Chess solved?

[syzygy]

Questioning whether an idea will work is completely legitimate, and is actually valuable feedback ( )

As far as I can see we got stuck at: you have no idea to begin with. Your case is built on "it would be surprising if no idea that will work existed".

[towforce]

Questioning whether an idea will work is completely legitimate, and is actually valuable feedback ( )

As far as I can see we got stuck at: you have no idea to begin with. Your case is built on "it would be surprising if no idea that will work existed".

Questioning an idea with reasons from Computer Science is invaluable feedback. Straw man argument and gratuitous negativity are not.

One of the biggest forces holding people back in today's world is a widespread lack of confidence: people giving inaccurate and unhelpful negative feedback is a contributory factor to this situation. My message to people is: make a decision to change from "demolition" to "builder". The biggest beneficiary of this choice is very likely to be yourself!

[syzygy]

Questioning whether an idea will work is completely legitimate, and is actually valuable feedback ( )

As far as I can see we got stuck at: you have no idea to begin with. Your case is built on "it would be surprising if no idea that will work existed".

Questioning an idea with reasons from Computer Science is invaluable feedback. Straw man argument and gratuitous negativity are not.

One of the biggest forces holding people back in today's world is a widespread lack of confidence: people giving inaccurate and unhelpful negative feedback is a contributory factor to this situation. My message to people is: make a decision to change from "demolition" to "builder". The biggest beneficiary of this choice is very likely to be yourself!

Feedback on what? If you had had an idea, we could talk.

If you want to be a "builder", then go build. You haven't built zilch. You just come in here with silly claims that it would be surprising if you could not solve chess (mixed with unrelated stuff you took from a book about the history of encryption you seem to have been reading). Instead, you could have shown us how you solve tic-tac-toe with your (apparently non-existing) method...

[towforce]

Questioning whether an idea will work is completely legitimate, and is actually valuable feedback ( )

As far as I can see we got stuck at: you have no idea to begin with. Your case is built on "it would be surprising if no idea that will work existed".

Questioning an idea with reasons from Computer Science is invaluable feedback. Straw man argument and gratuitous negativity are not.

One of the biggest forces holding people back in today's world is a widespread lack of confidence: people giving inaccurate and unhelpful negative feedback is a contributory factor to this situation. My message to people is: make a decision to change from "demolition" to "builder". The biggest beneficiary of this choice is very likely to be yourself!

Feedback on what? If you had had an idea, we could talk.

If you want to be a "builder", then go build. You haven't built zilch. You just come in here with silly claims that it would be surprising if you could not solve chess.

1. I am building - I'm working on the key software - fitting information-rich polynomials in multi-dimensional space. It's proving to be more difficult than I expected, but I am making progress.

2. You said that I "just come in here with silly claims...", but if you re-read the thread (just my posts - it doesn't take long - I've done it myself!), you'll see that most of my posts are actually responses to questions that you have asked. So... if you don't wish to read that chess might be solvable, stop asking questions to which that would be the answer. Simple!

[Angrim]

But even 4k3/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQ - 0 1 is not trivial to prove, although looking at a few lines, it looks like it could be done in a day or so.

Just a followup on this, I left 1 core of my computer running on this while I did other stuff, and(not too surprisingly) this is proven to be a white win with 1.e4 being a win in at most 33 turns. I used pn^2 search which may not be ideal for this sort of position.
It took 278,802,838,818 calls to eval(which for proof number is a pretty trivial function) and storing the proof required storing 18k positions. Which does give an interesting data point on how much harder it is to prove something than to store the proof.

[jp]

The main problem, as I see it, is that the fundamental nature of chess is exponential. So I think that a solution will have to deal with that level of complexity. Any simpler sort of solution would be some kind of stroke of good fortune (like a forced solution nearby).

The "stroke of good luck" that is very likely to exist in chess would be an unexpected emergent pattern. They do tend to arise in complex systems - even when you try to design them out (and nobody has done that in chess).

