alt Hacker News> If the complexity of chess is finite this is possible.
This is like saying the distance to Mars is finite so it should be possible to just go and live there. It's not theoretically impossible, but at the time it is practically impossible. There are real engineering challenges between here and there that have not yet been solved and from the looks of it, it will be at least several more decades before we get there.
In your example, you gloss over the construction of a "finite time oracle" by just saying "just train it until it is perfect". If humanity knew how to do that we could solve a whole other (more interesting) set of problems, but we don't.
>"just train it until it is perfect"
Yes that's exactly the problem with current approach based on a "valuation" function.
They are not trying to aim for perfection, and therefore cannot make progress anymore.
To progress you must precisely define what is the frontier : an evaluation of 0.1 is not resolved to one of "white win", "draw", "white lose" which they theoretically must be. They are not "committing" to anything.
To train such a network to perfection you must avoid training your neural network for the "average" game state, but rather also train for "hard mining samples", game states which define the frontier.
Find a candidate, find a violation, add to dataset of training examples, Retrain to perfection on a growing dataset, (or a generator of hard positions) to find a new candidate and Loop.