I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good experts that manage to explain it to normal people. Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with audience through questions from chat etc.

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.

I don't think that's solved, actually.

It isn't solved but it's pretty obvious. There's enough drawn endgames where material advantage is insufficient to win

Antichess at least is a solved win for White

> I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good experts that manage to explain it to normal people. Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with audience through questions from chat etc.

I usually don't follow chess, but I still end up watching the WC matches on Norwegian TV. They manage to make it interesting and exciting.

I love the idea of being somewhere that (a) what the world chess champion does is big news and (2) there are resources dedicated like this to the broadcast of chess matches. American culture is just so ostentatiously mauvais ton in comparison with so many other countries (my other point of comparison was being in England in ’93 and watching a game show where it was clearly a competition of intellectual skills and the winner’s prize was a dictionary—I just cannot imagine that being on American television).

If find it suspicious calling a match interesting when people need to have "Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with audience through questions from chat etc." - I always found that suspicious with the NFL too.

The overall match can be interesting, while still having some periods of lower intensity. The guests are typically celebrities which also has some relation to chess, for example a famous actress being an avid amateur chess player as well.

The guests will typically join in on the discussion of the positions, and as such often serves as a proxy for the viewers by asking questions like "but why doesn't he just do X now" and similar.

It doesn't always work but overall I think it's been a positive addition to their broadcasts.

I do watch the WC matches myself, but definitely not live.

Trips to Spain between moves.

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.

While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.

I think no expert will claim it’s a win for either player, but I don’t think all experts agree it’s a draw. There will be some that don’t claim to know either way.

(If they had to bet, I think all experts would bet on “it’s a draw”, but some experts won’t be wanting to bet, even if they think that’s almost certain)

I don't see why anyone would agree to that. In fact, I can see it being far more likely that chess experts believe it ends in a win for white considering that today white is favored, to the point where if offered a quick draw, black will almost certainly take it (unless they need a win to move up a rank in a tournament, etc).

This is flat out false. Virtually all of the experts agree on this, and in top engine and human play the percentage of games drawn is increasing, not decreasing. AlphaZero on autoplay @ 1 minute per move draws 98% of the games.

> if offered a quick draw, black will almost certainly take it

[citation needed], and 1200 elo games on lichess aren’t a valid citation

>AlphaZero on autoplay

While Alpha Zero is good, this is not very good proof. Alpha Zero is not perfect, so if there are tiny ways to win that Alpha Zero misses, it will miss it on both sides (being the same engine), so would never explore that path.

It's like claiming inbreeding will result in perfection :)

> While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter

Can you cite this?

I can't see anything on this.

It's not something a chess champion would know on their own for instance.

Basically you have to get a good understanding that the advantage of being white can't be leveraged enough to win.

Obviously it can't be proved, but to even get an idea will be very mathematical or computational.

Chess is still no-hard, so "proving this" will be near impossible. The closest we have is statistics. I remember watching a "bot battle." A chess tournament for bots only, algorithms playing eachother. Nearly 70% of these games ended in draw.

Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.

Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.

NP-hardness is indeed often not a big deal in practice because NP-hardness is a statement about asymptotic worst case complexity. In practice you have some finite size problems that are often of average difficulty, not of worst case difficulty. For example, we solve instances of SAT every day, some of them quite large. Even humans are able to solve many Sudoku puzzles, even though Sudoku is NP-hard.

If you hang with the right crowds (for example people into software correctness), PSPACE completeness is easy and you even solve undecidable problems every day.

I solve the TSP every time I run errands.

How Sudoku is NP-Hard?

If you generalise sudoku to a board with sides length, with subsquares with sides length n, then sudoku is no complete.

The reason chess is hard to solve is not because it's NP-hard (which it is not, being a constant-sized problem), it's because chess is a big problem.

It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.

I never said chess was NP hard, it was an analogy. The equivalent would be some kind of chess on an NxN or Nx8 board I guess, I don't know how hard would be.

Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of meaningless.

Like parent was saying - that is true of all problems in practise since the earth has finite resources. That doesn't make complexity classes a useless concept.

In other news, no point in needing pi, because perfect circles dont actually exist in the real world.

I don't think people are trying to claim it's unimportant in general, to anyone, they're suggesting that it's completely unimportant in this conversation about how slow and boring championship chess matches are.

Yes and saying a problem is finite is also kind of meaningless. That narrows it down to everything except infinity. I also did not say that chess is NP-hard, it was an analogy.

Why hasn't it been done then?

