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Cake day: October 17th, 2024

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  • On average, there are about 30 legal moves per position and about 120 total moves per game. That means there are about 180000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 possible game branches in the average game alone. It’s simply too big to calculate.

    For comparison, chess with 7 pieces left on the board is solved. The calculations to add 1 more piece increase the solution storage size from 20000 GB to 2000000 GB, would require ~40000 GB of RAM, and would take an estimated 8 months to calculate on the world’s fastest supercomputer. That’s just going from 7 to 8, chess has 32 pieces and solving 1 more piece increases the calculation needed exponentially.


  • Pretty much. Engine play from the starting position is a draw 99.9% of the time. What the other guy who responded to you is talking about are computer matches where the engines play game pairs that start in uneven positions. This is much more common as it lets people see which engine is better.

    For example, engine A and engine B play a game pair where white starts with a better position. When A plays with white, A wins the game. When B plays white (from the same uneven starting position), the game is a draw. This means that A won the game pair 1.5-0.5. If A played B from the starting position in 2 games, the result would almost certainly be 2 draws, but playing chosen game pairs will let the better engine have a chance at winning one and drawing the other.