I will sometimes hear agadmator say this in his videos whenever he is analyzing a game and he gets to the point in the game where the position is no longer found in whatever database he uses (which I assume is a database of only GM games). I was wondering though, with all of the chess games played by players of all levels in recorded chess history, combined with the billions of games played and archived on the servers of chess.com and other chess websites over the years, from the newest of players to the engine vs engine battles, is there really such thing as a "new game" that hasn't been recorded somewhere? Or is there a infinite number of possible chess games that can be played? Would somebody skilled with math or statistics have any ideas?
I believe agadmator uses a Master game database (not only GM games). In short, you will be surprised at how few moves it takes to get to a game which seemingly has not been played yet. A good place to start down this rabbit hole is this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
A quote from the page: "After each player has moved a piece 5 times each (10 ply) there are 69,352,859,712,417 possible games that could have been played."
I will sometimes hear agadmator say this in his videos whenever he is analyzing a game and he gets to the point in the game where the position is no longer found in whatever database he uses (which I assume is a database of only GM games). I was wondering though, with all of the chess games played by players of all levels in recorded chess history, combined with the billions of games played and archived on the servers of chess.com and other chess websites over the years, from the newest of players to the engine vs engine battles, is there really such thing as a "new game" that hasn't been recorded somewhere? Or is there a infinite number of possible chess games that can be played? Would somebody skilled with math or statistics have any ideas?