Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:56:07 05/27/99
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On May 27, 1999 at 15:10:44, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
[snip]
>I did some calculations. You can use 12 bits to represent kings and castling,
>one bit for side on move, one bit for e.p., (if there is an e.p., you get back
>the four bits from the pawn representations), 15^8 for the pawns, and
>46!/(32!*2^6) for the pieces (this is from the number of combinations of 14
>peices in the 46 remaining squares divided by two for each of the pieces there
>are two of). If I calculated correctly, this takes 114 bits. Many, if not most
>of these positions are legal (the exceptions are kings in check, and pieces that
>could not move to squares because the pawns have not moved and they are
>blocked).
Could you spell out your method formally and in detail?
If it works, it proves that there are less than 2.1e34 possible chess positions.
In fact, the exact number would be less than:
20,769,187,434,139,310,514,121,985,316,880,384
{around 20 decillion}
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