No, the paper only "weakly solves", so it doesn't give a perfect strategy of the type you talk about.
Imagine finding a pamphlet written by God that contains a listing of a perfect game of chess. Armed with it, you will still lose easily to Magnus Carlsen. He will deviate fro| the sequence and you won't know the perfect responses to his moves.
> Imagine finding a pamphlet written by God that contains a listing of a perfect game of chess
How would you go to prove that this is the perfect game of chess, if you didn't explore all of it's possible sequences? If they did solve the game, there's no way around knowing all possible outcomes - starting from a fixed given position.
The claim (see other threads, it is not clear if the paper really shows this) is that you can follow their plan or any deviation from it known results. That is no matter what I play if you understand their paper you can ensure you don't lose. If I also know their paper I can force a draw, but I won't win.
A "weak solution" demonstrates perfect play from the initial state and merely implies the existence of a perfect strategy for the entire tree of game states, but, crucially, need not actually produce said strategy. Doing so would be a "strong solution."
An "ultra-weak solution" is even less. It gives the win/lose/draw outcome of the perfect strategy, without producing that strategy, nor even producing the game of perfect play from the initial state.
This is all covered in the second paragraph of the paper's introduction.
And if a strategy for perfect play only from the initial position is a strong solution, then what do you call the even more strongly solved case of a strategy for perfect play from any position?
The second paragraph of the paper isn't super specific about its definition for "weakly solved", but I read it as agreeing with my statement. It also calls checkers "weakly solved", a game for which a strategy to beat any possible move is known.
>He will deviate fro| the sequence and you won't know the perfect responses to his moves.
Even if you don't know the moves you will know that you are in a winning / drawn position. Magnus can not find a way to get to a winning position unless you make a mistake.
That'll be very little help if the perfect game you have starts with 1.e4, but Magnus plays 1.d4. Yes, you're not losing, congratulations. You're still on your own against Carlsen now.
You can just evaluate whether or not a given move will change from a +1 or 0 position to a 0 or -1 position and play it from there.
Perfect play in a perfect game means that the objective won't change - in optimal control theory this is called Pontryagin's Maximum Principle or the Bellman optimality criteria. A "value to go" function is enough to find the optimal solution.
Yes, but we were talking about a scenario where someone was just given the moves of a single perfect game. Not an oracle that gives you the -1/0/+1 of any position.
Weakly solving a game requires a proof of optimality, which means an evaluation of all variations to prove their value. A sequence of moves in one perfect game isn't weakly solving a game.
Imagine finding a pamphlet written by God that contains a listing of a perfect game of chess. Armed with it, you will still lose easily to Magnus Carlsen. He will deviate fro| the sequence and you won't know the perfect responses to his moves.