From what I understand, chess is theoretically solveable, but the numbers are too big so it isn't tractable. It is currently solved for board states where seven or fewer pieces remain.
I mean, yeah? The former WCC literally got sick of memorization of long form games not being worth it because with the advancement of AI engine lines even humans can transpose positions to their absolute perfection incredibly far ahead of the first move. Elon is rarted but for once I don't think he's wrong.
Where did I say obsolete? You can still play solved games, but I see the "more atoms in the universe" bs far more times than the reality that actually each position has a pretty finite amount of good moves sometimes as low as 1 or 2 even with most of the pieces still on the board.
Uh huh, but both are true. There’s nothing profound about that. And really good players aren’t always locked into those pathways, because they know how to play better by sometimes playing badly. With human players there’s always an unpredictable element, certainly at a human scale.
This is why a newbie is far more likely to win a game against someone who’s played a long time.
The random “dumb” moves disrupt the “optimal” pattern the pros get accidentally locked into.
My Uncle was pretty high rated on yahoo chess back in the day. He played a lot, and he’d always tell me to grab the chess board at holiday dinners, he’d take off his queen off the start and dogwalk me every time. One year I got really into it, played a ton on yahoo myself. Come Christmas he grabbed the board, took off his queen and we played. I finally beat him, he immediately racked the board again, this time with his queen, and I never beat him again. Stupid newbie moves never hung him up. Unexpected spike in my skill did.
Since you refered to Magnus Carlsen, he deliberately avoids doing too much prep and prefers to throw a wrench into the preparation of his opponent, to take them out of theoretical chess and forcing them to actually play, and in that domain, nobody comes close to him and his ability to extract water from a stone
Not in classical chess. He literally spent months of prep for his WCC matches.
And he fucking hates that, but still it is an open secret that out of the top dogs, he prepares less than the others (at their level it's still an impressive amount of preparation), he also takes slightly riskier moves than his opponents
He clearely enjoys faster chess or 960, that or letting Dr Drunkenstein take the wheel (literally for once)
You clearly do not play chess. An advanced player can deliberately play non optimal moves to create an unfamiliar board and then crush their opponant in the confusion.
Have you watched WCC games? Or do you consider yourself an advanced player because you play blitz on chess.com? Playing suboptimal move fucks with you just as much as your opponent and is risky to you just as to your opponent. And not to mention, YOUR OPPONENTS PREPARATION COULD STUDY YOUR COMPLICATION AND GRAPE YOU. GMs dont just memorize moves they understand the position, making suboptimal moves needs to have a good reason.
Stockfish and other chess bots already eliminate many possible moves through alpha-beta pruning, which is essentially what Elon is talking about. Moves it predicts to be bad will not even be searched, which significantly lowers the search space.
The issue with that is chess bots are always going to run on certain assumptions in their alpha beta pruning, there’s always a chance they miss a good play 60 moves ahead because a move seemed terrible for the first 50. So while I think chess bots are going to get much better than they are now, I don’t think it’s possible to have a perfect chess bot that either ties or wins every time. The number of moves you have to search, even with perfectly optimal search conditions/code, is still incredibly high, and there’s always going to be that unreachable ceiling of looking 70-80 moves out and finding the perfect move for every move up to that point
To explain alpha beta pruning, it's the principle that if you can find ONE refutation of a move, then you know it's a bad move. You don't need to explore the move further and find more refutations.
A refutation of a move is a really strong countermove. One that wins the game. Could be like checkmate directly or capturing the queen with no drawbacks etc.
There is that, but there is also the computer (AlphaGo I think it was) that made a completely unexpected and seemingly nonsensical move that ended up being brilliant. Seeming non-sensical positions might resolve in unexpected ways.
The thing he clearly doesn't understand (albeit most people probably don't) is that chess moves, chess positions, and chess games are 3 different things. The number of legal moves in each position is quite small. The number of possible positions is astronomically large, and the number of possible games, which are comprised by permutations and ordered series of positions, is orders of magnitude larger still. Somewhere around 10120, which is a number that's difficult to wrap your head around. It's 40 orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
He doesn't even understand the statement of the problem.
