i saw this great response
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070803014221AAfMjgV
Scientist guy basically says that though most atoms (99 percent) are in stars most of the stuff that composes a star is a free plasma doodad so it's kind of pointless to think of stars as solely atoms also uhhm this is only observable universe i guess but anyways it's okay cause nowadays gms only play like the same couple of games until they hit move 20 or so.
Cheater_1- "Oh boy, once again you all show your IGNORANCE. THe universe is a pretty big place..near infinite."
I think this demonstrates YOUR ignorance, no?
hmm in fairness, I just noticed that while the op talks about total games, the thread title refers to positions! 
Yeah my bad...thats my poor title letting the side down. The quote definately made reference to total games lasting exactly 40 moves. Thats 40 legal moves each side. Whether or not those moves are good/bad clearly makes no difference, all I'm certain of is that it must be pretty complex working out every variation of a game that lasts precisely 40 moves.
ps lets go Europe Ryder cup boys!!
(sorry)
Its simple fact, I'm not gonna link more crap that people won't read. The number of atoms in the universe has been estimated by the maths gods and so has the number of possible games of chess (a finite number as long as the 50 move rule and draw by repetition are obeyed, otherwise the number of games is actually infinite.)
Although they are just estimates, it doesn't matter - we would have to be wrong by an exponential of exponentials about the amount of matter in the universe to have one atom per possible chess game.
Another misconception seems to be that the SIZE of the universe is in anyway relevant - its huge of course, 99.99999999999% is just vacuum.
I don't know offhand if the number of games possible after 40 moves is bigger than the number of atoms in the universe, and definitely the number of possible positions is less than the universal atomic sum.
You just have to think back to the myth about the indian advisor who allegedly invented the game to remind yourself of just how scary exponetial growth is; claiming as his reward 1 grain of rice for the first square, 2 for the second, 4 for the 3rd, 8 for the 4th and so on, doubling for each square. There are not (and likely could not be) enough grains of rice on the planet to accomplish this - and that just a (relatively) tiny number, 2^63.
cheater_1, you fail to understand the difference between numbers like 10^50 and 10^51... huge difference.... 10^120 is incomprehendable... and yes that's more than the # of atoms in the known universe
Cheater_1 is long gone. Responding to his two-and-a-half-year-old troll won't have any more impact now than it would have back in September 2008.
But to make it interesting one should only count relative good moves, it makes the math more difficult, but the result more accurate
And of course, to ensure that your assessment of "relatively good" is 100% accurate, you should reference a 32 piece table-base to ensure that the determination isn't hindered by the horizon effect.
These are all estimates, no need to be 100% correct.
Heh, by coincidence I'd just picked up this book a day ago: http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Consequences-Vintage/dp/0679726012
I think it would have done cheater_1 good to do so 2 and a half years ago.
Where the author starts out by illustrating people's confusions with large numbers, such as between a billion and a trillion or between 10^22 and 10^25.
I was being facetious.
And of course, to ensure that your assessment of "relatively good" is 100% accurate, you should reference a 32 piece table-base to ensure that the determination isn't hindered by the horizon effect.
Hey! I just finished a 32 piece table-base. I'll throw it in for free on any bridge sales!
What's facetious mean?
STUART..that statement is as FALSE as false can be. It's just an exaggeration to describe an impossibly large number. I'm a numbers/statistics type of guy and I laugh evertime I hear that one because I know.
A believable statement would be that there are more moves in a game of chess than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.
To put it in perspective, there are about 10 to the 120 power of possible moves in a game of chess. Thats 120 Zeros. Just one drop of water contains 10 to the 11th power (11 zeros) of atoms in it. Think of all the drops of water on the earth and youll see that it would DWARF 10 to the 120. And that's just the EARTH. They said the universe.
Just as you CANNOT put 20 ounces of water in a 16 ounce glass, You cannot have have something larger than the universe contained in the universe. It's a physical impossibility.
