Solving chess

Okay kiddo, do you know what chess is? It's a game with lots of pieces on a board, where two players take turns moving their pieces to try and capture the other player's king.

Now, imagine you're playing chess but you're really good at it. You can think ahead and see all the possible moves you and your opponent can make. That's called a "strategy" - it's like having a plan in your mind of what you want to do and what you think your opponent will do.

But what if you didn't want to just be really good at chess? What if you wanted to be the BEST chess player in the world? One way to do that would be to try to come up with a strategy that will ALWAYS let you win.

That's what people mean when they talk about "solving" chess. They're trying to come up with a strategy that will work no matter what their opponent does.

But there's a problem: chess is a game with SO MANY possible moves. In fact, there are over a googol (that's 1 with 100 zeroes after it) possible ways to play just the first few moves of the game. That's way too many for any person or computer to ever go through and analyze.

So even though people have tried really hard to solve chess, they haven't been able to do it completely. But they have come up with some really good strategies that work pretty well. And who knows - maybe someday someone will finally figure out how to solve chess completely!