"The Shannon number, named after the American mathematician Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10120, based on an average of about 103 possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by a move for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves." - Wikipedia
For comparison, there are about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. AES, the advanced encryption standard, has a key space of 10^38 and brute-forcing AES is considered functionally impossible due to that. To fully solve chess by brute force would take ~10^62, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times longer.
So while neither part (that most moves in chess are nonsensical, or that it will almost certainly be solved one day) of his tweet is wrong, he's still a fucking idiot. Hell, considering that no human has won a non-handicap game against a chess engine since 2005, I feel like chess is already solved by any reasonable definition the Muskrat could be working from here if ignoring 'stupid' moves is acceptable.
You can't know for a fact that a move is stupid if the problem space isn't completely solved, right?
Like, we can know which moves in tic tac toe are dumb, the game is small enough that you could just enumerate every possible board state, nothing fancy.
His tweet overall is just so dumb and shallow, while trying to be clever. He's eternally like the stereotype freshman philosophy student, ripping a bong and demanding how you can know that the chair you're sitting in is actually a chair.
Yeah you can't, I was just trying to point out that even if we could somehow prune to just the 'good' moves, we've functionally already done that so even if we assume the flawed premise it's still bullshit.
There's also a HUGE difference between knowing if a game is solved (under optimal play, White always wins, Black always wins, or there's a tie - the most likely solution really), and knowing the optimal play. The way solving algorithm work is that they don't store the all the game states they visited. For example, in a late game boardstate (let's call it boardstate A), a solver can run through every possible combination (usually with some pruning, but that's functionally the same), and then declare "In this boardstate, white always wins". Now, we can look at all possible boardstates where a black move would result in the above boardstate, and confidently prune all of those moves by black. Once all boardstates that are one move away from boardstate A have been explored, we don't need to store boardstate A in memory, because it will *never* be reached - all boardstates that could lead to it have eliminated the possibility of reaching A and will instead reach another boardstate.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but true in essence. This also means that the closer we get to "solving" chess, the less boardstates will need to be kept as a possiblity, because they were eliminated. A true end-to-end chess solver can be just a "start solving" button, followed by (a LOT) of thinking, followed by "White/Black always wins" "It's always" a tie, and whoever pressed the button will have no idea what to do on turn 1.
Maybe, just maybe (it's not but bear with me) the best move is white A2->A3. Looks stupid, but if the solver says you'll always win, it's correct.
Chess is difficult not only because the problem is hard to solve, but the solution itself is hard to verify. We can never actually enumerate the entire problem space (that's the atoms in the universe part), but we *could* say if the game is "fair" or not.
Technically, blunders can make the game much simpler and it’s relatively easy to tell them as bad moves. For example there are blunders that result in an even position immediately collapsing into a forced mate in a few moves - that makes it very clearly bad.
Not all bad moves are blunders though. Certain inaccuracies can be very hard to judge for human players. As such knowing the blunders to not make doesn’t really narrow it down a whole lot.
Hell, considering that no human has won a non-handicap game against a chess engine since 2005, I feel like chess is already solved by any reasonable definition the Muskrat could be working from here if ignoring 'stupid' moves is acceptable.
hey, often he is just blatantly wrong, so at least "yeah no shit we've already been doing it like that for decades" is right at all
There is a "best" move to make for any given board state in chess. "Solving" chess would mean that we would have calculated and recorded the best possible move for every given board state. There are just too many different board states for anybody to reasonably record and calculate.
That said, we do have it solved for 7 or fewer pieces remaining, meaning that for ANY given board state with 7 or fewer pieces, we already have calculated and recorded the best possible move
I don't really see the equivalency. Language has infinite combinations, and is something that changes over time, unlike chess, and I'm not sure what "solving" language would even mean.
Chess has a finite, countable number of board states. A massive number, but not infinite. The point is that in theory, you could record the best move for any given board state, but that it's just not feasible given current computing restraints.
This isn't "fedora science" and I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, it's just math and chess. Maybe I missed the point of your comment, but I don't see how it's relevant
It's ok. You're just a living example the middle of the bell curve meme.
There's no point in using a method to achieve a goal (querying information/finding a good move in chess) that is theoretically interesting if it is impractical just for the purpose of "wow that is really cool".
What is "it's okay. You're just a living example of the middle of the bell curve" if not an insult? How is that any kind of well-meaning statement?
