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ARandumGuyyesterday at 3:08 PM0 repliesview on HN

I've got to ask, do you play much chess? Because this post reads like you don't understand much about chess.

The issue with "solving" chess isn't that there isn't an objectively best move in every position. The issue is that calculating that move is functionally impossible for most positions. That's because chess gets exponentially more complicated the more pieces there are on the board. For example, there are around 26 million positions with 5 or fewer pieces, and over 3.7 billion positions with 6 or fewer pieces.

And most of those positions are distinct. This isn't like a Rubik's cube, where there are a lot of functionally identical positions. Any experienced chess player can tell you that a single piece placement can be the difference between a winning position, and a losing position.

And this complexity is what I love about chess! I love the fact that I can enter positions that no one has ever encountered before just by playing some chess online. I love the fact that deep analysis is possible, but that the sheer size of the possibility space means we can never truly solve chess. Chess strikes a perfect balance of complexity. Any simpler, and evaluating the best move would be too easy. Any more complicated, and evaluation becomes so difficult that it's hardly worth trying.

Which isn't to say that we can't build computers that are very good at chess. A person hasn't beaten a top computer in decades. Magnus Carlson is probably the greatest chess player to have ever lived, and you can run software on your phone that could easily beat him. But there's a wide gulf between "can beat every human alive" and "plays objectively perfect chess."