How many moves are there

I think there are 100 to the power of 100 of move or position you could make. Do you know how many?

A move and a position are entirely different.

There are roughly 10 ^ 120 positions.

Any given position has a certian number of (legal) moves, ranging from 0 (checkmate, stalemate) to probably over  200 (consider a side having 9 queens and two rooks plus other pieces.  There are a lot of possible moves there.) 

So a move and a position are entirely different. 

But this does raise an interesting question.  What (legally reachable) position has the most number of possible moves?  And how many moves are there in that position?

bowanza wrote:

 But this does raise an interesting question.  What (legally reachable) position has the most number of possible moves?  And how many moves are there in that position?

 Exeter Chess Club have shed some light on this  http://www.exeterchessclub.org.uk/studies.html#curios

Very interesting.

artfizz wrote:

bowanza wrote:

 But this does raise an interesting question.  What (legally reachable) position has the most number of possible moves?  And how many moves are there in that position?

 Exeter Chess Club have shed some light on this  http://www.exeterchessclub.org.uk/studies.html#curios

I tried that link and I couldn't find it there.  Did you?

I gotta say I did find some real interesting stuff there, however.  Thanks for that link.  Did you see the position with the most ways to mate the king?  I think it was 55 ways!  I think the position is legally reachable but would never occur in real play (like most other randomly generated legal positions).

Well..here's the most complex position..

Heh, seriously

I've got this one in PDF - it's part of one of the author's numberous statistics done by using Rybka on >500 games played by top historical players from Lasker till Kramnik. I don't know how Rybka evaluates "complexity" of a position.

The 3rd one in that ranking occurred in Anderssen-Rosenthal game, and the 4th one in modern Topalov-Kramnik match (complexity 2.16 and 2.13 respectively).

I don't know if something is wrong with my setup, but I could only see two of the four positions the above post says it has.

Anyway, is there a relationship between the complexity of a position and the number of moves in that position?

I only pasted two, I didn't have FENs and didn't want to paste a bitmap too big (it's a screenshot).

As I'm saying, I've never used Rybka and I don't know how complexity is defined.

I posted it as a curiosity, on a sidenote (after Alison27 jokingly posted the initial position as the most complex).

What does Rybka say the starting position's complexity is?

That's the problem with computers, they only know what we tell them..and if they can learn they can only learn in the way we tell them too lol.  I got in an argument with my friend over the accuracy of computers, she didn't seem to understand that computers are made by humans, humans make mistakes and thats why your computer freezes all the time.  PLUS if you goto intel website they public how many mistakes THEY SAY there chips make and thats only one of the many compents of your computer and don't get me started on the mistakes computer programmers make!   ok im done i promise..

Ok I found

"I determine the complexity of a position adding differences between the eval of the best and the second best moves each time Rybka finds a new move. Differences found on the depths 10-14 are multiplied by 2."

- from the guy's profile on Chessgames.com (the one who does these analysis; his nick is Nimh)

The question of how many moves there are is answered by the skill of your opponent. If he is a GM, your moves will be few ; )

Chessroshi wrote:

The question of how many moves there are is answered by the skill of your opponent. If he is a GM, your moves will be few ; )

But we are not talking about playing good chess, we are only talking about playing legal chess.  Good chess is difficult to define.