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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Question: if we discovered a way for white to always force a win, would humans be able to use that to beat black AIs consistently?

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This has been already found for checkers, but players around the world still play it. If the way is too complicated then we cannot apply it unaided.

It feels kind of surprising that this doesn't exist (yet). There are only a handful of reasonable moves per turn, and given the unbelievable amounts of moves that offline chess engines can process given time and server farms, I'm just surprised that doesn't overwhelm the reasonable branches at some point into forcing a win. Maybe someday.

The size of chess is approximately 10^50

Computers cost about $0.01 / GFlop (10^12 operaions); $1e47 for 10^50 operations.

The world economy is $1e14/yr.

That's 1e33 years to check every chess position, using all of Earth resources.

You'd need to find symmetries to collapse the search spaceby a factor of 10^33

For what it's worth, endgame table databases exist that give perfect play for when there are a limited number of pieces left on the board.

As of now, we have databases for perfect play when 7 pieces remain on the board (including the two kings). The 8-piece tablebase is computationally possible, but I don't believe a comprehensive release has come out yet. Even the current 7-piece tables are incomplete because situations like lone king vs. six opposing pieces haven't been explicitly calculated due to their obviousness.

Yes; further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess

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