I'd like to playfully add on to this. Chess is a convoluted version of tic tac toe the same way that a barbell is a heavier version of a handle, and to say opening a swing door is representative of human strength is ridiculous.
Maybe to follow up on that even, Chess is absolutely solvable the same way tic-tac-toe is solvable, and computers have been better than people for years, but it's an incredible playground for people to think against each other competitively and demonstrate whose ideas are better. Even on the computer chess side, there are so many ideas to explore from parallel programming to task scheduling to compression for creation of endgame table bases and reinforcement learning for modern evaluation functions used in open source projects like Leela Zero.
I thought I responded to this earlier, but it looks like I didn't, sorry! In short, it's solvable in theory. The game as it's currently played has a finite game tree (thanks in part to the 50-move rule) and that finite game tree can in theory be brute-forced. In practice, I think it's one of those problems that's so large we can't possibly solve it. For an idea of the scale of a complete solution, solutions for all positions with 2 kings and 4 other pieces occupy ~100GB and solutions for positions with 2 kings and 5 other pieces are ~10 TB and it's believed that 2 kings + 6 will be in petabyte scale.
Tournament chess is a fairly accurate proxy for war.
Any experienced player scoffs when hearing the British and Germans in WW2 thought they could bomb cities, and thus cause their enemy to "give up."
Human nature as revealed in intermediate tournaments is that it's exceedingly rare for somebody to resign. (My only opponent to resign had a medical condition that was triggered by stress and required hospitalization.)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadAny experienced player scoffs when hearing the British and Germans in WW2 thought they could bomb cities, and thus cause their enemy to "give up."
Human nature as revealed in intermediate tournaments is that it's exceedingly rare for somebody to resign. (My only opponent to resign had a medical condition that was triggered by stress and required hospitalization.)