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From: sje@mv.mv.com (Steven J. Edwards)
Subject: Solving Chess
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Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 02:55:51 GMT
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Using old style formalism, I interpret the phrase "solving chess" to
mean the determination of the game theoretic value of chess.  That is,
to determine if the game is a win, loss, or draw for the first player
assuming optimal play for both sides.

Note that solving does not require the storage of the optimal
strategies, either as position lists or as the construction of some
magic algorithm.

Even with near infinite storage, the analysis by brute search is still
going to require near infinite time.  Therefore, I would recommend a
simple depth first search to the legal limit of ply, a figure of about
12,000 or so.  It is easy to construct such a program, and I and many
others have done so already, or can easily do so by extending the
search depth limit of an existing program to the 12,000 ply figure.
Because the depth first search requires only D (maximaum depth) * P
(maximum number of moves per position) units of move storage (say, one
byte using canonical ordinals), a few megabytes will suffice.
 
This figure is easily within the range of a Macintosh Plus once you
have figured out how to keep the power supply running after half the
protons in the universe decay.

-- Steven (sje@mv.mv.com)

Post scriptum:

For chess items, use anonymous ftp at ics.onenet.net:

    pub/chess: general chess directory
    pub/chess/PGN: Portable Game Notation directory
    pub/chess/PGN/Standard: ASCII version of the PGN Standard
    pub/chess/PGN/Standard.TOC: Table of Contents for above
    pub/chess/PGN/Events: directory of directories of events by year
    pub/chess/PGN/Players: directory with many PGN games by player
    pub/chess/Tests: directory with many chess program test positions
    pub/chess/Tests/Manifest: description of EPD test files
    pub/chess/TB: endgame tablebases
    pub/chess/TB/README-TB: tablebase decyphering documentation
    pub/chess/TB/tbt.c: ANSI C tablebase test harness
    pub/chess/PGN/Tools: PGN tools and utilities directory
    pub/chess/Unix/SAN.tar.gz: Standard Algebraic Notation source kit

Enjoy.