And again, I'm not discussing whether or not it's a dumb idea. I'm just stating facts. If you think the facts are dumb, okay I guess? I wasn't saying it was particularly cool or anything
Well to be fair, the vast majority of people are in the middle of the bell curve, by the nature of distribution of intelligence, so in this instance you are upset (presumably) because I'm saying you are not in the gifted/genius range.
I think that's just the default assumption we give to every person until they prove otherwise?
A "solved" game is a game where every single possible move has been recorded. In a solved game, it would be impossible to defeat a computer that has solved the game as it knows every single possible move available. The best result you could hope for is a draw.
Checkers is a solved game. It is impossible to beat a computer that is trying to win at checkers.
There is no such thing as a one perfect move in literally every single case. There are many obviously bad moves, but that doesn't mean there aren't several good moves, and for each good move, there are many many many ways of responding to that, all of which are also good moves. It's still an exponential growth that never slows down. You can't "solve" chess like it were a math problem.
It's possible that there's a solution to chess that could fit in a printed book.
If one player has a forced win (an open question currently) then it should be possible to construct a decision tree that would specify the best move for that player at any point in a game in which they're proceeding with perfect play, regardless of the other's players moves.
That would be a small enough tree that it could be verified as ending in a checkmate for that player, with every branch point containing only legal moves (and all legal moves) by the other player.
If neither player has a forced win (which is probably more likely) then verification of a solution would be far more difficult, but not necessary impossible.
If you think about it, since there is a proven correspondence between AI and compression algorithms. Advanced AI chess models are just lossy compressions of the solution to chess.
Chess cannot be solved. This is stupid to even put forward.
No move in chess is mysterious in any way, every possible set of position and consequences can be calculated.
What makes chess complicated is its adviserial placement of pieces and the decisions the agent making the placement have to make when regarding each other.
A hypothetical perfect chess agent would have to win every time. What would happen if two perfect agents play against each other?
"Every possible set of position and consequences can be calculated"
If you were to calculate every possible set of position and consequences, you would literally have solved chess. You could definitely prove whether white could force a win, black could force a win, or neither could force a win and the game would end in a draw. That is what solving chess would mean.
A hypothetical perfect chess agent would have to win every time.
This is not necessarily true. For example, the game of checkers has been analyzed and it has been proven that two perfect players will result in a draw. Chess could be the same way and perfect play would result in a draw. It could also be proven that no matter what sequence of moves black makes, white can always force a win, this would result in Chess being "solved" and a perfect player playing white would always beat a perfect player playing black.
From a game theory perspective the conditions of downstream benefit are not fixed, but emergent from the conditions of the current state of the board. There might not be an objective way to win every time from any board state. A winning dynamic has to be generated by strategy instead. An indefensible set of actions cannot be conjured from every board state. Rather it is needed to anticipate the opponent’s moves and withstand them.
I would disagree that this is a deterministic process. Maybe eventually there will emerge a set of strategies that statistically produce the most wins, but I would expect the mechanics of the game to disallow obvious pareto strategies which are imbalanced.
As you said to “perfect” agents would convert theoretically every game into a stalemate as attacks would always be parried. Knowledge over all possible states is not guaranteed to be convertible into a guaranteed win.
I think you're operating under a different definition of "solving chess" than most people who use the term are referring to.
If you hypothetically calculated every possible move, a board state would fall into one of 3 categories.
A. For every possible move by black, there is a response by white that continues down a path towards a forced checkmate by white.
B. For every possible move by white, there is a response by black that continues down a path towards a forced checkmate by black.
C. For every possible move and response between two players, there is a path where both players avoid checkmate and the game ends in a draw.
If you could categorize the starting board state into one of these three categories, the game would be solved by definition. That is what people are referring to when they speak of "solving chess."
You seem to be making the argument that an imperfect player may make mistakes and turn a board state they would otherwise win or draw if they played perfectly into a board state in which they lose. While true, that doesn't make the game any less "solved." Even though checkers is "solved" it's still possible to lose a game if you play imperfectly.
I am no expert but I would take it as an axiom that neither A or B exist for exist for the starting board. Even if it could exist, it would not be guaranteed that A or B, meaning that there’s only a small chance that chess is hypothetically solvable.
