Solving Chess Kickstarter

[michiguel]

I wanted to announce that I have started a kick starter project to build and test a database structure to handle solving chess. I have discussed solving chess here and I think the community might be interested to read the details here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/12 ... tep-1-of-3 I would request comments and advice on other outlets who might be interested in this project.

I'm very surprised that our moderators have still not taken action against this scam:
* He's claiming to be building a 32-men TB, which is nothing but a farce.
* He's asking for money, and in particular you need to give him 250$ in order to get access to his source code, only to find out that it's a scam (if you're naive enough not to realize straight away).

Apparently, someone already did send 250$. Or maybe it's a scam technique. No one sent anything, but he's just putting that on his website to attract idiots to pay. The trick is to make the idiot think he's not the only idiot. Otherwise the idiot becomes suspicious...

Normally, you buy a product. Here there is no product. It is the difference between a scam and a commercial offer.

[MODERATION]
We received no complaints, and we do NOT monitor every single thread 24/7. So, yes, this sounds like a bogus approach and the attempt to collect money does not belong to this sub-forum. There seems to be some collateral discussion, but that can be continued if somebody open another thread. I will lock this. If anybody thinks it should remain open (because I missed something) please PM.

Miguel

[UPDATE]
We received by PM a request to re-open the thread. Upon reading more carefully, we cannot say that this is a scam, but certainly extremely naive to say the least. In addition, the OP is requesting advice, it just happens that it is requesting donations in the link. So technically, this is not violating the charter directly. So, people in this forum know this very well, and I do not think even a caveat is necessary. We all know.

The point is, some collateral discussion started. We will re-open this, but we will make sure it stays on-topic for this sub-forum. That is, some theoretical discussion of why certain things are possible or not, are certainly belonging here. If the thread stays like that, it should be ok.

Miguel

[DustinYoder]

I will try to make a few points here, then I'll address others in the kickstarter project faq for the benefit of the wider audience.
1. This is not a scam and I will make source available to all once step 1is working. The $250 will get git access to code during the project and you can offer contributions to the code through git.
2. I have no idea who the contributers were so far, but this forum is literally the only place I have meantion it in so far. so thank you to whoever it was.
3. I won't be building a conventional bitbase. I won't store move or positions only disk adresses. The database is step 2. This approach to storing chess positions without storing the actual position data in the db is really something I've not seen anywhere and I really think this could lead to new approaches to chess computing even if we don't reach step 3. To be entirely honest the db lookup mechinism needs help ₣rom all of y to fill in a gap that I haven't been able to find yet, but I am certain it can be built.
4. These numbers are why nobody makes progress on this, but you can see the practical numbers keep dropping. non achievable positions for example. I think perfect chess would be extremely aggressive and would minimize opponent pieces and responses so I think the numbers will continue to drop. how far, I can't say.
5. I do think that solving a subset first is a good idea and I am planning to do this by changing the game start position to some simpler, but keep the same pieces board and move gen so this can all be used in the larger version.
I understand seeing this as a scam but I am serious.
I placed 21st in my division in the deerborn mi national chess tournament so I do at least understand the game.

[Sven]

Hi Dustin,

I understand that you say you are serious. You may also assume that most people (well, let's say, all people ...) in this forum are serious as well

You are asking for advice. The first advice that I want to give you is this: please make yourself familiar with the most important concepts of chess programming if you haven't done that yet, and ideally just implement a working chess engine, before you actually start your very ambitious project. The reason is that I am pretty sure that you will begin to understand all sceptical comments that you received in this thread only after having done so. Do not stop at the stage of having a working move generator. Go through the pain of implementing an alpha-beta search with transposition table, all kinds of mate/stalemate and other draw type detection, collection of PV, move ordering, iterative deepening, PVS, and also at least a simple (supposedly incremental) material and PST scoring. Make also familiar with endgame tablebases/bitbases. Probably you won't need any positional evaluation for your purpose but all the other stuff will be necessary to understand the subject at all.

