I just want to focus on this extremely ridiculous quote as if one understands how unfathomably silly it is - it becomes impossible to take anything elmo says seriously (not that you should need more proof)
What elmo is trying to talk about is called game-tree complexity - the number of possible games based on the number of possible moves.
For checkers this is 10^54 - massive but obviously computable (took 18 years and finished in 2007)
For chess this is 10^120 - called the Shannon number is unimaginably large - like if we counted it in Planck times (smallest unit of time) - checkers’ number would convert to about 300 years - chess on the other hand comes out to around 10^58 universe ages
What’s more - there’s about 10^80 atoms in the universe - so it’s physically impossible to store that many game states in a usable manner to compute a full solution of chess.
Even giving him the biggest benefit of the doubt and turning the whole observable universe into a black hole (the most information dense object imaginable) the Bekenstein bound still dictates you only have 10^96 bits to work with - so it’s seems totally impossible to store a full solution of chess in our universe.
Overall this proves the point of this post - elmo literally does not believe he lives in the real world and any proof otherwise will get rejected by his solipsistic brain.
That’s fair - I guess that’s why I said “it seems” as I can’t confidently state something whose unknowns I don’t fully understand.
But yeah theoretically there might be a way to compress the final output into a physically possible form. Still considering the magnitude of the numbers we’re talking about - this would still be a mind boggling undertaking.
I guess my point was more around elmo confidently stating that chess is solvable and using the actual complexity of the task as a way to highlight how being that confident in such a statement is absurd.
Then again maybe I fell in a similar trap so thanks for pointing it out!