Yea that's true, it's a pretty overloaded word. From what I remember though, even the top players thought that there wasn't anywhere left to go with chess engines, before Alpha Zero basically ripped the roof off with a completely different play style back in 2017, beating Stockfish.

And the play style of Alpha Zero wasn't different in a way that needs a super trained chess intuition to see, it's outrageously different if you take a look at the games.

I guess my point is, that even if the current situation is basically a 'deadlock', it's been proven that it's not some sort of eternal knowledge of the game as of yet. There's still the possiblity that a new type of approach could blow the current top engines out of the water, with a completely different take on the game.

It's a strange definition of "solved".

War was "solved" when someone made a weapon capable of killing all the enemy soldiers, until someone made a weapon capable of disabling the first weapon.

There's the TCEC [0] which is a big thing in some circles. Stockfish does lose every now and then against top engines. [1] Usually it's two different engines playing against one another, though. Like Leela Chess Zero [2] vs. Stockfish.

In that hypothetical of running 2 instances of Stockfish against one another on a modern laptop, with the key difference being minutes of compute time, it'd probably be very close to 100% of draws. Depending on how many games you run. So, if you run a million games, there's probably some outliers. If you run a hundred, maybe not.

When it comes to actually solved positions, the 7-piece tables take around 1TB of RAM to even run. These tablebases are used by Stockfish when you actually want to run it at peak strength. [3]

[0]: https://tcec-chess.com [1]: https://lichess.org/broadcast/tcec-s28-leagues--superfinal/m... [2]: https://lczero.org [3]: https://github.com/syzygy1/tb

Here's a game from a month ago where Stockfish loses to Lc0, played during the TCEC Cup. https://lichess.org/S9AwOvWn

Chess is a 2 player game of perfect, finite information, so by Zermelo's theorem either one side always wins with optimal play or it's a draw with optimal play. The argument from the Discord person simply says that Stockfish computationally can't come up with a way to beat itself. Whether this is true (and it really sounds like a question about depth in search) is separate from whether the game itself is solved, and it very much is not.

Solving chess would be a table that simply lists out the optimal strategy at every node in the game tree. Since this is computationally infeasible, we will certainly never solve chess absent some as yet unknown advance in computation.

That just means that Stockfish doesn't get stronger with more than 1 minute per move on a modern computer. It doesn't say anything about other engines.