Will computers ever solve chess?

Despite being asked, and without insults which have no place in dialog among respected mathematicians, you have not provided any information on where readers can find any paper you've written on this topic, or where anyone can find your calculations that you have presented without being refuted. Should I take it now that you have retracted your position in post #4060?

Your burden of proof, once again.  I am not going to do any homework for you.  The current reality is in my favor, it's your position that has to be proven.  Lord knows I have spent enough time educating you and your ilk only for it to leak out your ears.

Take from it what you like.  You're still wrong, as you've always been.  Maybe you should pay more attention when those who still suffer fools in this thread (like Elroch) tell you your position or statements are suspect.  The people that consistently agree with you consist of s23bog and a host of revolving trolls/sockpuppets.  I guess you enjoy being a mediocre fish in a festering pond.

My position is prima facie. The number of mathematical operations to solve chess is unknown, and therefore nobody can say how much time it will require to solve chess. It may be less than a decade or it may never happen.

Yes, agnostic. Chess is obviously a finite and decidable game (there are algorithms that will solve it). But there are no proofs as to a lower bounds on the number of operations to solve it, and therefore nobody knows how much time it will require. I know that sounds boring, but math often is.😐

But this video is a related to things that are large. And small. Less boring and kinda cool.😊

Exactly the opposite.  Prima facie in this context would indicate that Chess is not capable of being solved by currently available means, nor by reasonably extrapolated means, so saying that Chess will be solvable in 18 years, or 50 years, or 200 years...are claims that are currently meaningless.  You have personally posted that it could be done in 18 years, and later, when you realized you were almost assuredly wrong on that front, said 200 years instead.  You'll find no such slipping and sliding around in my position.

But...even if God came down to walk the Earth and personally hand you the knowledge of whether Chess is a forced win or a draw, all your arguments on this thread still would have been ignorant B.S. right up until the moment you could prove or *reasonably* extrapolate otherwise.

I don't mind if Chess were to be solved.  I'm only here to hold peoples' pseudo-scientific feet to the fire when they make ridiculous claims.  You and s23bog just happen to bear the brunt of this due to the sheer quantity of said claims.

Much like people that have turned Myers-Briggs into a form of palm-reading or horoscoping, you are just tossing around terms and concepts about computer capabilities that you don't have even a remote understanding of.

Lol.  Why would Game Theory hurt your chess game, or help your poker game in any really meaningful/direct way?  You do know/realize that Game Theory is really a misnomer for what the subject covers, right?

"Game theory is "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers". Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic, computer science and biology."

http://web.mit.edu/14.12/www/02F_lecture102.pdf

Yadda yadda yadda...aren't you missing out on your assured online poker cash winnings by posting replies here?   You're supposed to be playing something obscene like 500-1000 hands a day...get back to work .

I know plenty of schmucks just like you here in Silicon Valley that tried to take their disposable income and their "developer smarts" to Vegas to make a run at a career.  Guess what happened to every single one of them.  Playing poker, much like playing chess, is a fool's career (for different reasons, but fool's careers just the same).  If you are seriously pursuing that as your life's goal...I pity you.

Not for those who make a living doing so. And yes, those of us who do, certainly use GTO when appropriate. And we use exploitative models when appropriate. And sometimes, simple old-fashioned TAG play is all we need. 

Coffee knows what I am talking about. 

 I pulled down $150k a year, $130k of that guaranteed, before I retired.  What kind of a salary/living wage do you honestly think you can make playing poker, and how much of that is guaranteed?  I'm not talking about some outlier that your cousin knew once...I'm talking about you.  Let's just say if you were making that kind of salary in poker, you wouldn't have the time or the inclination to read or respond to this particular thread...I learned that in my Exaggerrating A$$hole Theory, Modern Edition class .  Smart people know what I am talking about.

You are correct, Btickler that there are very few people who can make a living playing poker. I did not see anyone saying otherwise. 

I was addressing nothing more than what seemed to be your denial that Game Theory is meaningful to poker. 

Poker is a game...game theory applies to games. It seems silly to say otherwise. 

I have no idea why you would insist that someone who makes a living playing poker would not have time for hobbies. 

All you need to accept to be convinced that the complexity of chess is too high for practical solution is to accept that long games where the non-solving player generally has several options available without making it easy for the solver are typical. Given that, even a rough estimate makes it clear that the number of positions that need to be dealt with by a strategy is huge.

This would not be enough if there were mathematical proofs that large classes of positions have a specific result. But, because of its arbitrary nature, chess is hardly amenable to attack in this way at all: almost all positions need thorough analysis to be able to prove a result.

Seems that BallCrusher has been drinking again. 

Solving chess in 18 years is plausible because the amount of time required to solve chess is unknown. Here is a Venn diagram for you:

Every time you try to insult anyone on this thread it only reinforces our position. You've run out of arguments, and have failed at understanding basic concepts of logic. We just laugh at your comments because it shows your argument has failed a long time ago.

This is actually one of the few well thought out comments that I've seen on this thread for several days (although plenty of comments by BallCrusher28 and others are very amusing). The idea that the player in the losing position can make analysis difficult has some merit, but I don't believe it is an obstacle to solving the game. By giving a preference to complex lines rather than seeking optimal play may lead to branches in the game-tree that have more nodes, but are more losing. To the best of my knowledge, a player (chess engine) seeking a win would always prefer his opponent to make sub-optimal moves (more losing) even if it came at the cost of more near-term complexity.

It is far from proven that theoretical lines which are complex but losing pose a formidable barrier to solving chess. But it's a really interesting comment on this thread which lately seems to never address the topic anymore.

One does not simply

solve chess.

Why not you forumers try talking 960 next? : )

Lol.  Even if I accepted your argument, you specifically posted a bunch of bad math showing how the brute force method (!) might be done in only 18 years (!!!) by essentially removing 30 orders of magnitude with faulty assumptions and logic.  So, you didn't simply posit 18 years as a plausible number among the set of all plausible numbers as you have tried to play off here. 

Just more backtracking and obfuscation from you...and the only people laughing are you and s23bog and bunch of trolls who couldn't find their way out of their local corn maze, so...yeah...I'm not too bothered by it.

It was brute force combined with other analytical methods. It demonstrated one plausible example of how chess might be solved (out of many). The path to solving chess might not happen (or not happen) based on what you can see today. Things in the future don't look the same as things appear in the past. Remember, there was time when humans could not imagine what human-flight would look like. But it didn't stop humans from learning how to fly.