Not too much longer. Starting from the end of the game is not the right way to do it. It's extremely inefficient. In fact these endgame tablebases are almost useless for solving chess. First of all with best play a very small percentage of those 5-man, 6-man endgames etc. will ever occur. I could elaborate but I'm sure with careful thought you'll find that developing endgame tablebases are only necessary after finding positions that use them which arise after best play. Secondly I bet that the strongest move (most chanllenging to meet) is 1. e4 or 1. d4 (we'll see after chess is solved). After that there are obviously many variations that could follow. The best moves after the above moves are commonly known as book moves (admittedly it is possible that there are some other moves that are not yet in the common opening books that are equally as strong as book moves, but especially early on in the game all the best moves are considered book. If you don't believe me I'd play a game with you where you get out of book theory early on in the game and I'd probably win (you wouldn't have a chance to win with best play)) for the definition/explanation of what a book move is visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opening_book So it turns out that many many positions with more pieces on the board are much easier to find the best moves/canidate moves. Also, for more on the amount of legal chess positions I just looked at the first result in a search: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chess.html This page states that (these are all estimates) the amount of possible chess games is about 10^10^50. I said I have heard before that the amount of chess positions is greater than 10^36. This other guy said he saw an estimate of greater than 2.5*10^43 (which agrees with the above web page). If it mattered how many possible chess games there are to play (although admittedly this would have to be known to find how many ways possible there are to draw, how many ways possible there are to lose and how many ways possible there are to draw (of course completely disregaurding the concept of best play, which I find makes it rather useless)) then in analyzing the position I posted above would be at least a quintillion times as ridiculous because one would say the position can't be further analyzed until you determine every possible move sequence/order there is to get to that position and every single move sequence/order is possible for the rest of the game. This hardly seems logical to me, but if this is your idea of solving chess it's safe to say it will never happen.
Originally posted by bobbob1056thYou're mad as a hatter.
There is enough time to solve chess, and it wouldn't be nearly as difficult as one might think. In fact I predict chess will be solved within 100 years. In order to solve chess you don't have to analyze every possible position. I believe some openings have already been solved (they have been proven to be losing with best play (ie a variation of dami ...[text shortened]... re are over 10 million times as many legal positions as my source said. You're probably right.
Originally posted by BowmannAll six-man endgame tablebases have been solved. My friend has all the 5-man tablebases on his computer. It's only about 6.88 Gigabytes for 3,4, and 5 man. 6-man takes 2 TB. Chess is not nearly complex as some people believe.
6 man endings have not been solved yet. I'm not even sure ALL 5 man endings have.
"It is still unclear how much chess-playing programs benefit from using the current set of endgame databases. This is because most modern chess programs can play a majority of such positions well enough using their normal search algorithms and heuristics without using endgame databases as a crutch. It is suspected that as more endgame databases (for example six and seven piece tablebases) are generated and used, this situation will change."
The main reason for having these tablebases is so that the computer can find the best moves when a position with more pieces arises. Something I might add is how inefficient it is to generate these tablebases (I think they analyze every position that can result to see if mate can be forced. They do this because it makes the generation algorithms much simpler. Although I am no computer expert I would suggest writing a program that would find an ideal algorithm). This may eventually change.