Dreams of a final theory  

Will Baude weighs in on the solution to chess with the sexy idea that Black, moving second, might actually have an advantage over White at the most precise levels of play,

because the game would naturally tend toward a lock-down where being forced to move was a major disadvantage, and black would be able to capitalize on white's tempo "advantage".

Possibly. But I'm not so sure we will ever reach a solution for chess, or even the "still higher levels of play" he refers to. Computers are making rapid advances, yes, but a couple things suggest to me that this progress will be limited. First, depsite massive increases in processing power, Kasparov and other top level players still aren't getting wiped off the board -- and in fact, they are finding ways to win some games. This situation may change, but the tide hasn't turned yet, despite declarations to the contrary after Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue (a bogus result anyway, if you ask me and a small cadre of chess-players).

More importantly, the way chess programs work is at issue. Computers, even the top level machines that play against top level humans for top level championship purses, aren't doing much besides chugging vast numbers of positions and evaluating them by assigning a score. This method is effective because of the sheer processing power at the computers' disposal, but also because the computers are programmed by international masters and grandmasters with the values of various pieces and piece combinations, positional circumstances, etc. This is to say the computer cannot evaluate the game by itself; humans must decide what the relevant values are, either through their own expertise or through constant play testing.

At some point, perhaps we'll be able to program a machine with elegant pattern recognition skills that allow it to play positionally without human coaching. When that happens, chess may or may not be transformed. But even then, the level of complexity in this game is astonishing (did you know that after 10 moves for White and Black, there are more possible positions on the chess board than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe?), and it's hard to imagine that tactical foresight could lead to a "lock-down" from move one.

(Incidentally, with a friend I've invested quite a bit of time into various permutations of two move chess, which ends up being much more aggressive than its popular counterpart. My friend and I don't play at a very high level, but there were definitely "lock-down" circumstances in many of our games, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that black had an advantage there. Does this work against what I've said above?)