With Best Play for both sides Chess is a Draw--So Why Do We Play?

Ponz has tried his best. The hypothesis belongs to us, chess players. It remains to be seen about the outcome or shall I say the truth.

What jaas says chess is undetermined. That is why we play chess to determine the outcome of 2 chess players or man vs machines. The undetermined becomes determined when the game is finished or the clock has run out.

Nothing is 100% certain.  We or you may just be a figure in some super mind and we or you do not know it.

so i go with 99.999% odds are as certain as I will get.

Here is one of the proofs chess is a draw with perfect play.

We know Black is at a slight disadvantage at the start of a game so the liklihood of Black can win vs perfect play is almost nil.

This leaves chess is a draw with perfect play or chess is a win with perfect play.

Now there have tens of billions of games played. But there was not even one game out of those billions where White won and Black did not make a mistake. Not even one.

Thus the odds are tens of billions to one that I am right.  No, that is not 100% certainty but it is close enough for me.

Exactly. The theories are interesting but they are really just trivia.

If there had been a game where White won and 

Black did not make a mistake it would be chess headlines and change chess even more then chess engines did.

But, of course, there is no such game.

A hypothesis is a statement which has not (yet) been proven to be specifically true or specifically false. Oftentimes there is a substantial probability for it to be true (based on some empirical observations), but this doesn't have to be the case - there are hypotheses which have neither been proven or disproven and the probability of them being either true or false is unknown either.

The outcome of a perfect chess game is determined, it must be either a draw or a win for either side. However, the exact knowledge about which of the three possibilities is true is inaccessible to us. Similarly, 100,000 years ago it was well determined that the Earth was orbiting the Sun, however the knowledge about this being the case was inaccessible to cavemen who lived back then.

You don't have to make it so specific. In general, chess is a win for one side or a draw. It is nothing new.

In a subset where specific set belongs to the general set, the general set takes over. Unless there is something particular to the specific set that is outside the general set.

No, we don't know this. The starting position might be a zugzwang one, in which case Black would have the advantage you whimsically attribute to White.

Jaaas  nothing is 100% proven I could be something is someone's mind and I think that you do not see the practicality of calling something a fact if it is 99.999% likely but after all  there is at least a 0.000001% chance that you are also a figment in someone else's mind.

If knowledge depended on being 100% proven then there would be no knowledge

It's not the outcome any random game of chess which is being discussed here, but the outcome of a game played perfectly by both sides.

It seems that for each of my posts, at least one person pops up misinterpreting what I have said.

Ponz's argument above is nonsense.  The number of chess games that have been played is an incredibly miniscule proportion of all the chess games that could be played.  The difference is larger than the difference between a drop of water and the Pacific Ocean. 

The tablebase idea is about the same as just trying to iterate all the possible chess games.  There will likely never be computers powerful enough to do this.  Even if there were, this kind of proof does nothing for me.  Imagine some quantum computer with some magical computing ability and it spits out "Chess is a win for white".   Who cares?  There is no insight to be gained from that.  It simply means we have built an oracle. 

An example is included as an example to clarify some point. You understood the example, but missed that I intended the example the way you understood it. The point of the witch hunt example is that what once accepted as a proof is not acceptable nowadays. Of course, it is an extreme example, but I hope you understand it now as an extreme example of a more subtle point:

the acceptance of a proof depends on the theory from which you look at the proof and on which theory it is based. If your theory of thought is in line with the theory needed for the proof, then will you accept the proof. If it is not in line with the proof, then will you not accept the proof.

The problem with Mercury has been solved almost, I thought. But that is not what I meant. I tried to point out that a fact is independent of proof. The fact remains the same, even if the proof can not be created. The theory of Newton (which is imho one of the biggest scientific accomplishments in human history) can not explain the orbit of Mercury. And although it has an enormous explanatory power, it shows that physics needed more advanced theories to explain what is happening around us. That was of course not a little challenge, because it should also be able to explain what Newtons theory was already able to explain. The point is: a proof supports the theory, not the fact.

Saying that a fact needs a confirmation is like telling that the earth will stop orbiting the sun if we disagree with the fact that the earth is orbiting the sun. Our theory about the orbit of Mercury is in need of confirmation, the fact of the orbit is not. We need theories to perceive an event as a fact, but that does not change the fact itself.

The statement of Ponz111 is not a fact, but a conclusion of some premisses. The conclusion is true when all premisses are met and false if one of them fails. A conclusion is never a fact itself, because it does not happen nor exists itself. It is a statement that can have several statusses, but it is not a fact itself.

A conclusion requires proof, but a fact does not. We are still unable to prove the point of Ponz111, but my bet is that he is right.

I'm sorry, but it seems like you did not understand my rather lengthy reply after all.

If you are still (for reasons unbeknownst to me) implying that I claim a fact itself depended on someone's knowledge about it, then all I can do is to kindly direct you to my PM reply I sent you earlier, or to the previous page of this thread where most of it has also been posted. Question #3 of each of the two examples (caveman's statement and Ponz111's statement), as well as the following summaries, are dealing with this wacky (to put it mildly) "idea", which I had hoped would not possibly be put in my mouth anymore.

I am 99.78469787169% sure that number is made up.

I understood your reply, but you said yourself:

...confirmed to be fact...

That is what you write, that is what I read and reuse.

I am not trying to put that 'wacky idea' in your mouth again. I tried to be precise and not adding a different meaning to what you were saying by using the same verb you used.

What is the problem with the phrasing "(...) confirmed to be fact (...)" (besides that it has been taken out of context by the person who quoted it, i.e. not by me)?

If someone told you that you won the lottery, wouldn't you like to confirm whether that claim is indeed fact or not? Who could be expected to be as silly as to assume that whether he won the lottery or not would depend on him knowing it to be fact or not, besides perhaps a three-year-old? Would that even be possible, given that the fact must exist before knowledge of it being a fact can be obtained?

If you recall, I said

"A fact makes knowledge about that fact possible. In turn, knowledge about the fact makes it possible to determine whether a statement concerning that fact is true or not."

"Confirming a fact" means nothing other than "acquiring knowledge about a fact that is sufficient to constitute a proof that the fact (known until then only as a possibility, proposition, hypothesis, etc.) is indeed a fact". It has been a (objective) fact since billions of years that the Earth is orbiting the Sun, but is has become a (subjective) fact to humanity only after it was discovered and confirmed to actually be true.

I thought we had clarified on all this. If not, please read my lengthy post on the previous page again.

This is a terrible and wrong proof.

Let say we have an infinite number of numbers that are divisible by 2 and a 6.00000001.

We are going to prove those numbers belong to a set of even numbers.

Of course we can't since they don't belong to a set of even numbers. Unless we can prove that 6.00000001 is divisible by 2, which is not.

It doesn't take a lot to prove something is wrong, but only a fraction of it can make the entire theorem collapse.

The solipsism argument as the basis for eroding the definition of "fact".

So since we can't be 100% sure of anything we shouldn't hold anything to too high a standard of proof?

I prefer a little more diciplined an approach than this.  "Fact" and "proof" in this context " are objectively defined.  Let's stick with those definitions.

Numbers are a concept that humans made to explain our observations. Do you even know what mathematics is?

I know what mathematics is since I have a Ph.D. in it from one of the best universities in the world.  I think the notion that "Numbers are a concept that humans made" is childish and silly.

I agree with BMeck. The concept of numbers only exists because humans, for some reason, feel the need to quantify things. If you're, say, a tiger living in the jungle, then you wouldn't have the concept of how many trees there are in a certain part of the jungle, or how many days have passed since a certain event, because those things don't matter to you.