Will computers ever solve chess?

#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!

#6941
there are a lot more useful and important things to do with conventional computers as well and yet we play chess through computers and computers play chess...

Makes no difference if chess is ever solved.  No human has the ability to remember everything that it would take.  Checkers is solved, and no checkers player has been able to take advantage of it.

Connect 4 has also been sovled, and I believe the losing-chess variant has too.

Tip- The best first move for Connect 4 is the centre. The first player must take the centre to be able to force a win from the first move. Else player two is able to force a win (by taking the centre with their first move).

#6944
The number of checker players and even draughts players has diminished after the proof. Many have flocked to chess or go.
#6945
There was some competitive Connect Four and Nine Men's Morris play before those were solved, but after the proofs this stopped.

Quitting something because its solved even though no human can solve it is dumb.

Yes but requires very advanced techy

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.