Elon Musk stated that artificial intelligence will help to find a comprehensive solution for all chess games – a view he decided to defend in a discussion on his social network X with the official account of the Chess.com portal, the main source of knowledge about chess and chess artificial intelligence.
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At the beginning of the discussion, Musk wrote that the number of incorrect chess moves “Completely stupid”what a small thing “Chess will one day be solved once and for all”. The Chess.com account puts this succinctly: “The Problem of Mastery”. Musk responded as follows: “Chess is hard for people, but not for computers. One day they will find a complete solution, like checkers. In the meantime, then enjoy. People enjoy many games and sports, and cars are even better.”.
This time, Chess.com points out that there are 40 orders of magnitude more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe. “To solve a chess problem, you have to draw all these optionsthe website wrote and added. – Good luck”. Musk responds sharply to Chess.com “wrong”. he wrote “All valid chess positions” That’s about 40 orders of magnitude less than the estimated number of atoms in the universe. Musk also pointed out that super artificial intelligence (ASI) “We will find solutions and compression methods far beyond our imagination”.
At some point, Musk got tired of the arguments According to him “Random intern from chess website”although the person writing on behalf of Chess.com countered that he was a staff member.
In the end, the chess website declared victory. “We know losing a chess match can be disappointing, but losing to a so-called intern on Twitter must be maddening.”said a representative from Chess.com.
To be clear, both Musk’s and Chess.com’s numbers are correct, but the difference lies in the wording. Chess.com writes about possible chess “games.” Musk’s answer involves valid chess “positions.”
Let us add that in 2022 Musk announced that he would stop playing chess as a child because “Thought they were too simple to be useful in real life” And praised the mobile game Polytopia. And he also “Chess has diminishing returns in terms of transferring knowledge to understand reality”. However, the artificial intelligence of Musk’s companies is playing chess. In the 2025 championship, xAI’s Grok 4 reached the finals, but lost to OpenAI’s o3 model.
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