We haven't build enough Dyson spheres to power a computer of the right size yet.

There are more states to calculate than atoms in the universe so it isn't possible to brute force the problem. Maybe it can be solved, but it will require math.

To be fair, on this scale, “the total number of atoms in observable universe” is quite a small number.

Even 52! comes pretty close to it, and that’s just one deck of cards.

Saying there are merely “more” states is almost insulting to the depth of a chess game :)

I invite you to sit down and solve it then

A hundred billion years is still constant time. That doesn't mean it's doable.

https://tcec-chess.com/

70% draws is a very small number, really. Not conclusive at all.

TCEC is forced to choose very imbalanced openings to make sure there are some non-drawn games. From starting position it'd be 100 draws out of 100 (also all very similar o each other)

> The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live.

> In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.

Come now. The WCC matches were entertaining to watch for chess enthusiasts. Even when games took two days, people would sit and analyze each position, and that was without computers.

They still do that, of course. Although chess computers have taken some of the fun out of the analysis, I've been to several live viewings of the recent WCCs at chess clubs and bars, where a local GM would sit and comment on the position and take questions and suggestions from the crowd.

But the WCC matches have become less entertaining for chess enthusiasts, since there is so much defensive play. There isn't too much to analyze in yet another Berlin game.

It's entertaining when someone makes a horrible blunder, but not in the same way – there's little to analyze in a position that's blundered.

So I'd argue the classical WCC used to be entertaining to watch live for chess enthusiasts, but now they're less entertaining for chess enthusiasts. For "regular people", they've never been very entertaining, except when there's a spectacular blunder, which has never been very entertaining for chess enthusiasts.

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.

True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my opinion.

An alternative is to have tie-breaks for every game, playing increasingly rapid time controls until the result is not a draw.

1. Classical game, win = 5 points.

2. Rapid game, win = 2 points

3. Blitz game, win = 1 point.

4. Armageddon game, win = 0.5 points.

This point layout might backfire and make the classical games even less interesting because the huge edge for winning is probably going to motivate extreme do-not-lose style play, which trends towards draws. But, nonetheless, wins in classical should be weighted well above the tie-breaks.

How would point ratio help if every game is a draw? Maybe if it was a round robin tournament that would help top two players competing for wins against less highly rated people and then drawing against each other. Like Liverpool and Man City

My feel is that from a game theoretical approach, a 3:1:0 scoring ratio would encourage enough players to at least try for a win sometimes that it would restore some of the interest and competitiveness to the sport.

Would you play tic-tac-toe for a win with that scoring ratio?

This is an inappropriate analogy. Chess at the highest levels is not drawish because the game is inherently drawish but because the meta of it is.

The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings, though it applies throughout the game in different ways. Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of champions, being a major part of the repertoire of players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's an increasingly rare guest at the highest level. It's not because it's considered unsound or even slightly dubious - it's a rock solid opening that gives black real winning chances. But the problem is it also gives him real losing chances. It's complex, difficult to play, and if you get outprepared by your opponent you may lose without him even having to make a single move himself, which is really one of the worst feelings in the world.

So instead the meta has largely shifted to openings that are more about minimizing risk where black, more or less, aims for a draw - and usually gets it. Changing the risk:reward ratios in a sufficiently extreme way is most certainly capable of changing the meta.

This reminds me of football analogy where goals scored at away matches count for two in competitions like Champions League.

I am not good at chess but would it help if win as black was rewarded more than win as white?

The current trend has to been to increase the value of any win, with things like 3 points for a win and only 1 point for a draw. In my opinion increasing the points based on color is an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to be seriously considered because of the fact that it would disrupt the "symmetry" in chess both the sort of abstract fashion, and also in the specific - such as requiring tournament pairing systems based on score to be completely reworked.

One tie break system, armageddon, does break the symmetry by giving black draw odds (he wins if the game is drawn) but less time in a blitz game. But it's very poorly regarded and generally only used as a this-game-MUST-have-a-decisive-result last resort.

This implies that top-level players aren't trying for a win.

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.

Even the best human players are nowhere near perfect play.

Chess engines have proven that even players that are 1000 Elo stronger than the best players alive today can lose. Just look at how each new version of Stockfish absolutely trounces the previous version.

Stockfish 7, released 6 years ago, is nearly 500 Elo weaker than the newest version, Stockfish 15.[0] That's the difference between Carlsen and the weakest grandmasters.

0. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597...

In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

It's possible, although it seems unlikely, that white is in zugzwang [1] on the starting position, in which case black would have a win with perfect play.

