 10^45 positions would require about 10^30 positions traversed using 10^15 memory.  Certainly not feasible at the moment, and also not something we cannot rule out in the indefinite future.  Yes, this is speculative; the actual numbers could be higher, could be lower.  But that's the point - we really don't know.  What I know for sure is that it is not required to search all 10^45 positions.  So any argument of impossibility based on 10^45 computations/storage being required (or worse, 10^120) is not correct.

Another good example of a complex solved game is Go-Moku, played on a 15x15 board.  This has roughly 10^105 positions, and the number of games is much higher!

Technology like that would probably be the size of the moon.

Not trying to argue but computers can only be made small to a certain perimeter since electrons can’t travel if it’s too small.

Correct. Computers have to respect physics.

Thermodynamics turns out to be important as well: thermal noise has to be overcome. Lowering the temperature to extremely low levels helps, but this becomes increasingly difficult and demanding of energy.

One concept crucial to pushing conventional computing to the limit is reversible computing. This removes one of the barriers by removing the minimum energy per operation (which is associated with erasure of information).