Skybird |
09-26-08 05:39 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Letum
Pd2-d4
I wonder how many possible variations there are for any given game of chess.
If I had enough good mathematicians and enough processing power, would it be possible to solve chess for the black or white side?
|
In theory, yes, in practice: no. The number of possible (by rules) variations has been calculated, but it calculated to a number that is stellar in dimension.
A guy named Allis calculated the number of possible positions to be 5 x 10^52.
Influential Claude Shannon, father of the so-called Shannon-A and Shannon-B strategy in chess programming (basically brute force versus selective algorithms), showed that the number of possibel variations of a complete chessmatch is 10^120. This number is known as the "Shannon number".
If you take estimations of 80 billion galaxies existing in the universe, and count just the hydrogene atoms, an estimated calculation would lead you to ranges of around 10^79 hydrogene atoms in these 80 billion galaxies.
|