Author: vitor
Date: 23:33:22 06/04/99
i came across the following newsgroup post on quantum computer chess. the possibilities sound pretty wicked: Luigi Bianca wrote: > does a calculation exists (also if approximate) of all the possible > combination of this tree? Yes, several. A reasonable guess is that the number of possible games, assuming that the 50-move rule is enforced rather than optional, is around 10^23000, to within a factor of 10^1000. A naive quantum computer would be able to explore this tree [assuming it can store so much state information!] by recursing to depth 12000 and then unwinding the results; I suppose this might take a few minutes at current computer speeds, bearing in mind how much function evaluation etc has to be done at each depth. [Note that the recursion doesn't "explode", because everything is done in parallel.] But there are many fewer *positions* than *games*, so a "tablebase" approach would be more robust, and would take about the same time. Also, by complicating the code we could incorporate the usual alpha-beta pruning, which would certainly reduce drastically the depth of tree needed to complete the search [but the reduced depth might be more than offset by the extra complexity]. This is all rather fanciful. On the other hand, each humble particle in the Universe manages to calculate its own progress in space and time in real time, despite the complication of all the other particles in the Universe, with an accuracy and speed unimaginable to today's computer science. If there is a way to tap in to that computer power .... Of course, many science fiction stories have used the theme of the Universe as a giant computer, and of us as only some corner of the calculation. -- Andy Walker, School of MathSci., Univ. of Nott'm, UK. anw@maths.nott.ac.uk
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