Musk Declares Chess Will Be 'Solved', Chess.com Responds in Vietnamese: 'It's Just Skills'

In June 2026, when AlphaZero defeated Stockfish in 100 games without any pre-programmed chess knowledge, I was sitting in a small café in Da Nang, holding a glass of cold iced coffee. I looked at the news on my phone and exclaimed to myself: "It's burning." Not because I was afraid. But because I knew — the world of chess would never be the same. Seven years later, Elon Musk posted on X that chess would be "completely solved" by artificial intelligence, and I felt that déjà vu again. But this time, Chess.com — the world's largest chess platform — did not stay silent. They responded in Vietnamese: "Do kỹ năng thôi." (It's just skills.) That answer was so brief it was almost incomprehensible to those not living in the world of chess. But for those who have spent hours staring at a chessboard, it contained an entire philosophy. "It's just skills" — not because of machines, not because of algorithms, but because of human beings. That's how Chess.com, with over 100 million users worldwide, chose to confront one of the most powerful men on the planet who has a social media account. Musk, with over 200 million followers on X, declared that chess has "10^120 possibilities" — a number larger than all atoms in the observable universe — and that someday, super AI will "compress this information" and completely decode the 1,500-year-old game. Musk isn't wrong about the numbers. But he's comparing two different things. When Chess.com replied that chess has "10^44 legal positions," they were pointing out a fact that many people — including tech-savvy ones — often overlook: there's a fundamental difference between position space and game space. 10^44 is the number of possible chess positions on the board — already a terrifying number, larger than 10^80 (atoms in the universe) by a factor of 10^(-36). But 10^120 — the number Musk mentioned — is the number of possible move sequences, i.e., combinations of all games from start to finish. This difference, seemingly purely mathematical, is the foundation of the entire debate. From the perspective of someone who has followed chess for over four decades, I see this confrontation not merely as an online squabble. It reflects a deeper rift in how people perceive chess in the AI age. For Musk and the tech world, chess is a problem — and every problem has a solution. For the chess community, especially those who have spent hours studying a chess position, chess is not a problem but a language. And no language is ever "solved" — they are lived, spoken, rewritten by each generation. What's notable is that Musk is not new to chess. In 2026, he cancelled a chess event at Tesla, reasoning that "chess is too simple for real life" — no fog of war, no technology tree, and perfectly symmetric starting positions. In 2026, he posted that chess is "too easy for AI" because everything is obvious. In 2026, when Grok 4 — xAI's AI model, Musk's own AI company — lost to OpenAI's o3 in an AI-vs-AI chess tournament, the debate heated up. Musk didn't acknowledge Grok 4's defeat. Instead, he pivoted: chess will be solved, and when that happens, every chess competition becomes meaningless. This is what I call the "outsider paradox." It's like someone who has never played football saying that football will be solved because there are finite ways to arrange 11 players on a field. Mathematically, they're right. But they miss what any coach, player, or fan knows: football isn't about positions on the field, but about the rhythm of the match, about the moment a striker makes the right run, about the pressure of 80,000 fans in the stands. Chess is the same. It's not about 10^44 positions or 10^120 games. It's about the moment a young player puts the opponent's King in checkmate after a 40-move complexity, about the sound of heavy breathing in a silent playing hall, about the feeling of a beautiful move — something no algorithm can express in human language. And here's what I believe both Musk and those supporting the "chess will be solved" stance are missing: they're applying a framework from another field — cryptography, equation solving, optimization — to an activity whose essence is experience. Chess, like music, like literature, like football, doesn't exist to be "solved." It exists to be played, to be loved, to be lived. When Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 2026, people predicted chess would die. Thirty years later, chess is still alive, more popular than ever with the explosion of online platforms and YouTube analysis videos. When AlphaZero surpassed all traditional engines in 2026, people again predicted chess would lose its meaning. But the 2026 Candidates Tournament still attracted millions of viewers, and Gukesh D became the youngest world champion in history at age 18. Of course, I don't deny AI's power. I've witnessed the rise of Stockfish, of Houdini, of AlphaZero. I know that any player today can defeat any world champion in history with just a laptop and a free engine. But this is what people like Musk — those standing outside the chessboard — often don't understand: the fact that machines can beat humans doesn't diminish the value of humans playing chess. It's like a computer can paint a more beautiful painting than any artist, but that doesn't make painting less meaningful. Art — and chess is a form of art — is not measured by the final result, but by the process. So what happens next? I think this debate won't end. It will subside, then flare up again whenever a new AI defeats a player, whenever a tech billionaire comments on chess, whenever a chess tournament attracts media attention. But I also believe chess will continue to exist — not because it can't be "solved" (theoretically, perhaps it can, with enough time and computing power), but because its value doesn't lie in whether it's solved or not. It lies in the children sitting before a chessboard for the first time today, in the elderly still coming to chess clubs every week, in the moment a beautiful move makes you exclaim "oh!" — something no algorithm can replace. Chess.com was right to respond to Musk with "It's just skills." Chess, after all, isn't about winning or losing. It's about the skill of sitting down, thinking, and playing.