Will computers ever solve chess?

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."

Yeah, this thread has lost its way a long time ago. Deep Blue kickstarted a lot of research in the field of AI and so did AlphaZero. There is some research on the design of quantum chess computers. Again, any insights gained from this research in the distant future will be used to solve more complex problems. Chess serves as a "simple" enough test object/a tool for research.

"Why not expend energy on something productive, like learning a new opening."

I heard the London is really popular among chess players. Maybe its worth learning. haha

haha don't worry. I was just joking. I don't dislike the london, but I dislike the mindset most players have when playing the london. It's shocking how many people would play this opening for their entire life. Imagine eating the same food every day.

I eat the same food most of the time. I usually have a bagel for breakfast

#6974
"Why not expend energy on something productive, like learning a new opening."

++ Learning a new opening is among the least productive ways to expend energy.

If solving chess is more or less productive than proving the Riemann Hypothesis is open for debate.

I guys might think that I'm trolling with the above comment but I'm serious.

#6979
God the Son: "Let us play a game of chess"
God the Father: "OK"
God the Son: "I propose a draw"
God the Father: "I agree"

It is a different programming paradigm, but I believe in principle entirely general. One interesting property of quantum computing is reversibility: it is essential that all quantum gates are reversible for it to work.