Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:43:37 02/15/00
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On February 15, 2000 at 14:03:16, Phil Richard wrote: >Has anyone ever calculated the exact numbers of moves >possible in a game of chess? Look at Steve Pribut's Chess FAQ. It's about 5000. If you mean distinct possible positions, it's about 10^42 or less. If you mean possible pathways through those positions to the end, that would be a large number. >There's a lot of "0's" > >I heard it's more than the number of Atoms that make Planet earth. To solve the game of chess, you only need to solve the possible positions, not all possible permutations thereof. However, you would have to calculate a tree containing 10^21 nodes (sqrt(possible_positions)) to solve it. That's still a big number, but less than one mole of atoms. My Brother-in-law's dad has a patent (patent number 5,958,541) that will store 10^14 character/cm^2 of information. It would take 10^7 cm^2 of this stuff to hold the complete tree, if we could store a position in one byte. That's a square 3162.3 cm on a side times sizeof(pos_struct). We clearly can't squish that much, so we conservatively figure 20 characters per position which would give about 600 M^2, or a square about 25 meters on a side. Comuting the nodes is another matter. But a petaflop computer could manage it. ;-)
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