In the 1920s Capablanca claimed chess has been solved, the same claim was repeated by Fischer half a century later, but stronger human players and engines still come regularly along.elpapa wrote:Strong engines playing each other draw more often than weak engines playing each other.
Now, if we draw a graph (elo/draw%), find a best fit curve and extrapolate it, we should be able to estimate the strength of engines playing perfect chess (=100% draws).
Does this seem reasonable? Has it been done?
I bet perfect play is way above 6000 elo, current top engines' eval could be reasonably expanded at least 5-fold, and each new feature will bring some higher winning percentage. Same goes true for search.
I am not certain that perfect chess means drawing all games, rather than not losing a single game. The stronger the engines, the more games they win with white. How do you reconcile the 2 contradictory paradigms: the stronger the engines, the more games they are drawing, and, the stronger the engines, the more games they are winning with white?
For me, there are still too many unknowns in the equation for us to be able to draw definitive conclusions. But thinking that perfect play is maybe some 500 elo away is very funny to me; 2000-3000 elo is a more reasonable estimate, but I am not certain this is the upper bound too.