Solving chess

I have ADDRESSED this issue, a long time ago. Chess will INDEED be solved. I have proven this to me true in my analysis, which was very detailed.

I'll summarize. They said checkers would never be solved, a long time ago, and it has since been solved. PERFECT play can be attained in checkers by playing the checkers program CHINOOK. And so it will be with chess...it will just take a few more decades.

See, chess is a FINITE game. There are only 64 squares and 32 pieces and each piece has only a SPECIFIC number of squares it can move to. Also, a chess game must end at a certain point. Finite.

Put it this way: right now, your PC has no problem playing a game that uses 2 GB memory. 20 years ago, a game that had 8K of memory would crash the computer. The computing power need to solve chess does not even exist today. But it will.

I personally have spearheaded an effort to solve chess several years back, and want to be THE ONE who is there when it's done.

AMNESIAC, I was waiting for someone to quote that. It means NOTHING, as we scholars all know.

All me to illustrate someprinciples of RELATIVITY. First, you are saying that BECAUSE there are more chess moves than atoms in the universe than, chess cannot be solved. That's like comparing apples to cars.....no relativity. There is NO connection whatsoever. It would be like me saying, because there are 93 million miles to the sun, I'll never be able to travel to Boston to vacation this year.

Now, if I were around in the year 2000BC, it would take me 250 hours to walk from Wisconsin to Massachusetts. Today, I can make it in 2 and a half hours. SEE? Comparing 2 numbers from UNRELATED instances violates the rule. Also, as time progresses, what was once INSURMOUNTABLY large, becomes TINY to the point of insignificance

There is NO connection between atoms and chess moves, other than they are both a very large #.

As far as the generational comment, the previous generation was running commodore 64s with 64 WHOPPING kilobytes of memory. And as we scholars all know, the biggest, baddest Desktop PC is comparable to a handheld calculator in terms of computing power. See, the super-computer ROADRUNNER has the power to BEGIN the analyzations, not desktop pcs.

In conclusion, Do you all SEE the folly of such a statement? There are more moves than atoms therefore moves cannot be accomplished. There are more miles to the sun than miles to boston, therefore I cannot make it to Boston.

The people who say it CANNOT be done should get out of the way of the people who Are GETTING it done.

That's not a particularly good analogy. The issue raised by Amnesiac is that if there are more positions than atoms, how can we possibly store all of the positions with their respective best moves? Clearly, we need at least one atom per position, and this would be the case only if we somehow optimised computerisation to a level way beyond what we have today.

It's akin to trying to fit an elephant into your fridge. There isn't room.

Bad idea of adding peace. Let da game b as it is

People, people....WHAT difference does it really make? Will a computer one day be able to "solve" chess? Yes. And that of course will be quite a significant accomplishment for scholars and intellectuals. But SO WHAT...a computer will be able to calculate every move possible and will be unbeatable, can never lose. That is not RELATIVE to two human competitors playing a game of imperfect chess.

I see your point NYTIK. However, in my detailed analysis, I demonstrated that it is PHYSICALLY impossible to possess more moves than atoms to begin with. If the universe is indeed INFINITE, then there are infinite atoms. CASE CLOSED.

The atoms vs. moves statement was coined SIMPLY to illustrate that the number of possible moves is mindblowing. Just like the word googol was coined to illustrate a 1 with 100 zeros after it.

Allow me to end this debate here and NOW.

In the documentary Cosmos, astronomer and broadcast personality Carl Sagan estimated that writing a googolplex in base-10 numerals (i.e., 1 followed by a googol of zeroes) would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.

Translation, the known universe is the CONTAINER and everything else must fit inside it. Googolplex is therefore a CONCEPT. Chess moves are a reality. A FINITE reality.

Our universe CAN contain the number of chess moves and it does. Your proverbial elephant in the refrigerator works for the elephant being googolplex and the frig being the universe. BUT in our case, the # of chess moves is just a slice of pizza in the frig. For anything BIGGER than the frig is just a CONCEPT, and chess is not a concept, but a FINITE GAME.

