Richest man in the world keep trying and failing to get people to like him by being terminally online
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Slop.
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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I think Elon is actually correct about his initial point which is that the domain of sensible moves in chess is narrow enough that the game will be effectively solved (in the sense that a strategy will be discovered that is never defeated even if it's not mathematically proven to be perfect) probably within our lifetimes.
Leave it to Elon's fragile ego to take an easily defensible position and find a way to get owned anyway.
It is solved in a sense, though, it's technically a draw with perfect play. And many opening lines can be a forced draw.
Elon's opening line is ketamine
What solves chess is never going to be a strategy. The only way is to know the perfect move in every board state, which has very different implications.
Maybe, but I think the greater point is that if somebody came out and said "we've solved chess here's the math equation that proves it" chess players probably wouldn't care. Computers have been better than humans at that game for a while now and it literally doesn't matter.
Plus, the domain of "which moves are sensible" changes in response to how players are playing the game. So I can easily imagine a world where the hypothetical "perfect" game is mapped out, but then top level players distinguish themselves by coming up with imperfect continuations that their opponent hasn't studied, and it just becomes a pole that players orient themselves around rather than resulting in the game becoming "like checkers".
This is exactly what Magnus Carlson does. He lures opponents into known boardstates, then does something that throws every known solution out the window, where he can then improvise a win through intuition.
The Bong Cloud is a total meme, but it's an easy to understand example of Carlson's mindset.
Bong cloud?
my personal favorite opening
The twitter format is annoying to parse but if you reread the op and you will see that you have just paraphrased the very first thing that Musk said.
I'm not taking about moves that are simply considered optimal within a metagame but moves that are not strictly bad.
If a game is solved then following the optimal strategy will always win, so making "distinguishing moves" will always result in losing the game. If the players are deliberately avoiding studying or using the known optimal strategy then the game has indeed become like checkers.
Personally I feel that once computers have surpassed humans at a game there is a je ne sais quoi that is lost and can never be regained. There will never be the same awe seeing inspired plays and innovative strategies developed once I know in the back of my head that there is a known objectively better strategy out there. Not everyone will feel that way obviously, some can ignore the elephant and some cannot.
I think that this paragraph assumes a capacity for memorization that humans just don't have. My contention is that, even if chess is "solved", the variations that branch off of the "perfect game" will still be so complex that whether or not a player knows how to punish a suboptimal move from their opponent will be an open question. IMO it would just result in a new opening game playbook that everyone memorizes, and then the decision of where and when to break off from the optimal path will become the differentiator of skill.
And noted on the OP thing, I didn't read that right at all.