This is a bad kind of argument. There are more 16x16 sudoku boards, and ways of dealing a deck of cards, than there are atoms in the Universe too, but Sudoku and many card games are easy for computers to solve.
Well, you should volunteer on the Stockfish engine and show everyone how it's done.
I don't believe your comparison between fundamentally different games is sufficient to support your conclusion that an extremely large number of calculations does not pose a challenge for computer programs to solve.
Rather, to the best of my knowledge, to support your conclusion what you would need to do is to prove there exists a method or formula for reducing the number of permutations to a manageable number while still coming to an optimal solution. Apparently if Sudoku is easy to solve, that exists in Sudoku, but it certainly does not yet exist in the realm of human knowledge in chess.
The fact is that Sudoku and many card games are easy to solve, while chess is in fact a much, much more challenging problem for a computer program, and there are a lot of very smart people that have worked on that problem.
I don't disagree that Chess, and Go, and very hard. I don't believe without a major mathematical breakthrough we will see either solved, ever. There just isn't enough possible computing power in the universe.
HOWEVER, arguing that they aren't solvable purely from a point of view of "the number of possible games / states is greater than the number of particles in the universe" type arguments is that there are many problems we routinely solve with massive search spaces.
Your comment kind of bothers me. Probably because it is both wrong yet says in a rather frank, matter-of-fact way that my argument is bad.
Well, you could just do a Google search for yourself to see why your reasoning is wrong. The problem with using a computer to play Go is precisely what I described, the extremely high number of permutations involved, and it's the same concept with chess (Go just has even more of them): https://www.wired.com/2016/01/googles-go-victory-is-just-a-g...
Well, your comment bothered me, so we are all bothered!
I still disagree with your argument. The problem with Go isn't just the high number of permutations involved, there are real-world problems, with just as many permutations, which have been solved.
The extra problem with Go (and chess to a lesser degree) is that's it's incredibly hard to be sure, with any certainty, to be sure that a move is a "good" choice.
Comparing to the sudoku example again, when "playing" sudoku it's usually obvious as soon as you make a bad move, you've put two '1's in the same row/column/box for example. With Go if we want to play well, or perfectly, we really have to explore the entire search space.
Sudoku is a game, and in which to solve it, a computer program has an obvious method to limit possible permutations to compute in finding a solution. In other words, it is not faced with the challenge of a requirement to compute permutations > 10^86 (roughly atoms in the observable universe).
In contrast to sudoku, chess and go are games which have no yet discovered or theoretical method to limit permutations to solve, therefore to solve them you would be required to computer permutations > 10^86.
So the problem is still with the number of permutations.
Like I said in my other post: if you could develop a technique to reduce the number of permutations while still solving the optimal solution then you would be onto something. Right now no one has been able to dream up such a theory and there are a lot of very smart people who have worked on this problem.
