Author: William Dozier
Date: 08:59:29 05/19/99
the Famous logician and ecionomist, the late JohnStuart Mill, tell us, in his Autobiography, that at one oeriod of hhis life he was seriouisly tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combination. The varios sounds, he reasoned with himself, can be put togather only in a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful. Most of these have been already discovered, and there cannot be room for a long succssion of Beethovens and Mozartz to strike out, as these have done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. A similar doubt with regard to Chess has probably crossed the minds of maney chess players. A little reffection and calculation, however, will soon show th eir misgiving to be no less chimerical than was that of Mill. To estimate the actual number of ways of playinf even a very few moves is beyond the power of cacualtion, but to get somthing of an approximation to that number is very simple. Taking an average varation of the opening as usually practiced, we find that the player has tewnty-eight, thirty and-three way of playing the second, third and fourth moves respectively; twenty-nine,thirty-one thirty three being corresponding nubers of the second player. Of course both players, on their first move, have a choice of twenty moooves. On the hypothesis that the nuvber of replies open at each move is always the same, whatever the preceding moves may have been, and that the foregoing figures give those numbers, the numbers, the number of possable ways of playing the first four moves only on eachside would be 313,978,584,000. if then, then, anyone were to play without cessation at the rate of one set a minute it wpild take hiim more than six hundred thousands years to go through them all.It woud be difficult to say whether the above number is in excess or defect of the true one, but perhaps we may safely affirm that it is not likely to be out more than 20 per cent either way. When we bear in mijnd that the number of possable ways increases ffor maney moves some thirtfold for each move added, it is plain that the number of ways of playing the first twenty or thirty moves oneach side is so great as to utterly trancend the grasp of the imagination. No doubt the tatio of the plausible to the possible number of moves at every stage is small, but after every allowance has been made for that fact, the varieties of play still remain enormous. In a very rough way we may easly easily extend our survey, After the first four moves in commom form of the Giuocc Piano opening, White has thirty-three possible moves in the Evans Gambit he has a choice of thirty-two.moves. Let us assume, then, for convenience of calculation, that for the nest six moves on each side, after the firs four on eachside have been played, there is always achoice of thirty different ways of playing, an hypothesis probably below rather than above the actual fact. We this get by combinatin with the result give above, that the number of ways of paying the first ten moves on each side is(169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000). On this basis, and cosidering the population of the whole world to be 148 Million (Levasseur's estimate), More than 217 billion of years would be nedded to go through them all, even if every man,woman, and child on the face of the globe played with cessation for that vast period at the rate of one set per minute, and no set were repeated.(These figures have not been changed since the publication of the first edition, publised about the turn of the century-1960) This paragraph was take out of Book_The Principles of chess/By James Mason./NYC. Enjoy/Respectfully/William
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