At 04:01 PM 9/25/2003, John Conway wrote:
Yes, of course. The same argument applies to solving the game of Chess. If next week someone claims to have done that, I won't believe them for the same reason, namely that the problem is so big that their argument is more likely to be wrong than right.
I think a computer search could succeed with the 4-D kissing number problem. I was contemplating it several years ago. Consider for a moment the 3-D version. Take a sphere to be the center sphere. WOLG, place a sphere touching it. WOLG, place the next sphere touching the center sphere and the first one, etc. Use standard backtracking/depth first search. I don't think there are too many possibilities to consider for the 4-D kissing number - far fewer than chess.