Ever wondered ....

[illluck]

...
I'm reminded of this article

http://en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4008047

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Amazing article! Thanks for posting this link.

How much processing time went into your project?

Approximately – well actually quite precisely – 10,750,000 hours of single-core CPU time. The King's Gambit run took a little over four months in total, elapsed time, to calculate.

That was on about 3000 cores, right? What was the system doing?
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Will this take all of the creativity and flexibility out of opening play?

Quite the opposite. I think players will see that many surprising moves are playable, giving them more options to choose from. For example, take the game Topalov-Kramnik from Wijk aan Zee 2008. The genius of Topalov's preparation wasn't that 12.Nxf7 is some sort of great move. It was simply realizing that 12.Nxf7 is playable and doesn't lose by force. Once you establish that, it's not that hard to work out a way to put a ton of pressure on your opponent.
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Okay, cough it up: what next?

I say this with some apprehension, but we've been looking at the 6.Bg5 Najdorf (10.e5! looks promising as a forced win for White). But if we decide to do the full classification we are going to need much faster hardware. Maybe a factor of a thousand over what we used for the King’s Gambit. There are companies that periodically test that kind of hardware for new server parks, and run very CPU-intensive applications on them to locate faulty processors. We have made contact with the technical director of the Google server farms, who was definitely interested. So maybe in a year or two we will have solved the Najdorf.
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[Emphasis added]

Unfortunately, this was apparently an April Fool's joke.

[judicata]

Unfortunately, this was apparently an April Fool's joke.

I hadn't read it before reading this, but poor form on their part for the April 2 date on the article (they try to justify it, but I'm unconvinced).

All that said, the truth is sometimes more impressive than fantasy (or spoof articles):

Here is Chessbase giving reasons their article is necessarily a joke: http://en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4008051

It's reasonable to construct a search tree of around 10^18 positions using modern technology. The chess alpha-beta tree is thought to have at least 10^45 positions. The alpha-beta tree for the King's Gambit will be at most 10x to 100x smaller than that. So, we're still probably a good 25 or so orders of magnitude away from being able to solve something like the King's Gambit. If processing power doubles every 18 months for the next century, we'll have the resources to do this around the year 2120, plus or minus a few decades.

Actually Vas is being overly optimistic, and we are probably overly pessimistic when we say: it will not be possible in the course of this universe. The Rybka author added the following caveat:

You must remember that the tree for any specific 32-man position can be much smaller than we expect – if one side is immediately lost or if there is an immediate forced draw. Could the King's Gambit have a massively reduced tree? If the King's Gambit is winning for black, then this is theoretically possible. It is possible that after 2.f4 White is simply crushed instantly, no matter what he does. I very much doubt that this is the case. Everything in my chess experience tells me that any Black win would be long and tortuous. If the King's Gambit is a draw, though, then there are really no prospects for a massively reduced tree. In other words, it is (slightly) more preposterous to claim that 3.Be2 has been worked out to a draw than to claim that 3.Nf3 has been worked out to a loss.

[SmoothOper]

They translates 'fuseki' to 'gambit'.

The title is just breakthrough to shodan, fuseki at a glance.

Thanks oren! Is it a problem book?

[oren]

Thanks oren! Is it a problem book?

Yeah, it actually turns out I have it. It's called breakthrough to shodan, and I'd say it's a good problem book for kyu players.

[Martin1974]

Looking at the documented history of go (some nice artikels are in GoGoD's offspin "The Go Companion") the style of play changed rather dramatically when the rules of the game changed (for example: starting stones on the hoshis in even games like in China until the 1930s, starting stones on the "flower points" like in Korea until 1920s, kirichin = "group tax" like in old China). I think that suggests that the very good players of a specific period tend to adopt to circumstances and not just play in a certain way because that's what they had learned.

So my guess is that - under current Chinese / Japanese rules! - playing more or less "corner, sides, center" is at least than the optimal play when only ONE of the players plays that way. What I mean is, that maybe it's a kind of "forcing strategy". If one does is, the other has to go with it, at least for a bit.

[SmoothOper]

Looking at the documented history of go (some nice artikels are in GoGoD's offspin "The Go Companion") the style of play changed rather dramatically when the rules of the game changed (for example: starting stones on the hoshis in even games like in China until the 1930s, starting stones on the "flower points" like in Korea until 1920s, kirichin = "group tax" like in old China). I think that suggests that the very good players of a specific period tend to adopt to circumstances and not just play in a certain way because that's what they had learned.

So my guess is that - under current Chinese / Japanese rules! - playing more or less "corner, sides, center" is at least than the optimal play when only ONE of the players plays that way. What I mean is, that maybe it's a kind of "forcing strategy". If one does is, the other has to go with it, at least for a bit.

I would have thought that changes in style would have been associated with changes in rules, however it was pointed out to me that the Shin Fuseki era predates modern changes in rules, for example Komi.

I don't necessarily agree that the corner sides center is a forcing strategy. It is considered sub optimal against the tengen Great Wall strategy, for example.