Will computers ever solve chess?

My name isn't Methuselah...

It's an interesting question how often we are really surprised by a change in knowledge or technology. I mean to the extent of being pretty sure about something or a possibility and this being proven false. It is more common either for us to start uncertain or for the difference to be less blatant.

Any advance that could solve chess will be hugely more significant for other reasons.

As an analogy, DeepMind achieved a huge leap in the performance of computers at difficult finite combinatorial games of perfect information (most notably go, but also chess), but far more significant is their applications of the same base technology (advanced deep learning) to the protein folding problem.  The human race is little affected by the best go player being a computer, but there is huge potential in the new capability to analyse the behaviour of any protein (a sequence of amino acids) without spending a year or two in the laboratory.

https://youtu.be/XcpsZUyvn2Q

#6926
Chess was called the drosophila of artificial intelligence.

#6926
Chess was called the drosophila of artificial intelligence.

Why was it called the drosophilia of AI, isn't drosphilia a fruit fly or something?

#6929
The drosophila or fruit fly was the test object par excellence for genetics.

And a lot of people came to utterly false conclusions about chess due to NS (natural stupidity).

Yes, many people came to false conclusions about chess.

WILL it solve chess? Probably.

HAVE they solved chess? No.

For now it doesn't look like that chess will be solved. But engines will definitely get stronger. Maybe certain endgames will be completely solved in the future which is more likely due to the limited material but this is still not an easy task.

The number of possible chess games is many times greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. Even a quantum computer could never come close to fully solving chess.

@cdm299 As far as I know quantum computers are only effective for certain tasks like prime factorization but I'm not sure if they would be great for chess in the first place.

Edit: I did some research on Google Scholar I could only find one paper published in 2019 dealing with designing quantum circuits to play chess. In this paper they mention that designing a circuit for an 8x8 board is incredibly complex so they decided to design a circuit for a 3x3 board.

What they did was just some basica chess playing functionality like checking the validity of the moves. That means we are if at all at the beginning in the area of quantum chess engines. If a quantum expert could comment on this topic that would be great. )

Here is the link to the paper:

Design of Quantum Circuits to Play Chess in a Quantum Computer:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bikash-Behera/publication/338019071_Design_of_Quantum_Circuits_to_Play_Chess_in_a_Quantum_Computer/links/5dfa899692851c836486137c/Design-of-Quantum-Circuits-to-Play-Chess-in-a-Quantum-Computer.pdf

Quantum computers aren't magic.  They won't help much with chess.  Sorry.

Chess is no different from checkers, which has already been figured out. What part of chess hasn't been solved? These posters that say chess hasn't been solved are just making things up ,talking nonsense, that they seem to think sounds intelligent. 

Famous forum!!

You mean when Quantum-Stockfish comes out it won't be able to analyse the start position and say "Checkmate in 60 moves for White"?

It would be cool if that happened, but then disappointment as you realise chess would basically be ruined if a computer could list all the perfect moves from the start. Maybe we should protest against quantum-computers to save chess?

Could be a movie plot- it's the year 2050 and technology is being researched with the capacity to fully solve chess. But some chess enthusiasts don't want chess to be solved and try to stop it.

#6937
All evidence indicates that it will be: white to play, black draws.

I missed this post earlier.

It's very interesting that there has been some progress on this - at least people seriously starting to have a go at it.  If, as it seems, there are no fundamental barriers, the end of the road will be a quantum computer that solves chess, answering the OP question!

I am however inclined to observe that there are a lot more useful and important things to do with quantum computers!