How many ways are there to play a game of chess?

Efour2 said:
wow chess thread!

Im not sure how the ultimate chess computers "think" but surely they dont compute every move everytime? THey have some kind of "attack" mode built in. Or are they programmed to just work out everymove wuth no tactics to it.

wrr what am i saying i mean, develop a queen rather than respond to a random pawn movement? Or do random moves by the human make it calculate possibilities for that too???
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Deep Blue worked out as many potential moves as possible within time frame, with some basics heuristics to avoid search completely useless search spaces. There are some more intelligent systems out there though. E..g evolutionary trained neural network players. The difficulty is that classical computer leearning, e.g. using a Neural network would require a neuron for each state. The difficulty, and this is what humans do very well, is to take a small area of the chess board and realise azt a higher level it is the same as a certain move played before (in chess there are names for many common configurations). maybe a pawn is in a slightly different place, etc, but if the setup is similar it should be played the same way (as you can prove for limited subsets that certain moves are optimal).
 
Berserker said:
From the start of a game, I could legally just move knights back and forth forever. Pointless, but perfectly legal moves. Therefore, the answer to the question as stated is thus: There are an infinite number of ways to play a game of chess. :)
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Wrong. This situation would fall foul of at least two of the rules determining a stelemate, namely the three-time-repeated-position rule and the 50 moves rule.
 
TommoUK said:
Has anyone played Go? Just saw it mentioned in the Wiki article, I played it a bit a few months ago. There's a huge difference between someone who's been playing it a while and a relative rookie. Very popular over the net.
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I'm a (very casual) member of the GO club at my uni.
Its an utterly insane game. Its a huge personal triumph when you first manage a game on a full-size board without getting virtually annihilated :)

Basically imagine chess, but with dozens of little skirmishes going on at the same time. You have to constantly prioritise when to commit your new peices (ie where they'll have the most effect), which changes pretty much every turn. The board area is about 8-9 times that of chess in terms of squares, and by the end most squares are filled :S

Definately try it, but if you play against people then (as someone told me when I started) just expect to lose your first 50 games straight and treat it as a learning exercise.
 
Sweet. I did consider the loop thing but seemed to vaguely remember the stalemate rules - although apparently they have to be claimed.

Interesting thought. Also pretty insane that they've worked out how many atoms there are in the universe.

Just started playing backgammon online - getting a comprehensive raping each time :(
 
D.P. said:
Definitely not infinite. there are finite pieces on on a finite number of squares, each peice has a finite number of moves. Of course, you can have loops but ignoring that it is a finite search space of massive porportions.
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:) But then this is why you have the 50 move rule. :p

D.P. said:
A quick estimate is there are roughly 10 different moves you can play in one step. an average game lasts 100 moves. Therefore there are 10^100 different moves. There are only 10^81 different particles in the universe.
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An "average" game lasts nowhere near 100 moves... and there's generally more than 10 options for a player at each move (a rook on an open rook or file has 7 options alone).

I need to get back into chess, when I was 16 I played for my county men's team. ELO was about 1850-1900. :)
 
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I read in an old kids "Learn chess" type book that if all the moves in every game possible were printed in the same font and book size as an average phone book, the resulting pile of books would cover the planet to a depth in every direction equal to the distance to the moon.
 
daz said:
:) But then this is why you have the 50 move rule. :p



An "average" game lasts nowhere near 100 moves..
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Just checked...my last 50 games have been at an average of 26 moves per game.

I need to get back into chess, when I was 16 I played for my county men's team. ELO was about 1850-1900. :)
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That's a rating I'll never reach :o You should sign up at http://gameknot.com. After all...chess is perfect for online play.
 
It's obviously not infinite: there are a finite number of pieces, and a finite number of squares. Of course, that thinking assumes both that people would observe the conditions for calling draws in certain unusual situations, and not mutually just move the same two pieces backwards & forwards rather than playing normally in the beginning.

I had a look at that Shannon number, and the thinking behind it. It seems too simplistic to me. I understand that it's an approximation, and therefore not precise, but it seems to me it doesn't take everything fully into account. I'm convinced the number would be much higher than 10^123. I was the best in my sixth-form at stats going by module results, and I'm planning to sit down with pen & paper and think this through in the near future. If I actually get round to it, and come up with something that seems plausible, I'll report back.
 
Deadly Ferret said:
It's obviously not infinite: there are a finite number of pieces, and a finite number of squares. Of course, that thinking assumes both that people would observe the conditions for calling draws in certain unusual situations, and not mutually just move the same two pieces backwards & forwards rather than playing normally in the beginning.

I had a look at that Shannon number, and the thinking behind it. It seems too simplistic to me. I understand that it's an approximation, and therefore not precise, but it seems to me it doesn't take everything fully into account. I'm convinced the number would be much higher than 10^123. I was the best in my sixth-form at stats going by module results, and I'm planning to sit down with pen & paper and think this through in the near future. If I actually get round to it, and come up with something that seems plausible, I'll report back.
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You should use that time to go out and have some fun imo :p


And then report back to us on this chess issue :)
 
Im pretty sure Im with Deadly Ferret here, cannot be infinite and that number seems to have come very easily, I'm not going to have a bash at working it out though as it would probably take weeks :eek:
 
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