Author: Vincent Vega
Date: 21:11:40 02/19/00
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On February 19, 2000 at 23:12:04, Michael Fuhrmann wrote: >In the Gulko piece in Commentary magazine cited here recently, Gulko says: > >"It has been established that the total number of possible chess games which can >develop from the starting position on the board not only exceeds the number of >atoms in the known universe, but does so by a wide margin." > >Has this in fact been "established" or is this overstatement? I noticed that the total number of chess games is often used to show that chess will not be solved in a very long time. But the total number of possible positions would be better, because different games can lead to the same position, with the same best move. The total number of positions is much smaller, with the upper bound being given by 2^number of bits needed to store any position.
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