nkelly31

I thought I responded to this earlier, but it looks like I didn't, sorry! In short, it's solvable in theory. The game as it's currently played has a finite game tree (thanks in part to the 50-move rule) and that finite game tree can in theory be brute-forced. In practice, I think it's one of those problems that's so large we can't possibly solve it. For an idea of the scale of a complete solution, solutions for all positions with 2 kings and 4 other pieces occupy ~100GB and solutions for positions with 2 kings and 5 other pieces are ~10 TB and it's believed that 2 kings + 6 will be in petabyte scale.

Maybe to follow up on that even, Chess is absolutely solvable the same way tic-tac-toe is solvable, and computers have been better than people for years, but it's an incredible playground for people to think against each other competitively and demonstrate whose ideas are better. Even on the computer chess side, there are so many ideas to explore from parallel programming to task scheduling to compression for creation of endgame table bases and reinforcement learning for modern evaluation functions used in open source projects like Leela Zero.

I'd like to playfully add on to this. Chess is a convoluted version of tic tac toe the same way that a barbell is a heavier version of a handle, and to say opening a swing door is representative of human strength is ridiculous.

Very cool! Did they do a write-up? I haven't been following lobste.rs closely and some quick google searching returned a lot of unrelated content.

I'll be interested to see how they leverage the user tree. I'm no expert in social media bots, but it seems like the user invitation tree could be important to identifying not just networks of bots that are generating low-value content and trying to amplify certain viewpoints, but the people inviting those bots into the network in the first place.

As I've been learning Rust, I've seen ripgrep held up as one of the shining examples of how to use Rust to create useful, effective tools that new rustaceans should look at.