🚀 go-pugleaf

>   I find particularly amusing the assumption that you
> "know" the number of atoms in the universe, and that
> there aren't enough of them to store every chess
> position, so therefore, blah, blah.  It seems to me
> that one could argue, just as you do, that it is
> impossible to count the number of atoms in the
> universe, and so therefore, blah, blah.

Of course they know how many atoms there are in the universe.  It's science,
and everyone knows that science has never been wrong.  I mean, we always
knew the world was round.  That stuff about people thinking that the world
was flat is just propaganda.  Yeah right.

I wonder that too.  How science can tell us things like how many atoms there
are in the universe, and that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, or 14
billion, or 20 billion (all of which I've heard expressed here).  I think
sometimes we think we humans are smart, and we're really not.  I mean, you
can look back and think about the invention of the internet or something
like that, and think that we're super smart, but we're really not.  In 50 or
100 years people will look back at us and say,

"Can you believe that people back in the 1900's and early 21st century used
these things called a keyboard and mouse?  They actually had to use their
hands to use a computer.  Nowadays we have all known knowledge stored on our
zillion google-byte RAM drive.  People back then had to wait entire
nanoseconds to access data on their computers too!  I can't imagine having
to wait 6 entire nano-seconds for something to be read from the RAM.  I hear
there is an urban legend of these whacko chess dorks who posted on this one
newsgroup.  They were all nuts, except for that one guy Robert Hyatt.  He
seemed to have some sort of clue, given that we hadn't discovered brain
enhancing enzymes that released that other 90% of our brain.  I can't
believe people used to actually play that game of chess.  Back in 2050 when
we cloned Fischer and gave him the brain enzyme he solved the entire game of
chess in a few days for us.  That ruined the whole thing.  So now we play a
chess-variant called Guess that is played on a board 100 google squares by
100 google squares, and current Grandmasters of Guess can still outplay the
strongest computers at long time lengths.  It's only a matter of time before
these computers that we have created solve the game of Guess, I mean there
are only 10^4839729084375928347509827340985720394875029834750982347509823475
possible positions and we could solve that in about 10 years." etc....

whew, I can't believe I just did that.  Sometimes I wonder about myself.