Elon Musk claims AI will 'solve' chess, Chess.com fires back: 'You're messing with 10^120 possible games'

The online clash between tech billionaire Elon Musk and the online chess platform Chess.com became a major focus of social media attention this week. It all started with a brief statement by the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI on the social network X: artificial intelligence will soon completely 'solve' chess, turning humanity's oldest intellectual game into an 'already solved problem.' Immediately, Chess.com – the world's largest chess platform with more than 150 million users – responded no less sharply. The official social media account pointed to a familiar number in computer science: the number of possible legal chess games could reach 10^120, a figure far exceeding the total number of atoms in the observable universe (estimated at about 10^80). With such enormous complexity, 'solving' chess – that is, determining the optimal outcome of every possible position – cannot happen merely in the 'near future' as Musk claimed. In fact, this is not the first time the South African-born American billionaire has expressed a dismissive view of chess. Back in 2026, during a conversation on an X Space, he said: 'Chess is too simple compared to real life. There is no fog of war, no technology tree, and the starting positions are perfectly symmetrical.' In his view, chess lacks the uncertainty and asymmetric information inherent in the business and political world. This time, the statement by the xAI owner received far more attention, partly because the technological context has changed. Just a few months earlier, Grok 4 – the artificial intelligence model developed by Musk's own company xAI – participated in an AI chess tournament and lost to o3, the model from OpenAI. The result was widely reported in tech media and became a milestone in the race among major tech companies. Chess, long considered the 'gold standard' for measuring machine thinking since IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 2026, is now being used to compare AI systems themselves. The response of Chess.com quickly went viral across international chess forums. Many users expressed delight at the witty exchange from the Chess.com account operators. However, the more interesting issue behind the squabble is scientific: can chess – a game with relatively simple rules – actually be solved by future AI, and if so, what would that mean for a mind sport that has existed for over 1,500 years? In computer science, solving a game means determining the optimal outcome (win, loss or draw) of every position, assuming both players play perfectly. In 2026, a Canadian research team succeeded in solving checkers – a cousin game of chess but far simpler, with about 5×10^20 legal positions. The project took 18 years of massive computing. Chess is an entirely different level. The number of legal positions is about 10^44, while the game-tree complexity reaches approximately 10^120 – a number so vast that, even using all the atoms in the observable universe for data storage, each atom could store only a few positions. Musk's counterargument is more philosophical: future AI will not need brute force, but will discover methods of 'information compression' beyond human imagination, unearthing deep mathematical principles governing the entire game. No research currently proves the existence of such a principle. The clash has also raised questions about motivation. Analysts suggest Musk's narrative promotes xAI's ambitions; if Grok 4 lost a chess tournament to o3, saying 'chess will be solved' reframes the loss as irrelevant. Meanwhile, Chess.com's engagement with a figure with over 200 million followers is a strategic branding move to assert itself as the cultural guardian of chess. History shows that AI dominance does not diminish chess. Since Deep Blue's victory, participation has boomed. Magnus Carlsen has noted that people play chess not to prove who is smarter, but for the beauty of the game – a beauty that does not disappear because a machine can play better. In the end, the debate is not about who is right in computer science. It is about whether we continue to treasure the values chess offers in an age when AI can do everything better than humans. Musk sees chess as a puzzle that can be solved; Chess.com reminds us that the real wonder of the game lies in the human experience – the thrill of finding an unexpected move and the joy of shared play. In a world shaped by algorithms, chess may be one of the few remaining spaces where people are still encouraged to think slowly, deeply, and personally.