Isn’t chess a “finite” game where no luck is involved? Are computers able to calculate perfect strategies for both players?
And if yes, then which side is at the advantage?
In: 11
White has a slight advantage going first, but it’s an incalculable advantage with the tech we have. Maybe if quantum computing is perfected, and we can generate every possible position, something like Alpha Zero could give us an answer. My intuition tells me white wins, but because most high level AI games end in a draw, perhaps that’s the reality.
One person explained it like this: if we were to know every board state in chess, we would need a hard drive the size of the moon. That would be sufficient to store a perfect strategy of chess moves to show what the perfect game looks like and prove once and for all what the perfect game- or games- would look like.
The same person also joked that he tried to print out the proof, but his printer ran out of paper. Because of course it did.
It’s still a guess, since we have not “solved” chess even with the most advanced computers. However, it is most likely that two players playing “perfectly” would end in a draw, but still possible (albeit not very likely) that it’s possible for the White player to force a win by playing perfectly regardless of what their opponent plays.
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No game is perfect.
There are more games of chess than atoms in the universe.
But hypothetically whoever moves first has an advantage.
My understanding is that originally they tried to program computers to consider all outcomes and play chess that way, but they couldn’t do it. So now AI computers just play millions of games and learn by experience what moves are likely to work.
We’re not sure. We strongly suspect that it is a draw.
We believe that White has the advantage, but that with perfect play black can hold on and get a draw.
It is indeed finite, so in principle one could compute a perfect strategy, but we don’t have the techniques/computing power for it yet. Despite being finite, the possible options make a game that is ‘too big’ to know for sure.
I want to answer this differently. Since the game is unsolvable (so far), one way to look is the statistics. After looking for some I came across this great [Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess#:~:text=In%20chess%2C%20there%20is%20a,between%2052%20and%2056%20percent.)
So by using statistics, we can probably extrapolate for now that white has an advantage
55 percent win for white. Whites percentage increases with level of players and caps at about 64 percent win.
We do not know for sure because current computers cannot be sure play is “perfect”. To assure perfection, it is necessary to evaluate all possible moves. The number of possible games is approximately 10 followed by 100 zeros.
The good news is that after about 10 moves, the number of possible games is greatly reduced. Computer players like “Deep Blue” are able to evaluate every possible move to the end of the game after a certain number of moves. Until then, the computer needs to use pattern recognition and encyclopedic knowledge of every chess game ever documented. However, if there is a brilliant move that is not in a documented game and beyond the depth of moves the computer can evaluate, the computer will not “see” the move and will therefore play imperfectly. This is fundamentally why humans can still sometimes defeat computers.
If you are interested, checkout Wikipedia’s “Minimax Algorithm” and “Alpha Beta Pruning”.
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