Chess is only solved for positions with 7 pieces or less (and some configurations of 8 pieces [2]), so we're far from knowing best play from the 32-piece starting position.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang

[2] https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-tablebases-a-...

> In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

White cannot have a tiny tiny edge against perfect play.

Either it is possible to force a win against perfect play, or it's not. So white is either winning or the game is a draw (or black is able to force a win against white's perfect play, but that's a whole different level of unlikely).

When talking about perfect play, terms like "tiny edge" lose their meaning.

It isn't known theoretically whether perfect play is enough for black to force a draw. It is also an infinitesimal probability that white starts off in zugzwang (i.e. all possible moves are bad).

However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a draw.

Why is that the consensus guess? I could imagine that a perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.

Just like we can efficiently find approximate solutions for the traveling salesman problem (that are at most 50% longer than the optimal solution), these heuristics have not much to do with the optimal solution.

Because when great players realize they have a position that they connect win are still able to figure out how to force a draw so they don't lose.

> I could imagine that a perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.

So can anyone. Nobody knows what perfect chess play is. Our best guess though is that whatever your opponent plays you can always force a draw before they can win.

That's an interesting point.

Unfortunately it leaves us in the position of not having much to go by, if expert experience doesn't help analyze the game.

I wonder how different a chess engine and optimal play look for the reduced sized boards.

Unless I missed something recent, it is not known whether any player has a winning strategy (or a drawing strategy, for that matter). It would be quite the discovery as well.

It would be wild if it turned out that some of the 20 first moves led into a tree that included a perfect winning path for black while others were draw on perfection: "take it, if you can, I bet you can't"

With connect-4 it's like that: playing in the middle on the 1st move means the first player wins, playing adjacent to the middle means the game will be drawn, and starting further to the side means the second player wins (all assuming otherwise perfect play).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four#Mathematical_solu...

Plenty of forced moves in that game, where there is only one option to not lose immediately. I basically sacrificed the last years of school math to a 10x8 variation of that game, it was almost as if there were two competitions in parallel, who would win and who could call a game decided first. Declaring the other guy winner before he even knew was almost better than winning (but certainly not as good as declaring victory and then explaining why)

Having a winning strategy for black seems impossible though; the discussion is whether white have it or is it a forced draw.

Why would that seem impossible? One could argue that white has to open up his defenses first, allowing black to pick the best response to that.

In general, there’s no guarantee of first mover’s advantage. For example, Hexapawn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapawn) is a win for black on some boards (https://web.archive.org/web/20050330222720/http://www.chessv...). Versions that are more complex than chess and are a win for black may exist.

White could start with a knight move. Unlike Hexapawn, in chess, white moving first provides an increase in optionality for white, and the board positions are not forcing white on some losing track, because white is free to "burn" a move with many pieces by taking 2 moves to get to the same place they could with 1 move. White can use two bishop moves, or a pawn push to the 3rd rank followed by the 4th rank, to turn around the initiative early in the game.

That would give black two moves in a row, which is a different scenario, and might still be optimal for black.

Black doesn't know it's getting two moves in a row when it makes the first move. And on the second move, it can only take advantage if white's first move reduces white's optionality in a specific manner, e.g. by blocking another piece essential for response to a certain tactic, which by construction, would mean it wasn't really an opportunity to transpose the game to hand over the initiative.

Not sure I follow.

The scenario we're positing is that perhaps, in fully-solved chess, white is actually in zugzwang, where every initial move is actually bad for them.

If there were some way for white to hand the first move to black, then clearly this would be the best solution.

But all the take-back solutions (e.g. move the knight forward and back again) actually give black two moves, which is a different situation.

And the stutter-step solution of white moving a pawn only one space instead of two doesn't work because that's simply refuting the premise that white is in zugzwang.

It's not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.

They don't anymore, at least not the computers. When you let them start from normal starting position and provide decent hardware and some time it's always a draw and has been for a few years now.

> always

Not always. Almost always.

No one is going to waste the CPU time running Stockfish (or GPU with Leela) against each other at classical time controls long enough to see a decisive game which might never happen anyway so we will likely never know. I think current Stockfish on a modern ThreadRipper with classical time control will never be beaten. I am not 100% sure I am right but I don't expect (but would love to!) to be proven wrong.

Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree. Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree.

Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.

Due to alpha-beta cutoffs, you don't need a full game tree. But if you did build a tree with all legal chess positions, it would have approximately 4.8x10^44 of them [1].

