Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:40:10 01/14/05
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On January 14, 2005 at 18:00:55, Jesper Antonsson wrote: >On January 13, 2005 at 11:12:09, Dieter Buerssner wrote: >>One other number. The mass of the earth is 6*10^24 kg. It is mainly made of iron >>(the core). But say it was out of oxygen (which is lighter, so we overestimate >>the number of atoms). The atomic mass of oxygen is 16 g/mol. Avogadro's constant >>is 6.022e23 mol^-1. The number of atoms in the earth is: >> >> 6e24 kg / 0.016 kg/mol * 6e23 mol^-1 = 5.76 * 10^46 > >The calculation is incorrect. (e24*e23 = e47 > e46). The real answer should be >Xe50, I guess. No matter. Some estimate that chess is only 1e40 positions, and >if we are really optimistic about the alpha-beta gain and use some tricks, >perhaps sqrt(1e40) = 1e20 positions would suffice. 1e20 oxygen atoms weighs: > >(1e20 / 6.022e23 mol-1) * 16 g/mol = 0.0027 g > >1e20 bits is also "only" 12,500,000 Tbyte (of course, a bit per position won't >suffice, but anyway...). I would guess that the installed world hard disk base >is somewhere close to this number, and that these sizes will actually be in >reach of very-high-end database systems within 20 years. Furthermore, if we >calculate one billion nodes a second, we may build such a solution hash table in >1e11 seconds, or 1.7e9 minutes, or 2.7e7 hours, or 1157407 days or 3170 years. >Too much, but only by a few orders of magnitude. Perhaps we can speed it up by >parallelism. > >Solving chess may very well be forever unfeasible, but I think the jury is still >out there regarding how much work that has to be done to find a solution, and >while this is the case, we really don't know much about this. There is (of course) the possibility that there is a forced outcome nearby to the origin. Perhaps there is a forced win after 45 plies that may be discovered. You would think that someone would have found it by now, of course, but you never know.
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