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Subject: Re: The game of chess can never ever be solved.

Author: Louis Fagliano

Date: 09:16:10 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. 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...!

Actually there are "only" about 10^43 different legal chess positions.  The
10^128 is the number of different possible chess games because any one position
can be reached in numerous different possible move orders.

Not that storing and recalling 10^43 positions is any piece of cake, mind you.
So unless we can use individual quarks as electronic switches or binary bits,
yeah I agree with you that we are not going to see 32-man tablebases!



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