Rybka Solves the King's Gambit Chess Opening 206
New submitter smarq2 writes "Chessbase reports that chess programmer IM Vasik Rajlich has solved the King's Gambit chess opening with technical means. 3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analyzed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions."
Update: 04/02 22:11 GMT by U L : Skuto points out that this is the same person who was found guilty of plagiarizing GNU Chess and Crafty.
Just stop playing chess, play go (Score:5, Insightful)
... so long as you still have a chance. The computers haven't reached professional level yet and certainly won't be able to compute the whole of the game in advance, even after a given opening, in the next decades.
Re:The extraordinary conclusions? Only one move! (Score:3, Insightful)
Evaluating something to a 99.9999999% confidence is non-rigorous? You should go tell the CERN guys that they're doing it wrong.
I'm more of a Ruy Lopez guy.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:+ / - 5.12 is a lot of difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A probabilistic algorithm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All lines...? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just telling you that you'd lose against Rybka. But then, unless you're a top grandmaster having a good day, you already knew that. Even then, if you decided to play King's Gambit, Rybka's letting you know in advance that you are not having a good day.
+ / - 5.12 is not enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's assume that White is down by 5+ points in evaluation. Even in this case, Black may still want to force perpetual check (e.g., because not doing so would lead to a forced line where he might lose even more points further down the line) or White may still be able to force stalemate. You cannot assume that just because an intermediate search tree node in the game search has an arbitrary value (other than specifically a win, loss, or draw), that the tree below it can be pruned. You can limit the issues by ensuring that the position is quiescent before the evaluation is pruned, but even then there may be resources further down the tree. This research is deeply flawed.
That being said, the King's Gambit is still probably a highly dubious opening for White.
Re:The extraordinary conclusions? Only one move! (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, yes, it's not a proof.
However, probabilistic does not mean nonrigorous, even to a mathematician.
Re:The extraordinary conclusions? Only one move! (Score:5, Insightful)
Rajlich analyzed a small subset of the ~10^100 possible continuations to the point that Rybka (Rajlich's chess program) showed a score of +/- 5.12, which he describes as "99.99999999% certain" of the outcome. Assigning percentages to scores like that is tricky, often impossible, so it's hard to say how accurate the statement is. I'm sure Rajlich didn't intend the statement to be interpreted strictly. But if we take it at face-value where there is a 1/10^10 chance a line might go the other way and 10^100 opportunities for that to happen, we don't need a fancy statistics degree to see that it is highly probable not all of those conclusions are accurate. This analysis of the King's gambit isn't anything like Appel and Haken's computer proof of the four color problem, which is exhaustive and grudgingly accepted by the mathematical community.
A thief? (Score:0, Insightful)
I thought copyright infringement wasn't theft?
April Fools, you morons! (Score:4, Insightful)
How can computer professionals not spot such an obvious April Fools joke? Chess openings cannot be "solved" by a classical computer and if they were, the result would not be that white had only one move to save a draw after two fairly normal moves.