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Subject: Re: Lies.. Damn Lies & Statistics!

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 23:12:10 01/12/05

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On January 12, 2005 at 19:56:25, Dann Corbit wrote:

>>I recon about 300 years before a computer will solve chess.  This assumes
>>
>>1) 10^120 possible positions

>This is far, far too large.  Chess positions have been encoded in 162 bits,
>which puts an absolute upper limit at 10^58 (and it is probably much less than
>that).


As I'm sure you know, 10^120 is the estimated number of unique paths (or games),
while 10^40 through 10^58 are estimates on the number of unique positions. It
seems incorrect to me that we would only need to visit sqrt(unique positions)
nodes. Alpha-beta doesn't deal with unique positions. It deals with total nodes,
with unique positions often revisited during a single search via different
paths. It seems like the number of total nodes visited should actually be larger
than 10^120, since 10^120 only counts the paths to leaf nodes, and not all nodes
visited leading to each leaf node. Or am I confusing the situation in my mind?



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