Will computers ever solve chess?

Hmm

In the year 2876

I would not be surprised to see photonic quantum computers overtake the electronic quantum computers that have received a lot more attention up to now, and a programmable cloud-based, large scale photonic quantum computer service like the one being advertised by Xanadu would be just what would be needed to solve chess (and so many more important things!)

Xanadu scalable photonic quantum computing

Perhaps the best thing about photonic quantum computers is that they require zero cooling: they work at room temperature (because while electrons are vulnerable to interaction with all electromagnetic radiation, in particular heat radiation, photons are only vulnerable to interaction with charged particles).  Thinking of it like that, it's difficult to imagine why anyone is bothering with "traditional" quantum computers!

Checkers has diminished because it's just a more boring game.  Chess has also diminished from the Fischer/Spassky days.  Board games in general have diminished significantly.  It has nothing to do with a proof and everything to do with video games and smartphones.

How are they planning to solve the "no intermediate storage of variables/results" problem?  Using Python only matters if you can actually do everything you can do with Python on conventional computers, so this problem being solved is a big key.

"smartphones."

The latest oxymoron.

I am not sure what problem btickler is referring to. Quantum computing requires a different mindset, but it has a well-defined scope and the different quantum computing paradigms each provide generality (subject to the number of qubits), apart from the issue of errors.

The main hope for the latter seems to be to design quantum computers to be error tolerant (much as classical communications and storage are error tolerant) by means of high quality quantum error correction.

For more basic practical concepts: How to program a quantum computer

I hope quantum computers work better than that link ...

Not quite sure what happened there. Here it is again, plus another relevant one.

How to program a quantum computer

IBM Quantum Computing cloud service

[I can verify this really works - you can write a (very simple) quantum program and run it on one of a list of quantum computers and get back results!
]

Very long answer: .........................................................................................yes

(but only with future sufficiently powerful quantum computers).

I'm reserving judgment until quantum computers actually achieve something more than press releases in a non-sampling, non-chaos "weather prediction" type of application.  I hope for the best, but right now there's just a lot of what-ifs going on.  Predicting the weather planet-wide would be a much smaller application than 10^40+ .

I have seen all the "try it" cloud based stuff...but nobody has diddly idea how much of that is marketing spin and smoke and mirrors.  Even if you publish the source, you don't actually know what's running.  Much like Kasparov had reason to suspect Joel Benjamin helped Deep Blue, you don't know for sure until the trend line of actual achievement shows definitive progress that proves out the theory.  If cloud services didn't happen to work as well as marketing execs wanted, then they will modify the parameters in a non-ethical way.  Just like the Alpha Zero team did when they played Stockfish in a closed lab, then made a press release that was unwarranted until later.

So, until quantum computers publish their list of verifiable achievements of a type that cannot be done by traditional computers, it's not really anything worth getting worked up about.  It's a nice concept, with great potential.  Like space elevators.  We can talk  about them all day, but until you manufacture a material with enough tensile strength, it's just talk.

I have no reason to doubt that IBM has some 5 qubit QCs with quantum volume of 32 online. The issue is not whether these exist (or a lot more), it is whether it can be scaled up to much larger systems with adequate error correction.

It's not just about the qubits, as it would be if devices were perfect.  This is why the concept of quantum volume, more indicative of computing power, was invented.

An interesting fact there is while IBM (a big player for sure) has only claimed modest quantum volumes, claims of massively higher values, indicating much more powerful QCs have been made by IonQ:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/trapped-ion-quantum-computer-sets-new-mark-for-quantum-volume/

#6959
And here is again the 3x3 proof of concept of a quantum chess 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 

No. Because chess is the game of the gods/goddesses!

That still doesn't answer my question, though.  If you can't store intermediate data, you also can't pass it...you can't make a procedural call with a parameter, nor pass back a result, you can't do iterations inside the process that require tracking any variables, you can't do object oriented programming, etc.  So, solving chess would have to run in one procedure, with one output/endstate, as I understand it currently.  I made a reference to the answer "42" from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a good analogy to that type of limited outcome, but I may have lost that post?  I don't see it here.

So when they say it will run Python syntax, what do they actually mean...full Python with every bell and whistle, or just a more limited subset Python (which is already limited) using a subset of the same syntax but gutted of several fundamental capabilities?

It would not be the first time press hype would gloss over such a key distinction.  The article is also less than promising for solving chess since this particular company is currently shooting for just outperforming a current PC in 2 years from now.  That's quite a ways off from the millions of times faster that some people's assertions (not yours) are reliant on ...

No 

Chess is too difficult game

#6966
Extract from the above primer link #6959:

"Quantum computers will always be hybrid devices, partly quantum and partly normal. The latter is required to handle inputs and outputs, in order to interface with the lumbering apes who want to use the device. For this reason, quantum SDKs are typically embedded in a standard programming language. QISKit uses Python, so we can use a Python program to deal with both the normal parts of the program, and to construct and run jobs for the quantum part."