Solving chess with distributed parallel processing
Once in awhile someone asks me about the possibility of computers completely "solving" chess - coming up with a perfect opening that accounts for all possible moves and leads to a win no matter what the other side plays - possibly using a technique like massive distributed parallel processing (SETI@home style
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I have to agree with their ending statement. There are many better things to use this processor power we're talking about for. Cure something, or explore the cosmos more.
On black's twelfth move: 16,777,216,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 positions.
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And fortunately no one is seriously proposing devoting resources of that magnitude to chess (probably because there's no money in it!). There are some big parallel processing projects like SETI@Home, but that's actually useful.
I saw one a few years ago that was an attempt to win a contest -- someone was offering like a million dollars to anyone who could crack this certain encryption algorithm. They were going to split the money between all the participants if they won. Pretty neat. :)
You know, I really don't think a parallel processing project like that would be too hard to create as long as you have a problem that can be split into bite-sized chunks.
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