LOL, if you're a stastician I'm Kasparov. Your last sentence is simply hilarious - do you mean to say that the number of permutations of a game is comparable with its physical size? Theory-space is not realtime-space. I would have thought a "statistics" guy would know that; in fact, it looks you've done your research, but your common sense seems to be horribly lacking.
I rarely find anyone stupid enough to suggest that the Earth contains 10^120 atoms, but whenever I do I pounce on the opportunity. Actually, the Earth contains around 10^27 atoms of water and about 10^41 atoms in total.
Ugh, I hate arguing with people like you with their inferior minds coupled with arrogance. Your intelligence is pathetic - take it somewhere where people will blindly believe the rubbish that you take your time to type out without even a tiny speck of knowledge. You said you laugh you hear that the number of positions reached after 40 moves is greater than the number of atoms in the universe (which it undoubtedly is) - on the other hand, I laugh on the rare ocassions I find an idiot like you spouting out his nonsense without thinking it through.
Oh boy, once again you all show your IGNORANCE. Just one drop of water is reputed to have 10 to the 11th power of atoms. And this is just one drop of water on EARTH. THe universe is a pretty big place..near infinite.
There are no definitive answers as to how many drops of water there are in the earths oceans, but after many google searches, I get an average answer of 1 x 10^25. Multiply those two number together and you get 1 x 10^36. THATS 36 ZEROS. and thats just water....teeny tiny earth.....
Once source says there are 1.33 x 10^50 atoms on earth. THATS 48 ZEROS!!!!
http://education.jlab.org/qa/mathatom_05.html
As you can see, and as I have spelled out that teeny tiny 10^120 will be QUICKLY dwarfed when you factor in the solar system.......ah yes...and then theres about 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 googol more solar systems. By the way..a googol is a one followed by 100 zeros. Yes...thats where GOOGLE got its name from.
GET MY POINT.....GOOD!!!!
Hahaha, I was pleasantly surprised after reading your first post (and replying to it - read that one first) to find that you're going to back yourself up. I'm glad - I like a good argument against a delusioned retard, I find them everywhere nowdays.
So, 1.33x10^50 has 48 zeroes, does it? I would have thought it has 50, since 50-3=47. Not very good maths for a "statistics guy". Let's go with your fairly innacurate estimate of the number of atoms on Earth (1.33x10^50), and see where it gets us. If we round the size of the solar system up, we arrive at about 10^8 times the size of the Earth. So, if I said there were 10^58 atoms in the solar system, that would be accepted even by someone with a misfunctioning brain such as yourself (in reality, much of the solar system is vacuum, and in any case the Earth does not contain 1.33x10^50 atoms; more like 4x10^41).
How many solar systems do you, the big "numbers guy", think there are in the universe (we're talking about the known universe, of course, since no fool would bring unknown parts of the universe into it)? 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 googol? I'm disgusted by the number usage of someone who claims to have an interest in statistics. Actually (and this is being extraordinarily lenient), there are something like 10^14 solar systems in each galaxy and a maximum of about 10^16 galaxies in the universe. And so, our grand total for the number of atoms in the universe? 10^88! (the real answer is more like 10^78)
Gosh, it's refreshing to meet something as mathematically helpless as yourself which I can laugh at. Let's move on to getting a rough idea of the number of possible positions after 40 moves (in no way am I claiming that this idea is totally accurate, just that it gives us a fair idea). Now, bear with me: for a moment, I'm going to delve into areas of Chess and maths with which you are unfamiliar (e.g. addition and subtraction). But don't worry, I'll be back with the real numbers soon.
Let's say that for the first 10 moves for each player, there are 20 options per half-move, each leading to a different position. Then, after 10 moves, we have a total number of positions of 20^20. For the remaining 30 moves (60 half-moves), we will say that there are 30 options per move, but then half our total number of games at the end to provide us with a raw estimate of the number of the positions after 40 moves. The calculation is (20^20)*(30^60)/2=3.14x10^114.