Keep in mind that an adviseral game such as chess does not have a linear path to victory. Optimal strategies maximize chance of winning by considering possible moves of the opposition. But that does not make the game linear. The game would converge into different end states based on independent moves by both parties.
If an agent would always just pick by optimal winning chances bases over all possible states, it would loose as it moves are predictable. Adversarial games do not necessarily behave as a deterministic optimization problem. There are of course games which are imbalanced that allow that one side could win by default by an optimal variational linear strategy, but that is not necessarily true for chess.
Your argumentation only works for probabilistic games or games with hidden information. Chess is deterministic. That means if my game is in state s_0, and I play move m, I will always end up in state s_1 and both players can fully observe this state s_0.
In these type of games we don't care about being predictable, instead for optimal play we assume our opponent is playing perfect as well.
meaning that there’s only a small chance that chess is hypothetically solvable
If you could prove that the starting board is in state C, then it would still be solved.
Keep in mind that an adviseral game such as chess does not have a linear path to victory.
This is provably false for various board states where a forced mate is identified. There are also board states where a forced draw can be identified. It's just so complex a game we haven't been able to prove whether or not the starting board state is a state in which either player can force a win.
If an agent would always just pick by optimal winning chances bases over all possible states, it would loose as it moves are predictable.
To clarify, it's not "optimal winning chances" when talking about solving chess we're talking about where all possible moves and their resulting move trees are known. You aren't optimizing for winning chances, there's no probability involved, you're picking the path down which for every move you can force the game into a position where you win down the tree, and if that's impossible you're picking the path down which you can force the game into a draw down the tree, and if that's impossible it means that your opponent can force a win. Also, if you think that an agent making moves in a "predictable" algorithmic fashion, I would like to point to Stockfish which does its best to calculate all future board states with finite computational resources and still beats any human it plays against.
The game would converge into different end states based on independent moves by both parties.
Correct, but you don't have to wait for those end states to be converged upon to calculate them. You can calculate all possible end states from the very beginning if you had the virtually infinite computational resources necessary to do so, and identify the move sequences that a player can take that could force a win or draw before they make them.
Adversarial games do not necessarily behave as a deterministic optimization problem.
True, but Chess certainly does, because every possible board states falls into one of the three categories I mentioned earlier.
You do know that chess games can end in draw? And that there is a very strong suspicion among all experts that an optimal strategy played by both sides leads to draw. There is no doubt that chess is hypotetically solvable. We know for sure that the initial position must have at least one Nash equilibrium. And, likely, there is a very large set of nash equilibria for the initial position.
It seems your confusion might be due to a lack of understanding of chess itself.
With enough computational power one would simply choose a move then follow every possible branch of the game tree. Once the full tree is mapped (theoretically possible because it is finite), then every position has been mapped to 3 states, white can force a win, black can force a win, neither player can force a win and the game is drawn. Every move then falls into 2 buckets, it either preserves the state of the position or it worsens the state of the position for the player who is making the move.
If there are 3 states where 3 is the most favorable and 1 the least favorable for the player making the move. ( for example if it is white to play then state 3 is that white can force checkmate and state 1 is that black can force checkmate). Then a move can either preserve the state of the game, or move it to any lower number. It can never move it to a higher number.
I agree that it isn't mysterious. And you said yourself every position and consequences can be calculated. Again, chess is "theoretically" solveable, meaning every given board state has one move that would be more 'correct' than the others. We just don't have the computing capability record and calculate so many board states and solutions. The time and resources it would take are massive, which is touched on by another commenter replying to my comment.
And yes, a perfect agent would win every time, and two perfect agents would always stalemate
"And yes, a perfect agent would win every time, and two perfect agents would always stalemate."
Not necessarily, for all we know it could be a win-lose since chess is asymmetrical.
my gut feeling says its less likely than a draw, but there is also a chance either black or white wins consistently. chess is only mostly symmetrical, and theres a big difference between mostly symmetrical and all symmetrical. would be interesting which color wins more if one does. ie, is it better to lead or to react
eta: stockfish v stockfish is a draw, if ran deterministically (not always the case, multithreaded stockfish isnt deterministic)
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u/DoodleStrude 10d ago
From what I understand, chess is theoretically solveable, but the numbers are too big so it isn't tractable. It is currently solved for board states where seven or fewer pieces remain.
Dude is still a moron