Class dismissed.

Nice try, but a Googolplex is not just a concept, it is a number, in the same way that the number of chess moves is a number. The universe is not infinite, as you suggest in your first paragraph, and there are certainly not infinite atoms!

what do you mean by "solving chess?"

Wow... this teacher guy is in serious need of some basic introduction to how you do a debate without resolving to statements such as: "It means NOTHING, as we scholars all know." That is a classic fallacy known as the verecundiam fallacy .. as we scholars all know!!!!

And the universe is not infinite, and it does not contain an infinite number of atoms.. It is expanding! And as it expands there will be more and more space between matter..

Geez, look in a book on physics or something like that, instead of making random statements that you present as sound and/or logical ...

Nytik I think this is a lost cause.. let him ramble on, this is not a place where logic or reason will prevail.

You realise that the theory of the Big Bang surfaced AFTER Einstein's work, and presumably that quote... these days it is pretty commonly accepted that the universe is not infinite in size.

I'm not sure if you know what proof is.

No it's more like saying "There are 93 million miles to the sun, I'll never be able to travel to the sun".

I feel I MUST respond, as solving chess is very near and dear to me. I want it to be done.

STAY ON TOPIC PEOPLE!!!!!! WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE SOLVING OF CHESS!!!! THIS IS NOT A PHYSICS LESSON!!!!!

Let's use LOGIC, people. Let me use an ANALOGY to help you all GET IT. The best use of an analogy is to use an EXTREME example. For if the extremes are true, then EVERYTHING in the middle must also be true. Also, it is much easier to comprehend extreme examples. A nonsensical example is so glaringly apparent that those of you that have a difficult time grasping the concept will see the LIGHT.

Comparing apples to automobiles in a way to determine how much fertilizer to use on the trees is UTTERLY idiotic. Agreed? Good. The fact that there are 250 vehicles in the USA has NO BEARING on how much fertilizer one should use to fertilize all the apple tree seedlings. There is NO connection. TO say that there are more moves in chess than atoms in the universe means NOTHING about the ability to solve chess. It just means that there is a whole lot of moves. Moves are NOT dependant on atoms. But "A whole lot of moves" is RELATIVE.

50 is a HUGE number compared to 10 x 10^-10.

The fastest computer of 1982 (commodore 64) is a snail compared to what's out there today. And what's out there today will be a RELIC compared to what's out there in 10 years. SEE my point?

As time progresses, what was once INSURMOUNTABLY large, becomes TINY to the point of insignificance. The total number of chess moves will ONE day be stored on the head of a pin. HARDY HAR HAR you say.

They once said the 4 minute mile was humanly Impossible. I proved them wrong on several occassions.

I could go on and on with impossible things that came to fruition, but I won't bore you.

Impossible today, commonplace tomorrow.

 I don't know

No

and no(random chess is good if you want to change it ).

And I am sorry for not coming in sooner to settle this. 

Apparently teacher_1 does not want to comment on the things he has been called out on - he uses the good old comment-on-the-topic-not-my-misuse-of-rhetorics-and-lacking-understanding-of-the-universe-because-that-is-imbarrassing-to-me-tactic.. But when you take a look at his profile it is really no wonder! I wouldn't waste my time giving proper rebuttals to mere mortals if I were a half-deity.

But since he who so graciously has bestowed us with his majestic presence does not feel the need to provide an answer to why he amongst other things uses fallacies, I guess it must be because he in his omnipotence employs a logic that is on a level beyond understanding of our, by contrast, insignificant minds.

Teacher_1's logic and debating skills clearly leave something to be desired, but he is not necessarily wrong.  Once one considers transpositions, the number of possible positions, can be mathamatically calculated ... its finite.  The calculation is beyond me, and I'm sure its huge, but its calculatable.  A future generations super computer could work backwards from the endgame tablebases solving an ever-larger group of the possible positions. 

