Author: Uri Blass
Date: 04:37:26 11/03/02
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On November 03, 2002 at 05:20:31, Omid David wrote: > >The game of chess can never ever be solved: > >There are about 10^128 potential chess positions. This number is not correct. The number of chess positions is less than 2^160. I remember that I wrote a program to caluclate an upper bound to that nuimber and I found something that is less than 2^160(I simply caclulated the number of pseudo legal positions for every material structure and I added the numbers). The program is in my old p200 and this computer does not work today so I do not have the program but I sent it to Dan corbit and it may be also possible to find the exact numbers in the ccc archives. I ignored 50 move rule,side to move and castling in my calculations but I believe that most of the pseudo legal positions are illegal positions and this factor is more important. My guess is that the real number of the legal positions is about 10^42. It is possible to write a program to get a better estimate by generating a lot of random positions and calculate the number of legal positions from them. If you get an upper bound of 10^46 and 100 out of 1000000 random positions that you generate are legal then it means that 10^42 is a good estimate. If we start searching with a >supercomputer with the speed of 100 million nodes per second (10^8 NPS), it will >take about 10^113 years to process all possible positions! What is the speed you >can imagine in the next 100 years? Let's say 100 million million nodes per >second (10^14 NPS); then it will take "only" 10^107 years to solve the game of >chess! > >And even if we process all 10^128 possible positions, we will have one little >problem: where to store the data?! Even if we manage to store a position in an >atom, there won't be enough atoms for that, since there are "only" 10^80 atoms >in the entire universe...! I believe that chess can be practically solved. I believe that you do not need to prove the result in order to get a draw in every game. I do not expect it to happen in the near future but I believe that in 2050 every comp-comp game between top programs in chess is going to be finished in a draw. Uri
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