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Subject: Re: Last Point.. Chess will NOT be 'solved' by Computers!

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 08:06:31 01/18/05

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On January 18, 2005 at 10:36:20, chandler yergin wrote:

>Only delusional people, disconnected from reality think it can.
>
>End of discussion!
>
>Anyone want to refute this?
>
>http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/chess1.htm
>
>In this tree, there are 20 possible moves for white. There are 20 * 20 = 400
>possible moves for black, depending on what white does. Then there are 400 * 20
>= 8,000 for white. Then there are 8,000 * 20 = 160,000 for black, and so on. If
>you were to fully develop the entire tree for all possible chess moves, the
>total number of board positions is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
>000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
>000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
>000,000,000,000, or 10^120, give or take a few. That's a very big number. For
>example, there have only been 10^26 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are
>thought to be only 10^75 atoms in the entire universe. When you consider that
>the Milky Way galaxy contains billions of suns, and there are billions of
>galaxies, you can see that that's a whole lot of atoms.
>
> That number is dwarfed by the number of possible chess moves.
>
> Chess is a pretty intricate game!
>No computer is ever going to calculate the entire tree. What a chess computer
>tries to do is generate the board-position tree five or 10 or 20 moves into the
>future. Assuming that there are about 20 possible moves for any board position,
>a five-level tree contains 3,200,000 board positions. A 10-level tree contains
>about 10,000,000,000,000 (10 trillion) positions.
>
>
>   Any "garbage" about the 50 move rule is smoke & mirrors, the number of
>possible legal moves in the 1st 10 Moves of a game exceeds the number of
>molecules in the observable Universe.
>
>
>
>A few people here been nippin on the juice or something...


Computer will also never be able to solve this position and show that it is a
draw.
[D]3qkb2/8/8/8/8/8/8/Q3K3 w - - 0 1

The proof is identical to your proof that chess cannot be solved(number of
possible games of n plies is at least 20^n and you can get more than 20^80 games
of 80 plies).

Programs claim that it is a draw by tablebases but I guess that you believe that
they are wrong because you proved that the position cannot be solved.

Uri



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