Is there any project coming to solve chess?

[Uri]

Chess cannot probably be solved by a computer. This game is just too complex for a computer to solve, let alone "understand".

If I had to guess it will take probably a million years from now before that becomes even remotely possible but by that time humanity could already be extinct.

Chess programs are way too stupid and slow to solve chess in my opinion. I'm talking about today's chess programs which are pretty stupid compared to the human brain full capabilities.

My point is that humans will long be extinct before chess is solved by a computer.

[Uri Blass]

Chess cannot probably be solved by a computer. This game is just too complex for a computer to solve, let alone "understand".

If I had to guess it will take probably a million years from now before that becomes even remotely possible but by that time humanity could already be extinct.

Chess programs are way too stupid and slow to solve chess in my opinion. I'm talking about today's chess programs which are pretty stupid compared to the human brain full capabilities.

My point is that humans will long be extinct before chess is solved by a computer.

I do not agree that chess programs are stupid compared to the human brain full capabilities.

There are positions when they are stupid relative to human but these type of positions do not happen often.
There are more positions when humans are stupid relative to chess engines.

[OneTrickPony]

Just as, for all practical purpose, pi is a rational number.

While true, this is not a fair comparison.
Chess being weakly solved in practice actually means something. Back then when chess wasn't weakly solved for practical purposes people were willingly but unknowingly playing into losing lines because they didn't know the solution (their hardware, software and/or analysis skills weren't good enough). It doesn't happen today anymore as everyone has access to "the solution" at home (SF eval).
If someone published the real solution to chess say 20 years ago it would change the game in an observable way. If someone were to publish it today exactly nothing would change (I mean "weak" solution, publishing full solution would change quite a lot).

This is all unlike your example because irrationality of pi never mattered to anyone outside academic math and for that pi is not rational number for practical purposes (that is math research) anyway.

[chesskobra]

Weak solution is a mathematical concept. What does weak solution 'in practice' mean? Should it be taken to mean that most games under conditions x, y, z are drawn? In game theoretic sense for a weak solution all we need is one forcing line (or subtree) for a win or draw, so the overall statistics of the game tree is irrelevant. In fact it is possible to construct games (and even chess positions) for which if you do not know the thin winning or drawing line, your statistical experiments and intuition would be completely off. How are you sure that the initial position is not one such position?

What about the position with 8 pieces (IIRC) that is winning for white in 500+ moves. Probably ignoring the 50 move rule, but still is the existence of such positions of any relevance to our intuition (or a lack of intuition) about the game theoretic value of chess?

What about stockfish losing a game pair (lost at least one in the recent TCEC didn't it?) and Lc0 losing multiple game pairs? How do these results inform your own intuition? Or do you just explain such results away on case by case basis, and continue to hold on to your intuition that chess is 'solved in practice'?

[jefk]

this forum /hosting sucks big time

twice tried to post a (longer) reply

but can't see it.

well so be it

PS if a game is weakly solved and it's a draw it doesn't
mean there still could be winning lines for the first mover
quite the contrary..

PS2 game results of TCEC mean nothing because that's not from
the initial position (same with some 8 pieces egtb positions btw)

[petero2]

Weak solution is a mathematical concept. What does weak solution 'in practice' mean?

I propose the following definition. You provide a publicly available chess playing entity that behaves deterministically. For example you might specify:

* Using Stockfish 16 with specified UCI parameter settings
* Use a publicly available opening book, possibly empty
* Search limits, for example 1e9 nodes per move using a single search thread

You then claim that this chess playing entity is unbeatable when playing a game from the starting position, regardless of which color it plays. If no one is able to prove this claim to be wrong in a long time (i.e. no one can ever beat the entity), we might consider this entity to have "weakly solved chess in practice".

Is anyone willing to make such a claim for a deterministic publicly available chess playing entity?

Actually the opening book move selection does not have to be deterministic, but using a book that has more than one move for a position just makes it harder to obtain an unbeatable entity, because an opponent just needs to find a refutation for one of the book moves to prove that the entity is beatable.

For this definition to have practical value, it must be possible to run the entity on existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time, just as the mathematical "weakly solved" definition specifies that the algorithm must be possible to run on existing hardware in reasonable amount of time.

[chesskobra]

For this definition to have practical value, it must be possible to run the entity on existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time, just as the mathematical "weakly solved" definition specifies that the algorithm must be possible to run on existing hardware in reasonable amount of time.

Mathematical definition doesn't say anything about existing hardware or reasonable time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

[chesskobra]

The only way to post a message here is type it in an external editor and then ctrl-C, ctrl-V, click submit. Otherwise, the site throws you out.

[petero2]

For this definition to have practical value, it must be possible to run the entity on existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time, just as the mathematical "weakly solved" definition specifies that the algorithm must be possible to run on existing hardware in reasonable amount of time.

Mathematical definition doesn't say anything about existing hardware or reasonable time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

That Wikipedia article contains the following text:

Given the rules of any two-person game with a finite number of positions, one can always trivially construct a minimax algorithm that would exhaustively traverse the game tree. However, since for many non-trivial games such an algorithm would require an infeasible amount of time to generate a move in a given position, a game is not considered to be solved weakly or strongly unless the algorithm can be run by existing hardware in a reasonable time.

Whether that is part of the definition or not is debatable, but without such a rule, it can be claimed that chess has already been strongly solved by the mini-max algorithm, but that no one has bothered to execute the algorithm yet.

[chesskobra]

I think there is some confusion in your interpretation of weak solvability caused by the wikipedia article. So let me quote from Nowakowski (Games of No Chance Vol. 1, p88). (I also looked at a couple of other well known books, and they don't seem to use the terminology anywhere.)

"What does it mean to solve a game? Allis [1994] defines three levels:

Ultra-weakly solved: The game-theoretic value for the initial position has been determined.

Weakly solved: The game is ultra-weakly solved and a strategy exists for achieving the game-theoretic value from the opening position, assuming reasonable computing resources.

Strongly solved: For all possible positions, a strategy is known for determining the game-theoretic value for both players, assuming reasonable computing resources."

The above definitions will no doubt require some refinement to make them precise because, as stated above, strong solution does not require weak solution, so min-max would seem enough in case of finite games. As stated above, only ultra-weak solvability is precisely stated. Also, as stated above, there is no difference between ultra-weak and weak in case of finite games where we have min-max algorithm.

But the crucial part in ultra-weak and weak is "the game theoretic value of the initial position has been determined", which is not the case of chess. So min-max alone is not sufficient to claim ultra-weak or weak solvability. In Hex, we can prove that the first player has a winning strategy, implying that Hex is at least ultra-weakly solved.