Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 17:18:32 01/18/05
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On January 18, 2005 at 20:01:21, Uri Blass wrote: >On January 18, 2005 at 19:45:36, Anthony Cozzie wrote: > >>Chandler, your statement "chess cannot be solved by computers" is patently >>WRONG. Zappa on my opteron can solve chess, it would just take a VERY long time >>to do so. TSCP on a PDA can solve chess, it would just take even longer. > >I know nothing about zappa but I am sure that tscp cannot solve chess. > >It has limited depth of 32 plies based on my memory so it will never search >lines that are longer than 32 plies. > >I believe that zappa also cannot solve chess. > >possible reasons except the reason of maximal depth are: >1)zappa use null move pruning that is not correct so it may miss some zugzwang. >2)zappa has some bug that will cause it to crash after 12345678910111213 nodes >It never search that number of nodes so you never found that bug. >3)There is no hardware that live forever and you will get an hardware crash >after 1234 years of search regardless of the hardware that you use. >4)God decided that this world has only 123456789 years to live and zappa needs >more time to solve chess so it simply not fast enough. What if there is a forced checkmate and it is 40 plies away from the root? You cannot know that the universe will end before Zappa finds it, even pragmatically. Turning off null move will halve the search depth, but going to proof search instead of evaluation may double it. So even the loss of null move may not matter. Besides, even if it is still halved, you just double the time. It is a mistake to say that something cannot happen, no matter how absurd. IMO-YMMV. I believe that many smart people at one time believed that a computer would never beat a GM. And probably after that, many believed that a computer could never beat the strongest player in the world. We do not know how hard it is to solve chess, except for the worst case. It is possible to stumble onto a solution tomorrow.
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