Thanks. Yeah, I guess chess has been (weakly) solved and that means you need a more powerful technique for probing differences. Follow up: around what rating do engines gain the ability to force a draw from the starting position? (I understand this will only be a heuristic for the real question of “which engines possess an optimal strategy form the standard starting position?”)
Forgive the nitpick, but I think the standard definition of “weakly solved” requires known-optimal strategies from the starting position, which don’t exist for chess. It’s still not known for sure that chess is a draw—it just looks very likely.
Thanks. Yeah, I guess chess has been (weakly) solved and that means you need a more powerful technique for probing differences. Follow up: around what rating do engines gain the ability to force a draw from the starting position? (I understand this will only be a heuristic for the real question of “which engines possess an optimal strategy form the standard starting position?”)
My guess is somewhere in the 3200-3400 range, but this isn’t something I’ve experimented with in detail.
Forgive the nitpick, but I think the standard definition of “weakly solved” requires known-optimal strategies from the starting position, which don’t exist for chess. It’s still not known for sure that chess is a draw—it just looks very likely.
Agreed. This is a deliberate abuse of mathematical terminology, substituting any notion of “proof” with “looks true from experimental evidence.”