Back to you, to provide you with the hard numbers in a language you may be able to understand. 3.14x10^114 is BIGGER than 10^88. And it's not just bigger. By your own admission, the number of atoms in the universe is 31.4 times smaller than a single water atom when the number of positions of Chess after 40 moves is the size of the entire Earth. Please don't waste my time again without checking up your facts - I don't like explaining obvious things slowly to half-wits. But really, to be honest my problem with you isn't your low level of intelligence - it's the arrogance which comes with it, which seems to be disturbingly profound in you.
I'm sorry if I've confused you with real maths, I was just having some fun. Feel free to reply anytime. ;)
If the total number of chess games under 40 moves is about 10^120 then imagine how many possible chess games there are without the restriction of less than 40 moves. Looking it up, I see that it is estimated at about 10^(10^50) which is insanely high!
I've got no quarrel with you and quite like you, so don't take this personally (not that you would normally, but my above posts might seem a bit aggressive). I just thought I would inform you that 10^(10^50) is far too high to be true. Since the maximum number of moves in any one position is 218, and there are a total theoretical rough maximum of (50*16*7)+(50*16)=5600+800=6,400 moves long that a Chess match can be, the technical maximum number of moves it could possibly be is 218^12800=3x10^29,932. Of course, since the real maximum is probably well lower and the maximum number of moves in almost all positions is far, far less than 218, the estimat should really be much lower. But, frankly speaking, 3x10^29,932 is actually a little less than 3x10^(10^4) and incomparably less than 10^(10^50).
I'm a numbers/statistics type of guy . . .
To put it in perspective, there are about 10 to the 120 power of possible moves in a game of chess. Thats 120 Zeros. Just one drop of water contains 10 to the 11th power (11 zeros) of atoms in it. Think of all the drops of water on the earth and youll see that it would DWARF 10 to the 120.
Well, for a numbers/statistics kind of guy, you don't seem to have any recognition of what's required to get up to massive powers of ten. Let's start with your first comparison, a topic which you clearly know nothing about and didn't bother checking.
A standard laboratory rough estimation is that 20 drops from a lab eye dropper is about 1 cubic centimeter. But why bother with that? It's much easier to calculate how many atoms in a cubic centimeter of water. The U.S. geological survey says the total volume of water on the planet is 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometers. At 10^15 cubic centimeters per cubic kilometer, that rounds to about 1.3 X 10^24 cubic centimeters of water on Earth. Allow 1 gram per cc and a molar mass of water of 18 grams, so each cc contains about (6 X 10^23)/18 or about 3.3 X 10^22 molecules of water, or 9.9 X 10^22 individual atoms. I'll round that to 1 X 10^23 atoms per cc . Finally, multiply that the earlier number of cubic centimeters of water on Earth, and the grand total is 1.3 X 10^47 atoms in all the water on Earth.
Nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
The solar sytem, you say? Heck, I'll go you better than that. The total volume of all the planets combined is about 2.4 X 10^15 cubic kilometers. Hey, let's throw in the sun too! It's volume is large enough that the planets are no longer even a significant contribution. The sun is about 1.4 X 10^18 cubic kilometers (adding in all the planets makes the total 1.40236 X 10^18, so I'll just stick with 1.4), or 1.4 X10^33 cc. So if the sun and all the planets were entirely water, that would be a total of 1.4 X 10^56 atoms for the whole solar system.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
Are we a typlical solar system? An upper estimate on the number of stars in the milky way galaxy is 4 X 10^11 . If they are all solar systems the same size as ours, and everything in the entire galaxy is composed of water, now we're up to 5.6 X 10^67 atoms in the entire galaxy.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
Are we a typical sized galaxy? Well, no, as a matter of fact, the milky way seems to be larger than the average galaxy, but let's say they're all this big. Rough estimate for the total number of galaxies in the observable universe = 1.7 X 10^11. If they all are composed entirely of water and are as large as our galaxy, now we're up to 9.5 X 10^78 atoms in all the galaxies in the observable universe. But wait! you say. 90% of all mass might be unseeable dark matter! Well if the dark matter is all water, that's only one more order of magnitude to add. Grand total of atoms if the entire universe is made of water? With these estimations/approximations, we get 9.5 X 10^79 atoms.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
I see ChessGod and I were busy calculating at about the same time.
