[mysecretaccount]

> We should have solved chess already. > We should be aiming to solve chess, but we are not even trying.

We are trying and we should not expect to solve it because the search space is massive. There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe.

[throw-qqqqq]

> There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe

I’ll make an even stronger assertion:

There are more legal chess games in 40 moves or less, than there are atoms in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4165/are-there-...

[NickC25]

True, but we can at the very least teach a computer to prune what are effectively unreachable positions or openings that won't happen at a basic level let alone high level or GM level play.

For example, I don't think I've ever seen or will ever see: 1. a3 a6 2. h3 h6

The computer should be given the logic in which to solve chess by telling it right off the bat to not search through certain lines or openings because they are effectively useless.

[jibal]

You think no one has done that? Aside from explicitly encoding book lines, NN weights developed over millions of games steer chess engines away from useless lines.

But if you don't explore a line, even if you believe it's effectively useless, then you haven't solved chess.

P.S.

> I don't think I've ever seen or will ever see: 1. a3 a6 2. h3 h6

I have. Children and other beginners often do play like this. And even at GM levels we've seen nonsense like the Bongcloud and, marginally less nonsensically, the Cow opening.

[NickC25]

>But if you don't explore a line, even if you believe it's effectively useless, then you haven't solved chess.

That's actually a good point because ideas that modern GMs found to be useless (in particular, locking a wing down via aggressive early wing play) have actually found a new home in AlphaZero's play.

What might be completely dumb from an early move (say, aggressively pushing the F pawn from the start) might provide to be an incredible opening, but humans are too stupid to be able to execute it perfectly.

[GistNoesis]

This is the precisely the point I am trying to make :

A candidate solution function can take a very small finite space : much smaller than the number of gamestates. And we can invalidate a candidate solution by finding a single counter example.

Current chess engine can't be invalidated quickly : they are not trying to solve chess. They are not falsifiable. They are not attempting to precisely define the frontier which is what I think where remaining efforts should be made.

We are just trying to encode the frontier like we would with a mandelbrot fractal.

Proving that a solution is valid is harder than finding a solution. Here I am suggesting we find the solution first.

Proving can also be done without exploring all legal chess positions. For example you can use branch and bound to cull vast amount of state space once you have your function. You just have to partition the state space and prove on each partition that the function is constant, for example when one side has 8 queen and the other has only a king with freedom of movement the position is winnable and you don't have to check every gamestate.

I am stating that there is a good chance that by searching for a function we will stumble upon one which has no counter example, because precisely the complexity of chess is not infinite (unproven conjecture (no-turing completeness of adversarial chess) ). We should be looking for it.

[charcircuit]

>We are trying

Who is currently trying? You make it sound like people think it is impossible and hence would not try.

>There are more legal games of chess than atoms in the universe.

This only matters if you are doing a pure brute force. Also comparing exponential numbers to a count is an unfair comparison where exponents easily win.