Will computers ever solve chess?

"there is always just one option for the moves for one side, the entire range for the other"

This statement is clearly incorrect for positions where there is a forced move (that is to say 'only move' positions) and many other forcing combinations where making a second choice move loses outright to an easily seeable continuation. So, saying that in every chess position there are (insert number over 25) possible moves and then extrapolating from that is nonsense and facile as I said many posts ago.

Well btickler's statement is an opinion and not supported by any math. It appears he (and others) have confused the complexity of the game (often expressed with the Shannon number) with the amount of work required to solve the game. There is no known connection between these numbers for solving chess (other than to say brute force, which is a naïve analytical method, can't be used).

An example is tic-tac-toe. It has a large amount of games that can be played and almost nobody ever writes all down. But young children learn to play it perfectly without memorizing or writing down all the possible games. They use deductive logic.

 Tic tac roe or noughts and crosses as it is commonly called in England falls rather neatly to a magic square formula which whilst it has nothing to do with the game itself can be used to construct a program to play the game. Every possible combination of tries in tic-tac-toe does not need to be put into the computer program, In fact, the program using this method bears little resemblance to the game were it not necessary to have an output routine and user interface.

There may well in the future be more complex but similar, apparently unrelated ideas which can be applied to chess. 

 Hi Scott,

I agree, for example, the Scandinavian defence for black may well fall to computer analysis. Maybe even the Kings Gambit.

The question is, should we then give up playing them? 

Did a parrot just squawk "18 years!"...?  All your regurgitated arguments have been addressed before numerous times by numerous parties.

The Scandinavian Defense for Black may well fall to computer analysis. [i wrote a book on the Scandinavia/Center Counter and won from a whole lot of masters with that opening but am now saying that opening is dubious]

Regarding the King's Gambit--this line:

Right. I believe 3. Bc4 has a better reputation.

But never refuted.

OTOH, your claim "Chess cannot be solved with current technology, nor with any reasonably foreseeable technology" was found to be completely baseless.

Well said. It reminds me of the history of flight - a lot of weird things were tried and people who lacked imagination and creativity said "it'll never be done". Some even said humans never flying was itself proof that it could never be done. Now humans fly.

I agree with Vic,

If we were meant to fly God would have strapped a Boeing 747 to our asses

Why would you say that? There has been no even half convincing case to the contrary proposed (I think the nearest is the idea that quantum computing might some day (a) have a way to be used and (b) be developed to a high enough degree to actually do it. [As it happens, I believe both of these are likely, but a belief is not sufficient!]

When I described the most efficient possible approach to solving chess, I thought it went without saying after previous discussion that the computational demands were utterly out of reach for any feasible conventional computing.

Note that the application of "brute force" as efficiently as possible has been how all comparable game solutions have been achieved (eg connect4 and checkers).

Where is this shown, and who did the calculation?

Thanks for the info, but I haven't seen 1% of total positions related to the number of mathematical operations that are required to solve chess. Is that shown anywhere?

Yes, White has 20 possible first moves, and then Black follows with 20 possible moves. That's 400 possibilities so far.

That's the start of a brute for analysis. Claude Shannon in 1949 determined that brute force won't work to solve chess because there are too many possible games. After 1949 most mathematicians have moved on to other analytical methods. But it's still interesting. It shows that chess has lots of games with very poor play - almost like moving pieces randomly.

Keep living in your dream world ...

Let me know if you are aware of an academic or scholarly paper that has concluded that chess cannot be solved. Or if you did the calculations I'd be interested in seeing them.

I know - lol.

I'll just wait 18 years and laugh at you .

Math doesn't work that way!