Will computers ever solve chess?

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Wikipedia changes. Wikipedia comes with a disclaimer: ‘ We do not expect you to trust us’, adding that ‘it is not a primary source’ and ‘because some articles may contain errors you should not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.’

I don’t care about it not being ‘a primary source’ or not being able to ‘make critical decisions’ based on it, but the fact that it may contain errors means also errors by omission, in other words, facts not included in it.

 It is irrelevant whether a fact makes or not into Wikipedia. They may have never heard of that interview, which perhaps was only found important by Kasparov himself—since his former team had long been dismantled by 2009.

  That doesn’t make a fact into a non-fact.

 In fact, I myself found out about this revealing interview not in ‘09, but only last year, from a third party. If Wikipedia people think like you—case closed, long time ago—they may have stopped looking for new evidence.

"Wikipedia" doesn't look for anything, that's not their job.  A person just like you, with a vested interest, wrote the Wikipedia article, and then other people, also with vested interests with or against your position, would have argued your point and if there was no verifiable citation for what you wrote it would be edited out by consensus.  You do know how Wikipedia works, right?  It is written by the public, by consensus.  Wikipedia editors will just enforce the consensus if some individual or small group are not abiding by said consensus and continuing to re-add dubious content that has already been deemed unverifiable.  This makes it *at least* as authoritative as a traditional encyclopedia, written by an army of individually biased Joe Interns, would be...because it guarantees that other people with dissenting opinion will get to weigh in.  Wikipedia's disclaimer is true though...but no more or less true than any other source you are reading.

I know all that. By Wikipedia in relation to this case I meant the people responsible for writing anything related to that match. Which means those idiots may have missed it. I don’t have a vested interested in this, although I’m interested. And I don’t care what Wikipedia decides is a fact and what isn’t, precisely because those morons may have missed the interview. There may be thousands like me who don’t bother to try to add the fact of this interview or do a little more research around it.

  In effect, I don’t look at Wikipedia to tell me what’s a fact and what’s fiction, precisely because of those errors, or errors by omission.

  Again, the interview took place 13 years after the match was over, while Wikipedia launched 5 years after the match and so 8 years before the interview. Whoever the group of people who covered the match period was, they were finished long before the interview surfaced. The interview is printed, anyone can read it. But there is a fat chance those people responsible for the match story haven’t read it.

Just put something up about it yourself, then.  All you risk is that it gets debunked and edited back out.

The fact that you still refer to Wikipedia as "those idiots" and "those morons" as if they are one lump means you are still not getting it.  Those people are you., and "they were finished long before the interview surfaced" is not true of any Wikipedia article.  One of the best things about Wikipedia, by the way.  Writing and editing continues forever,  Instead of, say, Encyclopedia Brittanica being written and edited by colonialist Englishmen who all have the same biases, Wikipedia is written by everyone, and contends with all points of view.  Except for those points of view not expressed at all.  So, no point in calling "them" morons or idiots if you don't want to express yourself there, in a place that could have some lasting effect. 

As for errors or omissions, all sources of information have that, you're just giving more "professional" sources more credence than they deserve relative to Wikipedia.  Kasparov doesn't say anything now because in hindsight he finally knows its stupid to claim that a supercomputer worth a hundred million dollars had to cheat against him when an $800 laptop could whup him a couple years later.  His ego has shifted his narrative from "I am the best player in existence and so cheating is the only logical assumption" to "I was the last champion of humanity against the inevitable march of the chess engines".  

Haha, why? I don’t need others to admit or recognize that there is a strong possibility that IBM has cheated Kasparov in their second match.

 We’re just talking about it here, in a friendly environment, that’s all. If he’s at all interested in how others perceive him, Kasparov may try to do that himself, but somehow I doubt that he cares about what Wikipedia says about him.

   I know those idiots are people like me, but I’m not presumptuous enough to enter a story which may not be validated by people with the necessary study in various fields, but by laymen like me. For instance, even though Kasparov mentions a new analysis which shows that White has strong chances to win even in the final position of the second game of the rematch, which twists the analysis twice, it is not mentioned at all. 

  However, have you read what Wikipedia has to say about the controversial  7...h6?? 8. Nxe6!? Apparently not, but I have and it says:

  ‘The only reason Deep Blue played in that way, as was later revealed, was because that very same day of the game, the creators of Deep Blue had inputted the variation into the database.’ (Although a citation is in order).

As for Kasparov, the narrative hasn’t shifted: he is simply saying both things. He was the best player, at the time, and he was the last champion against the march of the machines, which includes several matches after Deep Blue. Kramnik cannot be included here, after that horrible, horrible 34...Qe3?? blunder against Deep Fritz, in ‘06. 

 And, yes, he can claim that he could beat a computer worth $100 million, simply because he could. The fact that he may have lost to an $800 laptop a few years later is irrelevant to such a claim. After all, Deep Blue played inconsistently, playing weak moves at times, too weak for a ‘Supercomputer’ to win against Kasparov.

Skynet solved chess, after thermonuclear war, opponent does not move pieces so loses on time and Skynet always wins game.  For more information please see Terminator movie.

I have read it.  It has no citation, as you saw yourself.  This is an editor's prelude to taking something out, should no citation emerge within a reasonable period of time.  

