> “No, no,” said God, “it was really tough. More than 10^35 legal positions<p>God should know there are approximately 4.8*10^44 legal positions [1].<p>> Secondly Ken was predicting that the game of chess was a draw, i.e. that probably a majority of all legal positions, including the starting position, would lead to a draw with perfect play.<p>Only the latter is what the game being drawn means. The majority of legal positions is in fact overwhelmingly to one side's advantage, as is clear from sampling a few dozen random legal positions.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking">https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking</a>
So God plays backwards, so to say. He does what’s called <i>retrograde analysis</i>, “a technique employed to determine which moves were played leading up to a given position” (cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_analysis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_analysis</a>)<p>I had a vague intuition of doing the same (going backwards) to generate the <i>winnable</i> Solitaire card deals, but I didn’t get far with it… Does anyone have experience/ideas on that? FTR: a similar discussion on X, started recently by Jonathan Blow: <a href="https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1865520149891346634" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1865520149891346634</a><p>I ended up generating totally random deals, then filtering-out those unsolvable by an algorithm of mine (described at <a href="https://FreeSolitaire.win/strategy#remarks" rel="nofollow">https://FreeSolitaire.win/strategy#remarks</a>). It’s fast & good enough to run on-the-fly, when a player starts a new game. But this isn’t an intellectually satisfying solution.<p>Note that “The probability of being able to win a game of Klondike with best-possible play is not known, and the inability of theoreticians to precisely calculate these odds has been referred to by mathematician Persi Diaconis as "<i>one of the embarrassments of applied probability</i>"” dixit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probability_of_winning" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...</a><p>We need another genius like Ken Thompson for Solitaire!
I didn't know that anecdote. The point that a perfect chess engine would not necessarily be hard to play a draw against (until you accidentally play a losing move) is one that many people miss.<p>Although it could of course use some strong existing engine to pick a move in drawn tablebase positions. I assume Stockfish already does that.
Chessbase is one of those pieces of software that would be completely eaten by a cheaper alternative if the market was bigger. $400+ for a single download, selling mostly open source data, and it looks like it was made in 1998.<p>The thing is, there is money in chess but not that much money. There will never be a unicorn in chess software.
Really appreciate the Leko story about the endgames. He's the top level commentator that I enjoy the most, but I don't always understand what he says in his analysis. Leno's Banter Blitz was also quite fun to watch - <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-eGwi2NSmY" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5-eGwi2NSmY</a>
ChessBase is a horrible program and you don’t need it to get your own tablebases. You can generate your own with:<p><a href="https://github.com/syzygy1/tb">https://github.com/syzygy1/tb</a><p>But everything up to 6 pieces is on BitTorrent these days. The 7 piece tablebase is 20TB or so, so it’ll be a few years before you can fit that one your phone. Pretty sure Lichess has an API for that. Never tried to hook it up to Stockfish or Leela though.
I have trouble believing in God, but when I play chess, I sometimes get the sense that it’s not me and the opponent playing against each other, but God playing against himself. I guess it’s something to do with the mystery of insights.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but this seems like a long-winded way to say "most positions are a draw, and theoretically losing material doesn't matter if you can still force a draw eventually"