A solved game is a game whose outcome can be correctly predicted from any position, assuming that both players play perfectly. This concept is usually applied to abstract strategy games, and especially to games with full information and no element of chance; solving such a game may use combinatorial game theory and/or computer assistance.
Overview
A two-player game can be solved on several levels: ;Ultra-weak ;Weak ;Strong Despite their name, many game theorists believe that "ultra-weak" proofs are the deepest, most interesting and valuable. "Ultra-weak" proofs require a scholar to reason about the abstract properties of the game, and show how these properties lead to certain outcomes if perfect play is realized. By contrast, "strong" proofs often proceed by brute force—using a computer to exhaustively search a game tree to figure out what would happen if perfect play were realized. The resulting proof gives an optimal strategy for every possible position on the board. However, these proofs are not as helpful in understanding deeper reasons why some games are solvable as a draw, and other, seemingly very similar games are solvable as a win. Given the rules of any two-person game with a finite number of positions, one can always trivially construct a minimax algorithm that would exhaustively traverse the game tree. However, since for many non-trivial games such an algorithm would require an infeasible amount of time to generate a move in a given position, a game is not considered to be solved weakly or strongly unless the algorithm can be run by existing hardware in a reasonable time. Many algorithms rely on a huge pre-generated database, and are effectively nothing more. As an example of a strong solution, the game of tic-tac-toe is solvable as a draw for both players with perfect play. Games like nim also admit a rigorous analysis using combinatorial game theory. Whether a game is solved is not necessarily the same as whether it remains interesting for humans to play. Even a strongly solved game can still be interesting if its solution is too complex to be memorized; conversely, a weakly solved game may lose its attraction if the winning strategy is simple enough to remember. An ultra-weak solution generally does not affect playability. Moreover, even if the game is not solved, it is possible that an algorithm yields a good approximate solution: for instance, an article in Science from January 2015 claims that their heads up limit Texas hold 'em poker bot Cepheus guarantees that a human lifetime of play is not sufficient to establish with statistical significance that its strategy is not an exact solution.
Perfect play
In game theory, perfect play is the behavior or strategy of a player that leads to the best possible outcome for that player regardless of the response by the opponent. Perfect play for a game is known when the game is solved. Based on the rules of a game, every possible final position can be evaluated. By backward reasoning, one can recursively evaluate a non-final position as identical to the position that is one move away and best valued for the player whose move it is. Thus a transition between positions can never result in a better evaluation for the moving player, and a perfect move in a position would be a transition between positions that are equally evaluated. As an example, a perfect player in a drawn position would always get a draw or win, never a loss. If there are multiple options with the same outcome, perfect play is sometimes considered the fastest method leading to a good result, or the slowest method leading to a bad result. Perfect play can be generalized to non-perfect information games, as the strategy that would guarantee the highest minimal expected outcome regardless of the strategy of the opponent. As an example, the perfect strategy for rock paper scissors would be to randomly choose each of the options with equal probability. The disadvantage in this example is that this strategy will never exploit non-optimal strategies of the opponent, so the expected outcome of this strategy versus any strategy will always be equal to the minimal expected outcome. Although the optimal strategy of a game may not be known, a game-playing computer might still benefit from solutions of the game from certain endgame positions, which will allow it to play perfectly after some point in the game. Computer chess programs are well known for doing this.
