Ken Hirsch wrote:
> From: "John Dunlop" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>>Just a little thought for the mathematicians amongst us...
>>
>>This all sounds total nonsense to me. Does it make any sense to anyone?
>>Wirt?
>
>
> This is a common observation that the number of potential chess moves is
> larger than can possibly be enumerated.
>
> You can compare this with a simpler game, such as tic-tac-toe.  The first
> player has 9 choices, the second 8 choices, and so on. The number of
> possible games (sequence of moves with final outcome) must be less than 9!,
> which is 362880.  You could run a program to list them and run it in a
> matter of minutes.
>
> It turns out that the number of distinct games is 255168, including 131184
> wins for the first player, 77904 wins for the second player, and 46080
> draws.  The total number of moves was 2,106,288.  Of course the number of
> distinct board positions was less than that (it has to be less than 3^9 =
> 19683).
>
> If you tried to do that with chess, you'll find out that the number of
> possible moves is "greater than the number of atoms in the universe".
>
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Digressing onto the tic-tac-toe theme. There are actually only 3
starting moves, a corner, a side-center, the center. I got bored in 6th
grade and tried to work out the correct moves (by exhaustive search) to
always ensure at least a draw (it didn't take very long).

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