Thanks, I was wrong about that. I swore I read that somewhere, turns out it was on a chess forum--not a source I should have committed to long-term memory.
I did find this interesting statement about Graham's number (unsure of the veracity):
> Graham's number is greater than all of the Planck lengths in the universe. There literally isn't room in the universe to write it out in numerical form.
But according to the Wiki on Shannon's number, a the number of possible outcomes in chess does still far exceed the number of atoms in the universe:
>Allis also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10123, "based on an average branching factor of 35 and an average game length of 80". As a comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe, to which it is often compared, is estimated to be between 4×10^79 and 4×10^81.
I think you overestimated the possible chess positions by a couple orders of magnitude. You can't have a chess configuration with an arbitrary number of pieces.
Short answer is no. One estimate says there are 10^120th possible chess games. I'm not doing the math now, but I believe that falls into the not-physically possible within our lifetime using known physics.
An "If you had started calculating at the beginning of the universe, you wouldn't have even tackled a sliver of the work by now" type of problems.
"Claude Shannon calculated that there are around 10^120 possible games of chess in his seminal paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in 1950."
Ever. The combination of all chess games is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. There is no way to store all the progress you need to find an answer.
Maybe someone can mathematically answer the question, but that won't be by exhaustive solving (though it might be work down to a subset of all games that then are solved exhaustively)
There is a discrete and finite number of chess positions so there is a limit, but it might not be computable with resources available within the observable universe.
"Chess is a game of perfect information" - perfect but almost infinite/impossible to calculate even for the most powerful computers, within a finite timeframe. The number of legal chess positions is 10^40, the number of different possible games, 10^120. As a comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated to be between 4×10^79 and 4×10^81.
Chess is far more constrained than that. Pawns generally have 0 or 1 move with the maximum possible of 3 moves followed by piece selection which is knight or queen as bishops and rooks have the subset of a queens moves. There are a maximum of 8 pawns. Thus (8 * 3 * 2) = 48
Kings have a maximum of 8 moves. 2 Rooks a maximum of 14 = 28, 2 bishops 12 = 24, and 2 knights 8 = 16, queen = 36. And this is individually on an actual board there is often less then 50 legal choices (ex: 20 for opening) and the average game is 40 move (pairs).
Thus you could encode most chess matches as a tweet.
The article itself doesn't arrive at the correct number of 5898 moves, but some of the commenters do. At my own page http://tromp.github.io/chess/longest.html you can play through a 3-moves-shorter game.
You seem to be refuting a specific point of my argument which has little bearing on the overall point I was making.
All games were provided in the article. None of them were 4 move checkmates; nearly every one is longer than 20 moves and some are 40 or longer. There is simply no possible way that ChatGPT is regurgitating the exact same 40-move-long game it's seen before. You can check a chess database if you'd like; virtually all games longer than 20 moves are unique.
10^(number of outcomes in a 50-move chess games) also does not come close.
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