Sven

[hgm]

Being a good Chess player does not imply that you are aware of the current state of the art in Chess programming. The description of your project suggests you are not. Quite frankly, what you write there looks as ridiculous as an application for inventing "a new transport system based on rotating downward-pointing appendages that are polygons with asymptotically many sides". Representing Chess positions and moves, and writing code to make and unmake them is what all of us do, and there are literally hundreds of high-quality open-source versions available for it.

Representing a Chess position in 64 bits uniquely is not theoretically possible, and systems that suffice in practice to do this without the ambiguity being much of a problem are already in use by almost everyone. So there is a very strong impression that you are trying to re-invent the wheel, blissfully unaware of the cars that are whizzing by on all sides...

[Farkov]

Dustin, if I may make a suggestion...

Neither Losers Chess, nor Suicide Chess, nor Crazyhouse Chess has been solved. However, Crazyhouse played using Losers Chess rules has been solved. And Crazyhouse played using Suicide Chess rules has also been solved. Both of these solves were done years ago, on a desktop PC, in a sane amount of time, using a PN-search, the likes of which I asssume you have in mind.

May I suggest you tackle these problems first(and I say this because you can do both without generating tablebases, which are crucial to any non-Crazyhouse solve) before making any assumptions about solving chess?

If you can solve the above problems maybe you'll want to have a crack at solving Suicide Chess which, although an almighty task, is next on the list of "solvable chess variants that aren't completely contrived". This might, although it's unlikely, be possible to solve once 6-man tablebases are generated.

My other suggestion is, if you're really not a scam, take down the $250 link button, and stop insinuating that anyone from these forums has paid you $250 :)

[syzygy]

However, Crazyhouse played using Losers Chess rules has been solved. And Crazyhouse played using Suicide Chess rules has also been solved.

Interesting. Do you happen to have a link?

If you can solve the above problems maybe you'll want to have a crack at solving Suicide Chess which, although an almighty task, is next on the list of "solvable chess variants that aren't completely contrived". This might, although it's unlikely, be possible to solve once 6-man tablebases are generated.

I have most of the 5v1 but still many many to go and I have stopped the generation for the moment to do some other things. I'll finish them eventually.

I'm afraid they won't suffice to solve the game, but who knows.

[Farkov]

Interesting. Do you happen to have a link?

No, sorry. But I can tell you they were solved by ibid, the programmer of Guildenstern/G2K on ICC. If you held a gun to my head I'd say he solved them around 2003ish, which I can't believe is 10 years ago.

I'm afraid they won't suffice to solve the game, but who knows.

Ditto that thought :)

[jshriver]

It seems that he wants to show that 1.e4 (or 1.d4?) is winning by building a proof tree. For each position with white to move, such a tree only needs one - winning - move.

Assuming chess is won for white, the number of nodes of such a tree would be far smaller than the number of legal chess positions. The fact that chess has a huge number of positions does not prove that the idea is unworkable.

Reminds me a bit of my Golden Tree project, I did years ago. Not so much to prove but to find the best path possible starting with various ECO openings.
http://olympuschess.com/goldentree

-Josh

[Angrim]

If you can solve the above problems maybe you'll want to have a crack at solving Suicide Chess which, although an almighty task, is next on the list of "solvable chess variants that aren't completely contrived". This might, although it's unlikely, be possible to solve once 6-man tablebases are generated.

I have most of the 5v1 but still many many to go and I have stopped the generation for the moment to do some other things. I'll finish them eventually.

I'm afraid they won't suffice to solve the game, but who knows.

An interesting experiment is to temporarily add code to your tablebase probe function that returns "white wins" whenever it probes a 6 piece table. Then search some of the interesting unsolved lines and see if the modified version returns a win. If not, the 6 piece tables won't solve that line. Then assuming that no win shows up from that, change it to probe and return "white wins" for all 7 piece positions, which will give an upper bound on how many lines will be solvable once the 7 piece tables are done.
Since hard drive sizes seem to have stagnated at 2TB, I don't expect 7 piece suicide egtb to be practical anytime soon. But it's still interesting to have some idea of what would be possible if they were.

[rreagan]

Since hard drive sizes seem to have stagnated at 2TB...

You can buy 4 TB hard drives in any computer store. Much larger drives are on the way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... s#Timeline