Chess will never be solved, here's why

Imagine a chess position of X paradigms. 

Now, a chess computer rated 3000 solves that position. All well and good. 

Could another computer rated a zillion solve that position better than Rybka? 

No, because not even chess computer zillion could solve the Ruy Lopez better than a sad FIDE master could. 

the point is, there's chess positions with exact solutions. Either e4, or d4, or c4, etc. 

nothing in the world can change that. 

So if you are talking about chess as a competitive sport, then chess has already been solved by kasparov, heck, by capablanca. 

If you are talking chess as a meaningless sequence of algorithms, where solving chess equates not to logical solutions of positional and tactical prowess, but as 'how many chess positions could ensure from this one?'' type of solutions, then, the solutions are infinite. 

So can chess be solved? If it is as a competitive sport where one side must, win, then it has already been solved. Every possible BEST move in chess has been deduced long ago. 

If chess is a meaningless set of moves, with no goal in sight, then sure, chess will never be solved. 

Has chess been solved? No
Can chess be solved? Yes, it takes 5 years on cloud engines.
Will chess be solved? Maybe, it depends on somebody paying 5 million $ for the cloud engines and the human assistants during 5 years.

Have humans walked on Mars? No
Can humans walk on Mars? Yes
Will humans walk on Mars? Maybe, it depends on somebody paying billions of $ to build and launch a spacecraft.

cloud engine or sky engine, the game of chess has already been solved in terms of competitive chess. 

positional mastery has been deduced for pretty much every position. which move is best in which position out of every position out there in the chessverse? it's been solved as far back as capablanca. 

Chess CAN never be "solved". There is no "best move". 

You can never predict what kind of move will tick, inspire, amuse, or bore your opponent. Since you don't know how your opponents deep game psychology might work. You don't know what his game strategies are, what kind of blundering tactics he might fall pray to. The "best move" to them is not the same "best move" to the next opponent.

Or, say even that a player did know exactly what would provoke one of these emotions from his opponent. Consider that the player played a "tricky" move. Even if it wasn't considered optimal by FIDE rating standards. For instance, player may intentionally sacrificed his Queen to gain better checkmate position. FIDE analysis would have regarded it a "dumb" move. Despite this, the player knew that he could use it to trick his opponent into thinking about making a tempting follow-up. The opponent didn't know the move he was baited into was going to be a blunder.  

In both situations of knowing and not knowing your opponent's psychology which influence his moves, the "right" sequence of moves that would lead to the "best game" is completely fruitless and inobtainable.

chess will be solved as a game with multiple happy endings for white, if both play their best moves

If you have research to show, please do link.

#6
Chess is a draw
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf 

one other way of solving chess is by producing best moves for each openings and memorizing it which GMs are already doing.

they prepare and remember lines and play it out and make early draws, or win if the opponent can't find a reply (if they forgot to memorize the reply)

even a normal player on this site has memorized 28 moves of theory and claims he produced a novelty when he moved his king which was in check on a diff safe square.

Chess is about mistakes so a computer solving Chess has no bearing on humans. We will still play Chess and we will continue to make mistakes.

Lasker was great at confusing his opponents by playing inferior moves. 99% of Chess players will never be at the level where they have to worry about draws or "solved" Chess 🙄

No one cares.

Strange thread...most people seem to have no idea what "solving" a game means.

Solving a game does not mean being dominant over all other humans...otherwise chess was "solved" by Morphy, even though we can find many suboptimal moves in his play now.

Solving also doesn't mean calculating every permutation. 

What it means is a mathematically best strategy has been shown -- either an unstoppable strategy that always wins for one player, or a strategy that forces a draw (where an unstoppable can be proved to not exist).

At this time, the game of chess has not been solved, but there is no reason why it is impossible, or intractable.

I think Go will be solved before chess, and when that happens we can suspect chess is coming soon. Go has many more permutations than chess, so is sometimes described as a more complex game, but I think, given only one kind of "piece" and "move" it looks a better candidate for finding an unbeatable strategy.

#12
Here is what solved means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

I doubt Go will be solved before chess. Lee Sedol even won a game against AlphaGo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol 

Means nothing. As the authors admit, they have no way of comparing AlphaZero's play with accurate play other than bringing in Kamsky as a second opinion.

Edited moderator stumpybiitzer 

#15
The number of possible chess games is irrelevant because of the many, many transpositions.
Even the position after 1 e4 e5 can be reached in billions of ways.
It is the number of chess positions that counts.
An upper bound is 3.8521*10^37
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.09386.pdf 

#14
Chess even stays a draw if stalemate = win.
The paper shows that the draw rate increases with more time.
Compare figure 2 (a) and (b).

thats cause people play dead games nowadays not dynamic like botvinnik tal or fischer

10¹²⁰ b*llocks! That's a very rough estimate of the number of possible 40 move games with a constant 30 moves on each ply given by Shannon and never intended to represent the total number of chess games. 

The number of possible games under FIDE basic rules is א‎₀ if you consider only finite length games or if you allow (necessarily countable) infinite length games ב‎₁.

Also the number of atoms doesn't have much to do with it. The number of possible arrangements and states of atoms is far more relevant and that's vastly bigger. (On pre-quantum theory physics, at least, a single atom could encode the full set of up to 32 man tablebases and it would just be a matter of whether you could measure and set with enough precision to read and write the encoding.)

Regurgitating dubious figures is not a good approach to a feasible solution.

The time spent by AlphaZero also means nothing in terms of theoretically accurate play.

The paper doesn't show that chess stays a draw even if stalemate = win. It shows that Alpha Zero can't see a forced win in either case.

But AlphaZero or any current engine has a very limited look ahead capability.

I can't run AlphaZero but here is LC0 based on the same kind of software playing a drawn position with only five men on the board. It blunders into a loss on it's second move. It's not even a very accurate blunder. The longest forced mate with the black pawn on h3 is 71 moves but it blunders into a mate in 56 (according to Nalimov) and collapses in 21 instead.

If Haworth's law (http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/36276/3/HaworthLaw.pdf) continues to hold up to 32 men there would be winning positions where the forced mates need at least  tens of trillions of moves against accurate defence. The performance of anything that plays chess in much simpler positions such as the one above hardly inspires confidence in their assessments.