You have straw-manned a couple of statements in my post:

1. "As for Kasparov, the narrative hasn’t shifted: he is simply saying both things. He was the best player, at the time, and he was the last champion against the march of the machines"

I never said he wasn't the best player at the time, I said his ego about his playing ability was such that he did not think he even could lose a match without the opponent cheating.  A not-so-subtle difference.  This same weakness of ego is the reason he dashed himself on the rocks of the Berlin against Kramnik.  He was simply determined to prove not only that he was better than Kramnik, but that he was so much better OTB that he could just overcome all Kramnik's prep leading up to the match by sheer force of will and his brilliant play .  Ego and aggression are both a strength and an exploitable weakness of many top GMs. 

2. "And, yes, he can claim that he could beat a computer worth $100 million, simply because he could. The fact that he may have lost to an $800 laptop a few years later is irrelevant to such a claim."

You are asserting yourself in a counter to...what?  I said myself that he could have won the match if he didn't futz around trying to be overly clever against Deep Blue.  It is hugely relevant that laptops were mopping the floor with the strongest GMs a few years later, because it belies the very notion that IBM would need to have cheated at all.  At the time of the Deep Blue match, Kasparov et al were stunned that Deep Blue played as well as it did, but history has proven that chess engines were already poised to surpass human GMs (and at a breakneck pace) when Kasparov blew the match.  Even if he had played brilliantly and won, he'd have lost the very next match anyway.

P.S. Kramnik can most certainly be included, since he is the last GM to have the balls to play a strong chess engine at even odds in a publicized match.

Not in my book: anybody who doesn’t see a mate-in-one doesn’t deserve to be included among the best in the fight versus the ‘rise of the machines’. It could have been guts, but more likely it was ego.   

  As for Kasparov’s preparation against Kramnik, he admitted his preparation was poor for that game. Let’s not forget that he had been World Champion for 15 years, which could an aura of invincibility. He blamed his team for not coming up with certain things he asked for, in the openings. Above all, the team failed to come up with a robust strategy  for the whole match, and instead its analysis of various lines lacked cohesion. He’d always worked with a team, unlike Fischer, so he expected certain insights, which in the end never came. Therefore his confidence levels dropped and accordingly, his inspiration as well. He was always confident because of various novelties he and his team were able to bring to the board, in the past.

 Also, he was doing a lot of other things, like playing against Deep Blue(!), and in general, promoting the game of chess, like playing against the rest of the world through the Internet. And constant traveling, which takes its toll.

  And after losing that match without winning a single game, Kramnik proved to be quite the coward—the opposite of your image of him. For 5 years he consistently refused to give Kasparov a chance at a rematch, which finally drove Kasparov to announce his retirement, still being the top-rated player, 5 years after losing the crown. He was winning tournament after tournament, but the coward Kramnik was too scared to give him a second chance. Despite his improvements here and there, like 10. Re1! in KID Main Line, and in Queen’s Gambit Declined, by refusing Kasparov a chance at a rematch, he is a disgrace.

  Counter to what? To that very statement that the fact that a laptop could have beaten him a few years later had any relevance to the fact that at that moment he was better than Deep Blue, and the IBM did, in fact, need some gimmicks to beat him. As a hypothesis. Totally possible. The progress made by machines was rather exponential, so at that point they were not too clever, as pointed out by future analysis. Objectively speaking. I am not talking about a few years later, I am talking about the moment in time where Deep Blue faced Kasparov. The IBM team had no idea what would happen in the future—at that point in time they were just guesses. And they didn’t want to suffer another defeat and win the next game, since there was money to be gained, lots of it. So they did everything in their power to win that one. Not the next one. 

  Besides, Kasparov held his own several years later, when drawing against both Deep Junior (3-3) and X3D (2-2), both held in 2003.

  And just like Kramnik, IBM categorically refused Kasparov a rematch, despite the top dog appearing open to the possibility.

  But the main point was that what I just said above was included in the Wikipedia. Citations are backlogged, so it may take a while. Obviously, I don’t need one, since I’ve got the source in question. 

"the opposite of your image of him"

I don't have an "image" of Kramnik.  He had the balls to be the last champion to play even odds with an engine.  That's it.  I just thought it was pointless to point out how poorly he played in said match when no other GM would even risk making the attempt ...

agreed

your thread makes me think that fischer's saying might be right,that chess game is dead due to computer era and playing chess is about how to make good moves and good moves have a correlation with precision and calculation which computers can easily store it all in the chips of it's memory so once again fischer could be right when he concluded that in this computer era chess is only a matter of memorazion

Fischer is dead. The game is very much alive though.

If chess dies, it will be the variants that killed it.

I'm reading Game Changer by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan. I think that AlphaZero is on the cusp of solving chess (in a limited way), and that doing so, it is breathing new life into the game.

more like sucking the life away but nvm

There is not much attention towards variants anything other than chess960. Why is that?

Generally speaking most players don't care about chess960 as well.

BL4D3RUNN3R: you're right. Classical chess is always on the agenda 95% of the time. Variant chess has to be played on the internet because in clubs vast majority is only interested in regular chess. 

But why aren't other people willing to try variant chess? 

Chess960 means: people try to correct the position to steer it into „regular“ chess positions as soon as possible. So what’s the fuzz all about?

Then there's Eric Rosen who played the London system from a 960 position against Magnus.