Do you mean this "stroke of good luck" to be related to chess in general (i.e. the basic rules of moving, winning and drawing) or do you mean all that plus the specific (opening) position we have? If you mean the former (i.e. the stroke of good luck covers all chess positions), there are theoretical CS reasons why that should not be the case.

What are these cs (Computer Science?) reasons, please?

TCS = theoretical computer science.

Consider this from the TCS angle. As syzygy has stated a couple of times (in different words), if we just mean solving the standard chess game, then that is of fixed size, so then it's just debating lots of different very large constants, whether some are larger than others, and whether you can make some slightly less large. But we're not really talking about that (as the quoted text makes clear). We're really talking about solving it in some sort of quick, clever way.

So the TCS way is to look at the complexity of NxN chess. The problem is to solve an arbitrary position in NxN chess by a method that is not exponential in N. But it was shown decades ago that this cannot be done.

[syzygy]

The main problem, as I see it, is that the fundamental nature of chess is exponential. So I think that a solution will have to deal with that level of complexity. Any simpler sort of solution would be some kind of stroke of good fortune (like a forced solution nearby).

The "stroke of good luck" that is very likely to exist in chess would be an unexpected emergent pattern. They do tend to arise in complex systems - even when you try to design them out (and nobody has done that in chess).

Do you mean this "stroke of good luck" to be related to chess in general (i.e. the basic rules of moving, winning and drawing) or do you mean all that plus the specific (opening) position we have? If you mean the former (i.e. the stroke of good luck covers all chess positions), there are theoretical CS reasons why that should not be the case.

What are these cs (Computer Science?) reasons, please?

TCS = theoretical computer science.

Consider this from the TCS angle. As syzygy has stated a couple of times (in different words), if we just mean solving the standard chess game, then that is of fixed size, so then it's just debating lots of different very large constants, whether some are larger than others, and whether you can make some slightly less large. But we're not really talking about that (as the quoted text makes clear). We're really talking about solving it in some sort of quick, clever way.

So the TCS way is to look at the complexity of NxN chess. The problem is to solve an arbitrary position in NxN chess by a method that is not exponential in N. But it was shown decades ago that this cannot be done.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/1 ... 3-2_23.pdf

This does not rule out that the constant time in which 8x8 chess can be solved is surprisingly low, for example because 8x8 chess has a property that disappears on generalisation to NxN chess.

However, there is absolutely no reason to expect that 8x8 chess has such a property. In particular, the fact that Turing cracked the Enigma code (as has been mentioned about 10 times by towforce, who apparently thinks we didn't know that) is certainly no such reason. This is because Turing having been able to crack the Enigma code says as much about 8x8 chess as it does about 9x9 chess, 10x10 chess, .... 123x123 chess,... etc., and we know that not all of those games have a property that makes them easily solvable.

[Dann Corbit]

Having enigma machines on hand helped a lot too

[Angrim]

So the TCS way is to look at the complexity of NxN chess. The problem is to solve an arbitrary position in NxN chess by a method that is not exponential in N. But it was shown decades ago that this cannot be done.

If we could solve NxN chess with a method that IS exponential in N, that would be an incredible advance. Exponential in NxN is a lot closer to what we currently have.

[Uri Blass]

So the TCS way is to look at the complexity of NxN chess. The problem is to solve an arbitrary position in NxN chess by a method that is not exponential in N. But it was shown decades ago that this cannot be done.

If we could solve NxN chess with a method that IS exponential in N, that would be an incredible advance. Exponential in NxN is a lot closer to what we currently have.

I did not understand the article but
I think that you need first to define the game and if the 50 move rule exist or does not exist.
With the 50 move rule even KQ vs K is a draw in most positions when N is big enough and finiding if a position is a forced draw by the 50 move rule is not exponential problem and assuming every side has at most N^3 moves you can search 100 plies forward even by minimax in O(N^300) steps.

What is the number of white pieces and the number of black pieces in a general legal position that we need to solve?
Do we have at most 2N white pieces and at most 2N black pieces on the board?

How much memory do we have?(time to solve can be smaller if we have more memory)