What do you call "solve"?

[fern]

Thanks for the lesson, pal, though I already knew most of it. As I said, mine is just an intuition not grounded in nothing in this realm of chess. I can be absolutely wrong, of course.
But...
as much all what you say presupposes ssomething that is not posible to date to do, that is, to really do all that calculations, node by nodem leaf by leaf, there is still room for considering an atom of my thought as right.
I you cannot calculate the result of an infinite agregation of numbers even if you know the procedure to be done -take a number, add the next, etc-, then what you have and you can do is some intermediate, unacurate operation, where my thought of trasformations takes place.
You can, by example, say that the result is an infinite number and that's truth but not useful. (As to say chess can be solved, but you cannot)
Or you can take a package of numbers and make some guess about the future. Say, "first 1234 numbers give this amount; next package of same number of numbers will give us the same or near".
And so on.
In a way or another, you finally fall again in some kind of indetermination.

My best
Fern

[Sven]

Thanks for the lesson, pal, though I already knew most of it.

It was never my intention to give a lesson to someone who already knows most of it, so please accept my apologies if my post gave that impression. It is quite difficult for me, being an active CCC member for less than one year only, to know enough about the background of knowledge of people in this "General Topics" forum. Not all computer chess enthusiasts are programmers or have some formal/mathematical background. So I try to react on what people are writing. The "keywords" that had let me think you might perhaps not be familiar with that formal game tree stuff were those where you mentioned your thesis in sociological causation. When reading it, I intuitively felt that this were quite unrelated to the game of chess, and therefore I wrote what I wrote.

(As to say chess can be solved, but you cannot)

Absolutely agreed so far. I cannot, you cannot, and currently nobody else can

Sven

[fern]

No need to apologize, pal, I was talking in that way without any feeling of have been lectured.
Probably you are right there is not relation between my thesis and chess. In real life, human action is capable of creating new values, rules, etc each minute, changing the matrix, but clearly is not so in chess.
And still I feel that there is in this issue something more than a number of paths going on to the end.
Probably I feel so because in reality we cannot do that determination of those paths.
We can just get some shortcuts, some aproximative situations as those that are embedded in chess theory since ever.
My bst
Fern

[Uri]

I believe chess can be solved using chess theory. Chess is mostly theory anyway.

There are recurring patterns in chess and statistically speaking a solution can be inferred from these patterns. In many cases we can already say which positions lead to a win, which ones to a draw and which to a loss. Modern chess programs already use statistical learning theory and some pattern recognition but there's still a long way to go in pattern recognition. That's what Steinitz did when he first isolated and analyzed a set of common positions.

Also when a computer plays 2700 GMs like Vadim Milov (who played better than Rybka in the match) and loses only 1 out of 100 games then we can also say that chess is almost solved.