Is Chess on the verge of being solved?

Chess is a great game, but with advance computers such as Fritz A person has to wonder, Will This great game, either in the close-distant future be solved?  Their has been people saying that Checkers has been solved already.  Is Chess next?  If it is indeed "solved" Then with perfect play is the game a draw? Or does whites first move gaurantee him victory?  Perhaps Whites first move is actually a burden that will allow him (or her) to make the first mistake and give black the Victory? 

In his book "The Final Theory of Chess)" (Look it up!) Gary Danelishin claims that 

The best move for white is not 1. E4 but instead 1. D4  The best move for black is the dutch defence with 1. F5!  

Danelishin says that white plays D4 because after D5 he does not want to play 2. C4 of NF3 but instead 2. E4 Leading to The Blackmar Diemar Gambit (My opening Choice by the way!) and after 1. d4 Nf6 he says that white should play 2.F3!!

He also offers white options against the french (He recommends The Advance) and the exchange with Bd3 against the caro-kann!

As black against 1. E4 he recommends E5! and the two knights defence against the Guico Piano and The Marshall Gambit against the Ruy Lopez.  (According to Danelishin All of theses Variations was Checked By The latest version of Fritz!) 

Their is also a website that is similar to Wikipedia about the variations in the book.  Let me know your opinion of the matter.  Can Chess Really one day be solved, and If So Are the lines he recommends Really The Key to Solving Chess! With Perfect Play?

And (With perfect Play) Who really has the advantage?  Let me know Please! Thanks!!

Wouldn't solve something from a "computer programming" perspective  be having a lookup table that has "best move" responses from any theoretically possible position on the board?

For example, if you sat down with a pen and paper, you could come up with a flow-chart for the best move for every tic-tac-toe position ... there are not that many! I'd consider tic-tac-toe to be "solved"!

If that's what you mean by solve, I'm not sure chess is going to get there anytime soon.

Wikipedia says this is what it took to solve checkers:

Checkers is the largest game that has been solved to date, with a search space of 5x10²⁰.^[7] The number of calculations involved was 10¹⁴, and those were done over a period of 18 years. The process involved from 200 desktop computers at its peak down to around 50.^[8]

Chess will not be solved in the concievable future with our computing speeds. Even if we could reach a calculation speed of a sextillion variations per second (10^21 variations per second), which is beyond what we're currently capable of, it would still take 7 minutes and 10 seconds to calculate ahead every possible variation for the next 8 moves (16 half moves, an average of 30 possible choices per move for each player). And to give you an idea of how much this scales up, when you change this to 9 moves ahead, it takes 107 hours. A perfect Chess game could extend well above 800 moves, which we could not concievably imagine the power required to calculate.

While chess is not solved, and will not be totally solved for some time, we do have tablebases working backwards from the end, such that any endgame with 7 or fewer pieces on the board, is solved (I think we have 7-piece tablebases, or is it only 6?). That said, chess is a theoretical draw, almost certainly. The reasons people believe this include the great symmetry in the initial position, and, more compellingly to me, the fact that as you start looking at higher and higher level games, there are more and more draws. The stronger the players, the better chance of a draw, which tells me that chess is lost by mistakes, since they presumably make fewer mistakes.

@Lucidish_Lux:

Good point about the Nalimov tablebases ... it is also amusing to note that storing upto the 8-piece tablebases requires about a Terabyte of hardrive space :)

My Radio Shack chess computer from the 1980's finished solving it last week. But I forgot to write down the solution.

Margin too narrow?

i hope chess wont be solved in the next 60 years, so long for my greatest hobby! after that i dont care

---

Do you believe all your opponents would memorise the, say, 60-move game. Perhaps. But what if you make a deviation from perfect play at move 2? It is not within a human's capabilities to memorise each and every variation, of which there are millions.

Tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomany varitaions to calculate. If we ever build quantum computers, perhaps then we will possess the needed brute force to "solve" chess. Even then, it seems like there are too many possibilties to examine completely. I think the mega-computers of the future (within the next 30 or 40 years) will give us a greater insight into ideas, but I do not know if solving is possible. Just as the world has started the ITER project to try to build nuclear fusion reactors, I guess FIDE needs to start some sort of foundation for the long term examination of various openings and endgames by computers running non-stop, 365 days a year.

---

I once had a computer from Radio Shack... had about as much memory as an etch-a-sketch.  Once I shook it and reformatted the hard drive.

---

Yours had a hard drive? Wow. 4K RAM, and we were using audio cassette tape for permanent storage. Ah, the good ol' days ... it's all gone downhill since then ...

 The book "Final Theory of chess" is a good read, and definitly took long time and efforts to get out. However, I think we are far away from solving the total chess, and if it is going to be; I believe the result is to be drawn. Anyway, none is going to memorize it all and definitly it will nnot Blackmar Diemer Gambit; Akthough I like the opening.

wow, my head actually DID leave a dent in my desk this time . . .

It's odd that all of the previous times I have pounded it against a hard surface when sombody asked this question it never did that.  I guess my head has hardened.

---

My Commodore VIC-20 had 5K of RAM, and I used to listen to the data on the audio cassettes for fun.  Beeep beeeep beeeep ShhhhhhShhhhShhhh.  Like Music to my ears.

The Blackmar-Diemer gambit is refuted by 2...c6, so it can't be recommended.

---

Hey, an obsolescence club is forming :). We (our high school) moved to a pair of Commodore 64's after the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I still don't know who our Grade 11 math teacher had to blow for them, but it was worth it. Totally worth it.

Between computers.. yes, there may be perfect games but human factor is too complicated. 

Solving chess will require a paradigm shift not only in computing capabilities, but in fundamental computing approach that is likely still too far away for any of our lifetimes, if it will ever be realized.

So no.

---

According to Danelishin After 1d4 d5 2.e4 c6 White gets a (small) edge with exd5 cxd5 Bd3!