Tech tycoon Elon Musk humiliated himself by getting into a fight over chess with the most prominent website about the game.
It started on Thursday when he proclaimed confidently on his X platform, “The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny and chess will be fully solved one day.”
“Skill issue,” wrote back the account for Chess.com.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers,” Musk replied early on Friday morning, doubling down. “One day, it will be fully solved like checkers. Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
“There are more possible chess games, by about 40 orders of magnitude, than atoms in the observable universe,” Chess.com replied. “To solve chess, you’d have to map them all. Good luck.”
“Wrong, all legal chess positions are ~40 oom less than the estimated atoms in the Universe,” Musk insisted. “And ASI will figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend. (Here I am arguing with some random intern at a chess website).”
There are massively more possible individual sequences for a game of chess than atoms in the observable universe. A computer the size of the universe, capable of storing every game path for chess on a single atom, would run out of atoms long before it ran out of games to test, which makes “solving” chess physically impossible — though algorithms exist that can compute reasonable approximations of perfect chess play as a game progresses, allowing for computers that play on a comparable level to grandmasters.
In response to Musk’s retort, Chess.com’s account wrote, “I’m a full-time employee,” to which Musk replied with a breathing emoji.
“Even my friends don’t text me back that fast,” Chess.com remarked.
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