Rybka Solves the King's Gambit Chess Opening

New submitter smarq2 writes "Chessbase reports that chess programmer IM Vasik Rajlich has solved the King's Gambit chess opening with technical means. 3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analyzed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions." Update: 04/02 22:11 GMT by U L : Skuto points out that this is the same person who was found guilty of plagiarizing GNU Chess and Crafty.

Comments

Just stop playing chess, play go

[tp1024]

... so long as you still have a chance. The computers haven't reached professional level yet and certainly won't be able to compute the whole of the game in advance, even after a given opening, in the next decades.

Re:The extraordinary conclusions? Only one move!

[tobiah]

Rajlich analyzed a small subset of the ~10^100 possible continuations to the point that Rybka (Rajlich's chess program) showed a score of +/- 5.12, which he describes as "99.99999999% certain" of the outcome. Assigning percentages to scores like that is tricky, often impossible, so it's hard to say how accurate the statement is. I'm sure Rajlich didn't intend the statement to be interpreted strictly. But if we take it at face-value where there is a 1/10^10 chance a line might go the other way and 10^100 opportunities for that to happen, we don't need a fancy statistics degree to see that it is highly probable not all of those conclusions are accurate. This analysis of the King's gambit isn't anything like Appel and Haken's computer proof of the four color problem, which is exhaustive and grudgingly accepted by the mathematical community.