Now if you come up with some theory that move order matters and cannot be ignored (move order certainly matters sometimes for draw by repetition, but that might be something that they can find a way to deal with) then certainly the number of possible permutations quickly becomes insane, and its nothing more then blind faith to say that someday a computer may be able to do it. 

Speaking from the point of view of someone who has actually studied GR, I'd just like to set the record straight by pointing out that the answer to the question "Is the universe infinite in size?" is currently "We don't know." (especially given certain possibilities such as a toroidal universe, which is technically infinite in size but "repeats itself" after a certain distance). Hence rendering any arguments on that point rather redundant.

In any case, the comparison between number of possible positions and number of atoms in the universe is incorrectly phrased - it would instead only be accurate to say that the number of possible positions is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which has a finite and well-known size. However, although this is more out of my field, AFAIK the number of possible positions in a chess game of "typical" length is on the order of 10^40, while the number of atoms in the known universe is 10^80, so there are actually far more atoms than possible positions. Not to mention that technically you might not actually need one atom per position - given a quantum computer (I think it's likely to happen within a century), you can carry out massive parallel processing to bypass such limitations (plus if you use electrons instead of atoms...well, each atom has one or more electrons, so yeah). So as teacher_1 pointed out (despite a certain lack of, um..."tact", shall we say), the analogy is quite meaningless.

In addition, the number of positions to be calculated may not actually turn out to be anywhere near 10^40 if it turns out a draw (or even a win) can be forced within a small number of moves. I can't really comment on the likelihood of that though.

Never say never when it comes to future technology.

As the resident MIT math guy, let me go ahead and field this question. Will chess ever be solved? No.

I'll explain using an analogy. Will humans ever travel to other galaxies? No. Technology is improving, yes, and in the past it seemed impossible that we would ever travel to the moon, and we were proven wrong, but going to other galaxies is totally different. The nearest galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy which is 2.7 million light-years away. We will continue to build faster and faster spacecraft, but it doesn't matter what technological advances we come up with because it's no longer a matter of speed. No matter how fast we go, even light speed, the fastest speed there is, it will take us at least 2.7 million years to get there, which might as well be forever. So, no, humans will never travel to other galaxies.

... at least not in fast ships. Yes, I have to qualify my "no" because it's not 100% certain, but until we figure out some other way that the universe works, some sort of major breakthrough like warp speed or wormholes, it's just flat-out impossible to get to other galaxies.

In much the same way, it's impossible to solve chess. The game of chess is so complicated that it's not a matter of computation anymore because no amount of computation will ever be enough to solve chess. To use some hard numbers, the potential computing capacity of a kilogram of matter equals pi times energy divided by Planck's constant [1], about 5.0 * 10^50 operations per second, which is roughly equivalent to the number of legal positions in chess [2]. Thus, it would take a theoretically perfect computer to even begin to list all the possible positions in chess, let alone analyze them. So, solving chess just isn't possible. Sorry.

... at least, not with faster computers. Again, I'm going to qualify my "no" because it's not 100% certain. Anything is possible, perhaps quantum computers will change things, or new mathematical theorems will arise, or maybe a forced win will be found in the first 20 moves, but probably not. There is nothing on the horizon to even hint that such an EXTRAORDINARY breakthrough could ever happen, and if chess ever is solved it's certainly not going to be because of faster computing speeds. Chess is not like Connect Four because Connect Four actually has a reasonable number of positions that's within the realm of computation, kind of like how the planets in our solar system are within the realm of reasonable travel.

What we can count on, however, is better and better computer chess software. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that one side, white or black, will become so dominant that computers can always win as them (even against other computers), but that's not the same as theoretically "solving" the game.

Let's also remember how much we've already learned from computers. In the past, it was thought that human imagination and ingenuity and grasp of strategy was what set us apart from machines and their rote calculation, and maybe so, but it's become clear that being able to play tactically perfect out to 20 moves in the future is far more important, and that our ability to "think" that we thought was so special really isn't special at all =)

[1] http://puhep1.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_nature_406_1047_00.pdf

[2] http://www.thechessworld.com/Articles/how-complex-chess.html