[1] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking

I am not saying Stockfish is going to solve it. I am saying it will not lose from the initial position. In other words my hypothesis is that we already have a soft solution to chess available. I can't prove it but I can proceed accordingly in practice (in opening preparation or correspondence games for example) and no one will prove me wrong or exploit it.

Stockfish lost a handful of games against Leela from starting positions that were a couple of moves into mainstream openings. I don't think it's at at all unlikely that there's a route that beats it.

Can you provide an example of such a game? I am following computer chess pretty closely and it's just all draws if we start from mainstream openings. By mainstream I mean things that are considered solid by today top players and engines. Some of the traditional mainstream openings turned out to be problematic (King's Indian for example). I am talking about recent Stockfish (the one with NNs) as the traditional version had pretty serious problems in certain positions and needed an extensive opening book to steer it out of trouble.

When have you last seen a decisive game from the starting position by two modern engines on normal hardware? I haven't seen one for many years.

There is a small chance that deep into the tree the first to play gets into zugzwang first, meaning position with no good moves. Is there any other scenario where playing black would give you theoretical edge?

So until proven otherwise it's still possible that its theoretical win for white, theoretical draw or theoretical win for black as i understand it.

Zugzwang is the only way for white to lose. Without Zugzwang and a winning strategy for black for chess with Zugzwang, white could skip the first move and now has the winning strategy.

What do you mean skip the first move? Like play a neutral move? Why would such a move exist?

Skip your turn. Don't move anything at all.

Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that depend on getting your opponent into a position where he has only one legal move and by making it you can then play the winning move. If your opponent could instead skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.

I know what zugzwang is. I was just asking what he meant by 'skipping turns' because skipping turns by simply refusing to make a move is illegal, so i was not sure what point was Gehinnn trying to make.

The question was if there is any other scenario where black could force a win other than by forcing a zugzwang.

I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could win without zugzwang. Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to make the first move and by white skipping the first move, the colors swapped).

If white would not skip the very first move and play an arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.

But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which contradicts our assumption.

I think I may share confusion with the other poster. I don't understand the following step:

> Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy

I understand the other comment, that there do exist setups in which colors can be effectively switched by e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4, but that requires cooperation on black's part. How does white "skip" the first move? Thanks in advance.

Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves? If so, that clarifies my confusion.

Well, applying "zugzwang" means you only win because the opponent has to do a move and cannot skip their turn.

When black has a winning strategy, black already applies "zugzwang" for white's very first move: Black only wins because white has to make a move. If white could skip, black would not win.

> Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves?

Yes. It's not well defined, but I'd say a non-zugzwang win is a win (or rather a winning position) where you would also win when your opponent can skip their turn. A zugzwang win is a win that is not a non-zugzwang win.

Ahh okay I think I get it now, you are saying if chess is win for black, that immediately implies zugzwang for white from starting position. In the same way, chess being a win for white implies zugzwang for black starting position.

So chess being a win for one side is equivalent to starting position being zugzwang for the other side.

It's obvious now, but so interesting to me, I never thought about it that way! Thanks for taking time for explaining yourself.

White could win without zugzwang! Because white starts. After the first move, the position is no longer symmetric, so it doesn't help black to skip to switch sides.

You can play e.g.

1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever

And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed

Can black refuse this 'color switch'? It seems like he can, for a while, by mimicking moves. 1. e3 e6 for example.

Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?

Provably there's little that can be said about chess at large when it comes from opening to endgame. Heuristically speaking though matching moves against even a beginner is a very bad strategy for play, as a recent speedrun being done by GM Aman Hambleton on youtube has been showing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfF6l4A6Ks

Having that happen in one place deep in the tree wouldn't mean much: black would need to be able to get such a zugzwang (or other win) against anything white does.

Many think that perfect play from both sides will result in a draw but there is no prove for that yet. So I'm reality we do not know.

Still an open problem.

Unlike tic-tac-toe we're not certain if it is a win or a draw for perfect players.

To give an example from a game more complicated than tic-tac-toe, it is known that the player who goes first in Connect 4 can always win with perfect play if (and only if) they play in the middle column on their first turn.

The chess analogue to this would be that there is a single opening move for white that a perfect player can guarantee a win from, or maybe a limited set of opening moves.

In fact, there is a variant of chess where this the case, namely "pawns-only chess", where 1.b4, 1.c4, 1.f4, and 1.g4 are winning for white, whereas all other first moves are a win for black with perfect play.

https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/is-the-result...

AFAIK it's not a solved game so we cannot say with certainty.