I'm a numbers/statistics type of guy . . .
To put it in perspective, there are about 10 to the 120 power of possible moves in a game of chess. Thats 120 Zeros. Just one drop of water contains 10 to the 11th power (11 zeros) of atoms in it. Think of all the drops of water on the earth and youll see that it would DWARF 10 to the 120.
Well, for a numbers/statistics kind of guy, you don't seem to have any recognition of what's required to get up to massive powers of ten. Let's start with your first comparison, a topic which you clearly know nothing about and didn't bother checking.
A standard laboratory rough estimation is that 20 drops from a lab eye dropper is about 1 cubic centimeter. But why bother with that? It's much easier to calculate how many atoms in a cubic centimeter of water. The U.S. geological survey says the total volume of water on the planet is 1,338,000,000 cubic kilometers. At 10^15 cubic centimeters per cubic kilometer, that rounds to about 1.3 X 10^24 cubic centimeters of water on Earth. Allow 1 gram per cc and a molar mass of water of 18 grams, so each cc contains about (6 X 10^23)/18 or about 3.3 X 10^22 molecules of water, or 9.9 X 10^22 individual atoms. I'll round that to 1 X 10^23 atoms per cc . Finally, multiply that the earlier number of cubic centimeters of water on Earth, and the grand total is 1.3 X 10^47 atoms in all the water on Earth.
Nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
The solar sytem, you say? Heck, I'll go you better than that. The total volume of all the planets combined is about 2.4 X 10^15 cubic kilometers. Hey, let's throw in the sun too! It's volume is large enough that the planets are no longer even a significant contribution. The sun is about 1.4 X 10^18 cubic kilometers (adding in all the planets makes the total 1.40236 X 10^18, so I'll just stick with 1.4), or 1.4 X10^33 cc. So if the sun and all the planets were entirely water, that would be a total of 1.4 X 10^56 atoms for the whole solar system.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
Are we a typlical solar system? An upper estimate on the number of stars in the milky way galaxy is 4 X 10^11 . If they are all solar systems the same size as ours, and everything in the entire galaxy is composed of water, now we're up to 5.6 X 10^67 atoms in the entire galaxy.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
Are we a typical sized galaxy? Well, no, as a matter of fact, the milky way seems to be larger than the average galaxy, but let's say they're all this big. Rough estimate for the total number of galaxies in the observable universe = 1.7 X 10^11. If they all are composed entirely of water and are as large as our galaxy, now we're up to 9.5 X 10^78 atoms in all the galaxies in the observable universe. But wait! you say. 90% of all mass might be unseeable dark matter! Well if the dark matter is all water, that's only one more order of magnitude to add. Grand total of atoms if the entire universe is made of water? With these estimations/approximations, we get 9.5 X 10^79 atoms.
Still nowhere near 10^120, let alone dwarfing it.
Hmm, looks like my (slightly less respectful) version of the teardown beat you to it. But neither of us got anywhere close to the guys that berated cheater_1 just before he left the forum. 2 years ago.
(I just read some of the above posts, they filled me in).
Yeah. Honest, yours wasn't posted yet when I started writing mine!
Considering all the approximations and rounding that get thrown around in such fanciful approaches, our results are remarkably similar. What's a couple orders of magnitude here and there when we're comparing against a claim of 10^120?
about maybe700 are only played but really the only opening codes are like a00-whatever