Author: Frederic Friedel
Date: 12:54:16 08/31/00
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On August 31, 2000 at 15:01:18, Vincent Lejeune wrote: >If I remember well I red in a magasin some years ago that there is 10^80 >possible positions and there is 10^120 different playable games (no >demonstration was given). There are 10^112 possible games lasting 40 moves. This is considerably more than the 10^82 elementary particles in the universe. It is clear that, for principle reasons, all possible games will not be reconstructed (generated and stored) in the course of this universe. But we don’t need to do that in order to solve chess (in the Thompson endgame sense). The number of possible legal chess positions is far smaller: between 10^53 and 10^55. So will we (or someone or something) be able to work them out, effectively retro-analysing the 32-piece endgame chess represents? Again the answer is no, but not on principle grounds but for practical reasons. A computer processing a billion positions per second would require about 10^38 years to solve the game. If you use a billion computers in perfect multi-processing you will still have to wait 10^29 years for the answer (and if you are not careful with the program it might simply produce “42”). But there is still a major problem. You cannot store the tables on CDs or DVDs. As John Nunn explained to me we will need the matter from many millions of galaxies to store the information that is generated. So solving the game using the method of exhaustive analysis is theoretically possible, but one wonders what Greenpeace would say if we started dismantling galaxies in order to store chess positions.
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