Author: chandler yergin
Date: 10:17:43 05/21/05
Go up one level in this thread
How many times do I have to Post this before you understand? http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/first-time.htm?referer=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 10120, give or take a few. That's a very big number. For example, there have only been 1026 nanoseconds since the Big Bang. There are thought to be only 1075 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. Chess will never be 'solved' by Computers or Humans. The amount of games humans can play is but a fraction of the possible number of games. Any 'sample' size is only relevant to the Total played. Humans do not play perfect chess, nor do computers. A draw is but one possible outcome. There are 3! Historically, White has the largest winning percentage. Period!
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.